Resuscitating (and Refusing) Cartesian Representations of Daily Life: When Mobile and Grid Epistemologies of the City Meet

Abstract

In community planning, the consequence of a failed or productive teaching and learning interaction could mean the preservation or destruction of someone’s house, a neighborhood school, a park, all of it. This article elucidates consistencies in how people collaborate across spatial epistemologies and power imbalances for making recommendations and decisions about communities. Holding two epistemic stances in tension—mobile and grid epistemologies—the article follows the arc of a design-based research study, beginning with ethnographic observations of participatory planning meetings, the findings from which informed the design of experimental teaching cases with youth. I focus on two vibrant and consequential instances of people walking others through a storyline of their home communities that moves in and out of epistemic commensurability. Building upon findings from interaction and multi-modal analyses, I argue that consequential learning occurred when people enacted relational attunement in which new spatial imaginaries of a community came into view and were informed by both mobile and grid epistemologies. This article serves as one instance of finding, analyzing, and designing for moments where the roles of “teaching” and “learning” are under negotiation or unknown, and how people engage with one another in politically charged and tenuous interactions.