ABSTRACT
As I analyzed situated literate activity in Language Research (chap. 2), I became increasingly aware of the need for analytic and theoretical tools that would respect the complexities arising as the event structure of academic work (how writing tasks are cued, produced, and evaluated) interacts with participants’ perspectives (their evolving interpretations and goals) and with the lamination of activity (the multiple trajectories of personal, interpersonal, institutional, and sociocultural histories being relatively foregrounded or backgrounded by participants). In addition, those tools would need to account for the ways participants normally manage those complexities, often finding them, as Han and Mead did, routine and unremarkable.
