This week is the first of two focused on grouping theorists and/or theories by concepts. I identified five concept groups to which I’ve connected theories: Agency, Flow, Meaning, Boundaries, and Composition/Rhetoric. I’ve included a screenshot of the area I’ve set aside for concept grouping, along with a full-map version.

Concept Groupings, Week 1 (Inset): Putting Theories in Place (Popplet)

The Entire Mindmap: Concept Groupings on the Left (Popplet)

I described the concept groups as follows:

• Agency: Individual nodes (as opposed to groups of nodes) are given partial or full agency in the network.
• Flow: There is movement of some material through or in the network.
• Meaning: That which flows through the network has intrinsic meaning; it is not simply material.
• Boundaries: The theory offers some recognition of boundaries of the network, either as affordances or as constraints to the operation or definition of the network.
• Composition/Rhetoric: Theory offers direct or indirect reference to rhet/comp, or originates in rhet/comp.

I chose these concepts in part because several have been part of our inquiry throughout the semester and in part because these are aspects of networks that interest me most. I am becoming especially interested in boundaries in networks, whether the result of framework or infrastructure constraints or the result of relatively arbitrary efforts to circumscribe networks for study or description.

Geopolitical boundaries fascinate me, the result of growing up in Israel. I experienced early in my adolescence the arbitrary nature and origin of current Middle Eastern boundaries initiated through global political interests and will after World War I and, to a lesser extent, World War II. With an Israeli visa stamp in my passport, I remain a victim of those arbitrary borders — with few exceptions, I can’t cross the border into most Arab states using that passport. I can visit Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, and UAE, but I’m unable to visit Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, smaller Persian Gulf states or North African Arab states (Israeli Passport, 2014).

I would argue that the root of many socio-political conflicts in the Middle East stem from global influence on local boundaries. For example, the current Syrian civil war pits the minority Alawite ruling authority against the Sunni majority, the result of poorly-planned and articulated boundaries among various people groups with historic enmity toward one another. Not that individual nation-states or regions for specific people groups is the answer — reference ongoing enmity between Pakistan and India — but borders drawn in collaboration with, rather than enforced upon, local groups would surely have addressed, even mitigated, some of the pent-up enmity that has recently exploded in violence in Syria and surrounding nations. Boundaries are deeply decisive in the Middle East as borders, but they are also deeply decisive as concepts and socio-political realities. The result of divisiveness (differentiation) is discourse, and the rhetoric of boundaries, whether in reference to tricksters or Middle Eastern borders or networks, fascinates me.

At any rate, this week I limited connections to the theories rather than the theorists. I’ve maintained a running list of theories in the upper-left corner of my mindmap, each of which I’ve connected as Theorized and/or Operationalized. I’ve used that list of theories for connections. Next week, in addition to adding a concept or two, I’ll connect individual theorists to the concept groupings. This will weave a remarkably tangled web. It might even be ambient.

Reference

Israeli passport. (2014, March 27). Wikipedia. Retrieved 19 April 2014 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_passport

[ Feature image: The wall between Israel and Palestine. CC licensed image from Flickr user Peter Barwick ]