Chapter 1 presents my “alternative fieldwork,” how I make sense of my predecessors’ fieldwork and fieldnotes. I introduce Xia Xizhou in its historical cultural context, including its colonial history and changing kinship, economy, and schooling system. I contextualize the multiple boundaries, identities, and relationships between the researched and the researchers and highlight children's agency. I recover the experience of native research assistants, not just as mediators between anthropologists and children, but as lively characters participating in children’s moral development journey. I expose the challenges of reconstructing this ethnography and the puzzles I encountered. I reveal the inherent ethical dimension of actions and interactions that made ethnographic knowledge possible. I also draw from my own experience and expertise to discern the voices, silences and voids in this archive. Throughout this chapter, I connect my discussion of reinterpreting historical fieldnotes to children's developing social cognition and moral sensibilities, which provides the foundation for intersubjectivity and communication in the original fieldwork and in the making of fieldnotes.

This chapter discusses the poetics of familiarity embodied in the Romantic essay. It locates the origins of that poetics in Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ of 1800 and 1802 to Lyrical Ballads. Responding in turn to the famous preface, the three most notable ‘familiar’ essayists of the era, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, revise a manifesto for poetry into one for prose, a celebration of nature into a proclamation of the city. In their practice, the familiar essay becomes the exemplary form of urban expression in the Romantic era. The characteristic procedure of the essay is the slide from the familiar to the ideal and back again, by directly articulating the ideal bearing of the familiar subject, or by a range of other idealising (and essayistic) strategies.

This chapter provides an analysis of present theories and conceptualizations of intersubjectivity as well as psychological processes that have conceptual overlaps with intersubjectivity. The analysis shows how what counts as “intersubjective” behavior reflects the assumptions and analytic frames of each theorization and disciplinary focus. For example, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches define intersubjectivity as tied to language, whereas psychodynamic and cognitive science theories define intersubjectivity as primarily affective or embodied. A cultural critique is bolstered by findings from both cross-culture and within-culture studies of children’s interactions with adults and peers that show the predominance of nonverbal modes of interaction, such as mutual observation. These findings support a theory of intersubjectivity that allows for multiple forms and dimensions of interactive behavior, considers the cultural and historical context of the interaction, and recognizes how tools and tasks mediate shared activity

This chapter describes the development and validation of an observational measure of collaborative competence that can be used in naturalistic settings. The measure was initially developed and validated through in situ observations within an urban bilingual Head Start classroom. The details of the methods chosen derive from 13 principles for assessing intersubjectivity and collaboration according to the findings and arguments outlined in the previous chapters. These chapters argued for a culturally expansive, emergent, activity-based, and developmentally informed approach to defining collaborative competence. Each principle is elaborated with specific procedures and measures. The chapter discusses ethnographic details of data collection within five urban Head Start preschool centers over the course of a year. The chapter reports on coding of observational measures along with their psychometric properties.

This chapter reports on the results of the coding scheme designed to assess collaborative learning activities during early elementary school described in Chapter 7. The scheme measures dialogic, activity-based, and nonverbal intersubjectivity and collaborative engagement. Three video-recorded, teacher-facilitated pedagogical activities are used for the analysis. These activities reflect findings from the play-based pedagogy literature in that they involve a mixture of teacher and child contributions. Teachers scaffold the engagement and understanding of a small group while following the children’s lead. Each activity includes open-ended exploration of a material by the children. The findings show that two different videos with the same teacher used similar forms of exploratory talk most often, whereas the other teacher used other forms of dialogue most often. In addition, intersubjectivity and collaborative engagement among all three groups peaked during active shared engagement with the materials. These periods coincided with less dialogue and occurred in the middle of the activity.

This chapter elaborates on why an exclusive focus on the individual within psychology cannot be culturally valid for all children. Contrasting Western individualistic goals for child-rearing and development with the more collectivistic goals and orientations of the majority world, this chapter shows that foundational assumptions regarding the nature of subjectivity differ by culture. Three specific components of the interdependent approach to child development as demonstrated by African, Latin American, Indigenous, and Asian societies are examined in depth. These themes include a holistic view of development, intelligence as a form of social responsibility, and children as apprentices. Together, these themes characterize child development processes within the majority world. Research shows that societies that consider a socially contingent self as the ideal outcome for development might be more likely to support collaborative competence. Overall, the literature reviewed suggests that Western conceptions of subjectivity and therefore intersubjectivity do not extend to all cultures. In addition, collaborative competence highlights the strengths of minoritized children in the US while supporting all children’s development.

