On the nature of chaos and order

Steve and I were talking about our upcoming presentation the other day and he offhandedly remarked, and I'm paraphrasing, "Order is good, but sometimes chaos can be just as great." I almost stopped dead in my tracks, because I thought I was a child of chaos. Ironically, someone who fought social control a greater part of her life is perpetuating control. Oh, Bourdieu would turn in his grave in disappointment. Yes, I like to pretend that he's my cool but very dead Jedi master whom I talk to once in a while.

First, let me situate Steve's perspective. I had been obssessing about the upcoming discussion like fangirls over Backstreet Boys back in their heyday. And the poor man was being inundated with spam and probably lost in my crazy attempts at organization. Now, I don't know Steve very well, but he's super cool, I adore his wife, and he's Mr. Chillax. For the uninitiated, it's Mr. Chill and relax. So, when the epitome of Chillax says "Order is good, but sometimes chaos can be just as great," I almost cried. Well, not really. But it did set me thinking.

Research, be it in literacy, new media, etc., is chaotic. For the most part, as researchers, we're often trying to pin down how best to capture data in the chaotic human world. We're trying to draw generalizations based on the empirical data that we observe. Theory, in short, is our key to making sense of the world. Moje's work on adolescent literacy for instance is ethnographic, and in my limited experience, analyzing ethnographic data can be insurmountable. But one cannot deny its usefulness as a methodological tool. In fact, the funds of theory approach mentioned in the Palinscar & Ladewski is highly useful, particularly if we are to understand how students from different cultural backgrounds have different dispositions towards the various kinds of knowledge that are available in schools. It seems as if anthropology and sociology will never release me from their disciplinary clutches. Ah, but I am a willing prisoner.