Walking in the city
Imagine yourself walking around your neighborhood or a new city you traveled to. You notice a space – maybe it’s a small shrine in an alley somewhere; a narrow, rugged path that is just enough for a person to walk through; or a street corner where old men are playing chess – and you wonder how these spaces came to be the way they are. Who decided that there should be a shrine there, and not elsewehre? Who paved the narrow, rugged path and why? Why this street corner and not that one to play chess?
I organize walking tours that ask questions such as these, and I give at least three hypotheses from which participants can choose to defend with evidence they are asked to collect. These hypotheses are based on a semiotic reading of space, or the significations that render space meaningful for us. Meaning can vary depending on how signs are interpreted. For example, I might present hypotheses such as: Is the shrine for local businesses to propitiate deities that bring fortune and prosperity? Was the shrine erected in memory of some event that happened in this location? Or was the shrine built to prevent people from committing crimes in this dark alley?
Participants are asked to collect evidence that support one of the three hypotheses, or collect evidence in support of their own hypothesis. We end the tour with a discussion of which one of the hypotheses might be the most probable answer by sharing the evidence we each collected. There are no correct answers, but only evidence that guide our belief in a certain direction.
Reflexivity in the Social Sciences
Reflexivity is an important term that has been understood in various ways in the Social Sciences. For example, Anthony Giddens understood reflexivity as a continuous monitoring of one’s own actions in relation to others that gave people the power to shape, while being shaped by their social conditions. Margaret Archer argued that Giddens was conflating agency and structure, however. One may believe that he or she is reflexively monitoring one’s actions in relation to others, she would argue, but reflexivity may just as well be repetition insofar as the action reproduces structure in Giddens’ theory of structuration.
Archer wants to keep agency and structure separate, so reflexivity can mediate these two levels. Her idea of reflexivity is an internal conversation in which a person maintains an ongoing conversation with what goes on around him or her. It is not simply a monitoring of one’s own behavior but a personal power exercised to monitor and control one’s life projects. Archer’s research where she interviewed individuals on how they converse with themselves revealed that not everybody practices reflexivity in the same way. Archer found different modes of reflexivity such as fractured, communicative, autonomous, and meta-reflexivity that “mediate socio-cultural constraints and enablements in distinct ways and represent entirely different ‘stances’ towards social structures and cultural systems” (2003, 165).
I think Archer does not go far enough, and that we need more to turn reflexivity into agency or power that transforms social reality. But it isn’t easy, as I found out through a pilot study we did with the FirstARETE program – a wellness-based, brain-body integrated learning methodology and curriculum (American Sports Institute, ‘FirstARETE‘). In this pilot study, we implemented a program that was developed and implemented in the United States but never in Japan. Various stakeholders were involved, including the President of the American Sports Institute who created the program, the former Director of the National Institution for Youth Education Research Center who recruited relevant people to be involved and procured the expenses that were needed to implement the program, the principals of two public elementary schools in Tokyo, three teachers from each of the two schools who instructed the program, and the students who participated in the program.
In this multistakeholder context, reflexivity was not something that could be contained in each person’s thought processes as an internal conversation. It was a core competency that allowed everybody to work together as a team. The FirstARETE program helped the participating students develop reflexivity as a competency through various exercises and activities that strengthened their ability to focus, develop physical strength and fitness, and persevere through difficult situations. The schools exercised reflexivity by customizing the American-born program to fit their schedules while keeping the original program as much as they can. I also had to reflexively monitor the moving pieces by conducting action research, which entailed moving the program along while conducting research, such as preparing the Ethics Review Board documents, organizing teacher training workshops, and taking notes and interviewing the students.
Meaning of Reflexivity
The FirstARETE pilot study showed us what reflexivity does, but it didn’t help us understand what it meant. Different stakeholders got different things out of the program, but we didn’t arrived at a shared experience or meaning about it. Some students found the activities valuable, some teachers wished they could share the workload with the others teachers in their school, and the principals thought the schedule was too tight. Reflexivity helped stakeholders negotiate what worked and what did not, but it just wasn’t enough for everybody to arrive at a shared experience that could foster camaraderie and cohesiveness as a community.
In my walking tours, I use semiotics as a type of scaffolding for participants to take up a position not in relation to the social positions or roles they play at work or at home, but in order to question the meaning of reflexivity – often concerning how we turn space into a meaningful place in very simple, ordinary ways. Why is there a shrine in that alleyway? Who placed it there and why? I do this because I believe that interrogating the meaning of reflexivity can have a variety of benefits, such as:
- Opening a space of encounter among participants of diverse age, socioeconomic position, gender, language, nationality, ethnicity, and other backgrounds
- Promoting evidence-based decision making to guide reflexive actions
- Promoting dialogue with others and not just internal conversations
- Sowing the seeds of cultural change by using semiotics to develop hypotheses, rather than simply using it as a tool for analysis
Finding evidence to turn signs like a shrine in an alleyway into a hypothesis can be thought of as what Greimas, the semiotician and linguist, calls signification – “transposition of one level of language into a different language, and meaning is simply this possibility of transcoding” (1990, 7). My walking tours may be described as an experiment in a collective transcoding of the city. It is a practice of doing citizen (sociocultural) science which, in turn, helps us become shutai or citizens not just by right but also through the collective production of meaning. I outline this process of becoming in separate pages describing intentional self-constitution, pedagogical interventions to un-learn how we “naturally” perceive our environment, and the praxis of making sense/sense making to re-learn or transcode our environment and our experiences of it with new meaning.