Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
45. "when we move from the academic armchair of liberal goodwill or radical critique to an intercultural collaboration, we can no longer talk about social issues with comfortable reference to an absent 'they'"
46. main argument is for "a balanced picture in which intercultural collaboration is also understood as a genuinely problematic act of individual interpretation and knowledge construction--an attempt to embrace the divergent meanings of a shared experience. this process of dilemma-driven meaning making is ignited when people move into what prett (1991) calls the 'contact zone,' a place where intercultural consciousness is not a philosophical position but a social situated action. intercultural collaboration puts conflict on the table in a way that is hard to avoid; it forces people to construct not only a joint product...but also an ongoing interpretation of their differences and each other, revealing, at times, their radically different representations of this 'shared' experience. it calls for the construction of negotiated meanings that translate an awareness of difference and conflict into a ground for action."
50-1. "collaboration...depends on more than conversation; it demands the construction of a new negotiated meaning, an invention attuned in a particular, provisional way to those competing, conflicting voices"; while "conflict in cultural relations might seem the very thing to avoid...intercultural collaboration must...embrace conflict within commitment; it must be persistently attuned to competing agendas and values as a heightened recognition of the realities we inhabit. like modern jazz, it needs to go beyond the easy harmonies--articulating genuine differences in search of a more complex resolution. conflict, embedded in a spirit of stubborn generosity, is not only generative but necessary because it acknowledges the undeniable--the social and economic substructures of power, of racism, of identity that will not be erased by goodwill" (the jazz metaphor, which she keeps coming back to, is cornell west (1994))
60. "conflict calls for more than an awareness of difference. it calls for the extended, ultimately individual process of constructing a negotiated meaning--a new representation of ideas and issues that makes a new (if necessarily provisional) sense out of competing, and often hard to grasp, ways of seeing"
62-3. "when the framework of resistance fails to tell the whole story or to account for shared persistance after understanding, conversation theory ["burke's parlor discussion"] can offer another, less agonistic blueprint for developing our working theory of this dilemma." in conversation theory, "the conversation is the thing....he larger intertext of the culture and the personal and academic background each person brings to the moment speaks through them, shaping the positions they hold, the stances they take, the very language they use"; "individuals figure in this story as carriers who...stustain the life of a discussion that has gone on before and will continue later"; ultimately, though, this metaphor is "less useful than more situated accounts of conversation in which knowledge is the dialogic construction of real people"--in individual minds, regardless of how the conversation looks at a distance, "the meanings constructed in these dialogues were quite different"
64. & what about: "does interaction by itself produce...conceptual change?" (no) "and what about the other students in the class...not responding?....are they therefore not learning, not constructing meanings of their own?" (no) "and finally, how do the representations individuals create differ?" all in all, then, "a conversational reading...gives us a dynamic picture of an interaction that can lead to change, but it falls silent on the equally dynamic process of individual meaning making that goes on within the attempt to creat a shared public reality. in this case, attending to the public converstaion alone may ignore some of the private undertones of emotion that constitute individual knowing, some of the unspoken interpretations indivduals construct, and much of the radically different experiential knowledge that the black and white members of this conversation bring to it"
65-6. in the example dilemma presented, "drena and her teacher are working out of different discourses, appealing to competing sets of cultural resources," & so can't read conversational elements the same way--"this intercultural discourse is no longer a collaboration but two ships passing in the night, caught up in a conversation where 'shared social reality' is impossible and deeper reciprocity is unlikely"; "narrowing our focus to the 'shared' surface of meaning we observe in dialogue and to the cultural sources and analogues we see behind the text loses a critical part of the action"--"we must remember that the other of intercultural is not a reified culture or discourse but individual students trying to cross cultures, and our understanding must grasp the multiple and strategic dimensions of their meaning. as educators, the working theories we build need to recognize that two acts of construction are going on": (1) "individuals construct personal representations of meaning" that differ from one another's & (2) these encounters are rhetorical actions seeking to build meaning.
67. instead, we should be "using negotiation as a theoretical lens"--social webs as webs are never enough; "although invidividuals are never islands of isolated consciousness, we are nonetheless the sites of responsible action and interpretation." thus "negotiated construction" has a "special, perhaps quite limited place...in the multifaceted process of meaning making": "it arises when two conditions co-occur: (a) when the process of meaning making is subject to pressure, to converging constraints and options, or to conflict among goals and (b) when writers/interpreters turn their attention at some level of awareness to managing or negotiating this problematic congitive and rhetorical situation." "in this process, significant outer forces (such as social and cultural expectations, discourse conventions, language, teachers' requests, and colaborators' prompts) appear as inner voices, speaking in conjunction with the wrter's own goals and available knowledge....[and these] maybe come in conflict. writers who choose (if only momentarily) to entertain and attend to this conflict...enter into this construction of negotiated meaning. in the negotiation of these forces, which we are most likely to glimpse at points of conflict and decision, the writer constructs not only a web of meaning but the (often hidden) logic, or logics, which give shape to the writer's text"
69. "like the voices of jazz musicians in a jam session, [these inner and internalized voices] speak over, under, and through one another in the flow of thought"; 3 of them might be called "the demands of situational constraints (speaking in tones of sober efficiency), the warm suggstions of attitudes and values, and the perplexing, ambiguous voice of cultural signs"
70-1. "signs and their signification": "BEV" (or AAVE) "means" different things to different speakers/listeners, to different writers working in different places & at different times, so there's always a resulting "difficulty of creating a meaning that integrates these conflicting signs"--heteroglossia: "any utterance, [bahktin] claims, will find its object already 'overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in a obscuring mist...it is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents' (p. 276)"; for him, "texts are dialogic in the broadest sense," but to talk about negotiation "we will need to go beyond...[these] broad generalizations...for two reasons": (1) "philosophical generalizations of this type are 'existence claims' that neither push us (nor help us) to be accountable to situations and data that might complicate their truth claims" and (2) such generalizations can be in some sense 'true' but short on theoretical or explanatory power"
72-3. 4 "significant aspects of negotiation": (1) "more 'kinds' of voices get in the act than we see in the text" (2) "fewer voices may be 'in the act' than we might infer from the text" b/c "negotiation...foregrounds not the potential inherent in the 'Word'...but the diverse meanings that actually enter as live voices into the circle of active negotiation in a given consctuctive act" (3) "dialogism is a philosophical claim about the nature of language" whereas "negotiation...refers to a very situated--and optional--act of entertaining a sustained engagement with multiple voices. it is an act of selective attention" (4) "the desired outcome" for critics of dialogism "is not a resolution but the continuing dance of echoes, where meaning emerges from the ongoing play of ambiguity and opposition," but for writers engaged in negotiation the purpose "is a movement beyond juxtaposition to a new if provisional resolution--a new construction"
77-8. not all options are "live options" legitimate within a particular context, & "we do not simply choose the voices that capture our attention: awareness is mediated by many things, including the context we find ourselves in and the role we inhabit in that place. negotiation is an act of powerful, but problematic, and nonomniscient agency"
81. "when we are dealing with the cognition of qualitatively different kinds of representation, that our language may fail to capture the differences in what people know. we negotiate with voices we will never fully understand. such meaning making can be an intensely collaborative social act, but the representations we must build and be responsible for will always be our own"
83. "if onversation theory helps us envision a continuing flow of talk where meaning is realized in the dialogic exchange, negotiation theory is concerned with literate acts. its goal is to understand the making of those written and oral texts that function as rhetorical, literate interventions. the raison d'être of negotiation is not internal struggle for its own sake, but the construction of meaning as a response to voices in conflict"<--ends in rhetorical action.