Research in conversational hand gesturing shows an array of philosophical senses of intersubjectivity. Gesturing is interpersonally rational, as demonstrated in studies linking gesturing to common ground achievements and effects and to markings of communicative intent. Gesturing is an ecological and interactional activity through which copresent interlocutors codetermine their own social and environmental relatings, building as well as attending to a shared world. Gesturing is an intercorporeal experience central to what it means to live as linguistic bodies. Taken together, research indicates that hand gesturing even as a variegated phenomenon offers insight into how language works. The full story of intersubjectivity and attendant features of recognition, interpretation, normativity, conventionality, and reference begins and ends with actual bodies interacting. As these matters concern the core of pragmatic philosophy, gesture research has radical relevance for all language theorists. An enactive approach to intersubjectivity and language offers a framework for making this case.

This chapter reviews recent developments that reflect a convergence of work in various branches of linguistics and psycholinguistics around the implications of the incremental sequencing of speech units for understanding grammar and the cognitive processing that underlies the production, comprehension, and interpretation of utterances. Notions from Functional Discourse Grammar are used to present a view of syntactic structure as arising from the incremental extension of holophrases, i.e. minimal utterances. By prioritizing the timecourse of language processing, the chapter interprets syntactic hierarchy as arising from chunk-and-pass operations supported by predictive processing. Spoken dialogue is identified as the primary arena for these processes, with grammaticality subordinated to situational appropriateness. Linguistic data are seen as protocols of joint action aimed at the incremental co-creation of meaning. All of these notions make essential reference to context as constantly active, prior to and during the utterance of the linguistic signal, and as a crucial component of the operations and processes that take place in verbal interaction.

I argue that “The Rotation of Crops” represents one of two culminations of the aesthete’s (i.e., “A’s”) position in Either/Or. Under the guise of his bantering remarks, A sketches a theory of the modern self as specifically constituted in relation to the problem of boredom: To be modern is to be bored and to be motivated by the desire not to be bored. A’s boredom is thus in some sense an experience of ultimate significance, a religious experience imminent within the terms of the secular life itself. A’s solution to the problem of boredom turns out therefore to require a wholesale conversion; the cure is nothing short of a totalizing spiritual practice that one must make the center of one’s life, if one hopes to keep things interesting. A’s position amounts at once to a transcendental critique and to a theology of boredom.

The Introduction argues that Faulkner discovered an epistemology for networked systems in the creation of his own imagined landscape. I present two major stages in which Faulkner’s discovery took place: (1) an earlier vision portraying how networks scale, circulate information, centralize, and produce potentially tyrannical paradigms of top-down vertical power; and (2) another view of dynamical networks that are constantly adapting to produce novel forms of movement and behavior. The Faulkner that this study evokes is at once the modernist developing a spatial narrative practice describing the emergence of complex social networks and the Romantic for whom the immanent life was paramount and even sacrosanct. That these two trajectories of inquiry and spiritual belief are not easily reconcilable gives philosophical and moral weight to the landscape and characters that Faulkner invented. They also provide a striking meditation on what it means for human beings to find themselves in systems so vast and ubiquitous that they can no longer remember what it was like to live outside them and, thus, to think outside of their ideological dicta.

The present chapter uses a mixed-methods analysis to examine if L2 learners associate their learning with developing intercultural competence, and if these associations vary according to individual differences. It compares how L2 learners view language proficiency and sophisticated language use, and explores how they associate global citizenship with multilingualism. Responses to a survey were collected from N=67 L2 learners enrolled in either Tier I (basic language) or II (linguistics or culture) courses. Quantitative analyses revealed that age and instructional tier had a main effect on their level of intercultural awareness. Qualitative data showed that learners do not conceptualize language proficiency differently than sophisticated language use. Their definitions of global citizenship showed that they see multilingualism as the gateway to being a global citizen and language learning as the means to network with and learn from a global community. Agency and their roles as global citizens were only minimally mentioned; they self-identified primarily as L2 learners, not as L2 users with the ability to be agents of change on a global stage.

The Introduction interrogates the current critical view of early modern sympathy as a physical or occult process. It proposes that literary critics and historians have neglected the coexistence of the emotional and physical senses of the word sympathy in the early modern period. Exploring a broader range of intellectual frameworks – including religious culture, literary theories of imitation, and humanist pedagogy – complicates the idea that sympathy was primarily an automatic or a humoral phenomenon. The Introduction also argues that translations of European vernacular texts, including Du Bartas’s The Historie of Judith (1584) and Montaigne’s Essais (1603), played a significant role in introducing the affective meaning of sympathy to English readers. This expanding emotional vocabulary – along with other material and social changes in the period – led to an increased theorization of pity and compassion, whereby individuals came to be regarded as a connected network of distinct selves rather than a homogenous social group. In this way, the emergence of sympathy as a term and concept prompted a reconsideration of the nature and boundaries of early modern selfhood.