Semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces: from The Age of Mythology to today's schools
In this paper, I consider an alternative to the notion of a “community of practice” (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). This alternative focuses on the idea of a space in which people interact, rather than on membership in a community. I want to consider this alternative because I believe that the notion of what I will later call an “affinity space” is a particularly important contemporary social configuration with implications for the future of schools and schooling.