Conceptual Tools

These concepts will be resources that we return to repeatedly throughout the semester. Any improvements to these definitions that you can suggest are welcome.

• Process vs. System
  • Processes are events that take place in time
  • Systems are persisting, organized, made of parts
• Artifact
  • Material object created or modified by humans in order to be incorporated into meaningful actions.
  • Material AND conceptual
• Mediation
  • A process by which some third entity alters the interaction between two other things.
• Tool
  • Artifact that mediates between an agent and some object or environment towards some goal.
• Sign
  • Artifact that mediates between person and environment or social interactions towards some interpretation or meaning.
• Activity
  • Collective undertaking with a guiding object or motive.
  • Composed of goal-directed actions and routinized instrumental operations.
  • E.g., Healthcare
• Activity System
  • Community organized by rules and norms, tools, and a division of labor engaged in an activity.
  • E.g., Physician working at a clinic.
• Actant
  • Humans and non-human tools and objects.
  • Action as interaction, mediation
• Toolforthoughts
  • Amalgam of tool and thought
  • According to Shaffer and Clinton, all tools involve thoughts and vice versa
• C^3^ Process/System
  • Cognitive-Cultural-Communicative Process/System
  • Nascent notion of my own coinage
• Ecological Validity
  • Related to external validity – generalizability across groups (populations)
  • Grounded in or reflecting real-world settings and real-life conditions.
  • Generalizability from research setting to natural setting.

Theoretical Approaches

These are the theoretical approaches to cognition-culture-communication (C^3^) that we will be discussing this semester.

The big four:

1. Situated Cognition / Learning / Action
2. (Socially) Distributed Cognition
3. Cultural(-Historical) Psychology / Activity Theory / CHAT
4. Actor-Network(-)Theory

Other related approaches

• Sociocultural/Socio-historical Psychology/Theory / Mediated Action / Mediational Means (Vygotsky/Wertsch)
• Enaction / Enactive Psychology
• Embodied Mind / Embodied Cogniton
• Extended Mind / Extended Cognition
• Ecological Psychology
• And MORE!

Methods

Cognitive Ethnography
~ Combines aspects of traditional psychological and anthropological method.
(Participatory) Action Research
~ Specifically aimed at improving and researching conditions simultaneously, organically.
~ Subjects of study are also co-researchers and agents of change.
Multi-Level Methods
~ Phylogenetic history, cultural history, ontogeny, and microgenesis.
~ Look at: Institutions, Activities, Individual Interactions
~ Methods: Evolutionary, Historical, Developmental, Ethnographic, and Experimental
Model Activity Systems
~ Design and implement an activity system that is sustainable
Actor-Network-Theory
~ Actor-Network-Theory claims to be a theoretical and methodological resource. We’ll try to understand this claim later on in the semester.

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