Disciplinary Paradigms Research Articles

Making Peace: A Narrative Study of a Bilingual Liaison, a School and a Community

Schools today must address multiple levels of conflict in the lives of children and communities. This study explores the role of a bilingual liaison in helping to resolve conflicts and build bridges of understanding between schools and diverse communities. Using narrative inquiry to represent and interpret the narratives of Shou Cha, a Hmong community liaison, and his colleagues at the Center for Language, Culture and Communication Arts (CLCCA), special attention is given to the representation of subjects’ voices and narrative forms that engage readers aesthetically as well as critically. This study addresses the multiple conflicts affecting the lives of minority language students, their families, and schools, as well as the need to move from a schooling paradigm of discipline and punish (Foucault, 1979) to one of making peace. He examines the cultural roles played by Shou Cha as cultural healer (from Spindler & Spindler, 1990) and border crosser (Giroux, 1997), and suggests implications for researchers and educators.

Political attitudes and cognitive convictions among Danish social science researchers

Interview data from a survey among Danish researchers, mainly from social sciences (all disciplines, about on third of all) are used to examine connections between researcher political attitudes and their disciplinary cognitive paradigms. Included are researchers’ convictions concerning world view hypotheses, their basic assumptions regarding the subject matter in their fields of study, e.g., individuals, social action, and society as a whole, and their epistemic ideals and goals. Political attitude is indicated by researchers’ voting in the 1994 general election of the Danish Parliament.

The invisible substrate of information science

The explicit, above-the-water-line paradigm of information science is well known and widely discussed. Every disciplinary paradigm, however, contains elements that are less conscious and explicit in the thinking of its practitioners. The purpose of this article is to elucidate key elements of the below-the-water-line portion of the information science paradigm. Particular emphasis is given to information science’s role as a meta-science—conducting research and developing theory around the documentary products of other disciplines and activities. The mental activities of the professional practice of the field are seen to center around representation and organization of information rather than knowing information. It is argued that such representation engages fundamentally different talents and skills from those required in other professions and intellectual disciplines. Methodological approaches and values of information science are also considered.

The Scramble for Art in Central Africa

List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgments 1. Objects and agendas: re-collecting the Congo Enid Schildkrout and Curtis A. Keim 2. 'Enlightened but in darkness': interpretations of Kuba art and culture at the turn of the twentieth century David A. Binkley and Patricia J. Darish 3. Kuba art and the birth of ethnography John Mack 4. Curios and curiosity: notes on reading Torday and Frobenius Johannes Fabian Appendix: on the ethnography and economics of collecting, from Leo Frobenius' Nochmals zu den Bakubavolkern Johannes Fabian 5. Artes Africanae: the western discovery of 'art' in northeastern Congo Curtis A. Keim 6. Nineteenth-century images of the Mangbetu in explorers' accounts Christaud M. Geary 7. Personal styles and disciplinary paradigms: Frederick Starr and Herbert Lang Enid Schildkrout 8. Where art and ethnology met: the Ward African collection at the Smithsonian Mary Jo Arnoldi 9. 'Magic, or as we usually say, art': a framework for comparing European and African art Wyatt MacGaffey References Index.

Neighborhood Change and Urban Policy

Theories of neighborhood change have concentrated on explaining the process within one disciplinary paradigm despite repeated calls for a model with a multidisciplinary perspective. Consequently, policies to stabilize neighborhoods tend to be theoretically myopic with respect to their recommended course of action. This article provides a synthetic model of neighborhood change based on three major schools of neighborhood change: ecological, subcultural, and political economy. In addition, it provides a discussion of policy implications of each perspective including the synthetic model outlined in this paper

Credible Consorts: What Happens When Shakespeare's Sisters Enter the Syllabus?

J AM ONE OF A RECENT GENERATION OF FEMINIST SCHOLARS to be trained first as a cultural critic and then as a literary one. I announce that affiliation because my training reflects a broadly based shift in pedagogical models across the university system-a philosophical reworking of disciplinary paradigms and educational goals unimaginable a decade ago. ' It is this joint background in cultural studies and feminism which convinces me -of the need to consider plays such as William Shakespeare's As You Like It or Hamlet in' conjunction with other texts and writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It is also this background which persuades me that undergraduates, encountering Shakespeare's works within the same revised and expanded format of a comparative, issue-oriented, culture-based, and gender-aware study, will find Judith at least as engaging as her brother.2 Shakespeare's writings can be hard to navigate for feminists, especially when his plays are offered in traditional formats. In my early experiences with the Bard, I often found it difficult to talk about the kinds of concerns I was interested in without erasing the historicity of the texts. Classes devoted to Shakespeare posed problems for me because Shakespeare bore the entire burden of proof in the gender questions that I wanted to ask. Secondary sources that took on history and culture in Shakespeare's plays and poetry proved only marginally more helpful. While most of those critical studies ignored gender, the few that didn't often embraced Shakespeare as a proto-feminist or reviled his writings for their seeming lack of sympathy to women's issues.3 In several cases those initial considerations of

Some thoughts on multiplicity

Analyzes means and results of reduction of variables from evident multiplicity to a manageable few, the latter driven by conceptions of science and disciplinary paradigm and problem formulation. Attention is given to the use of such concepts as ‘natural’, ‘distortion’, ‘anomalies’, and assumptions as to rights. To the inevitability of the selective reduction of multiplicity and complexity is juxtaposed the necessity of taking account thereof and of the limits thereby imposed on analysis.

A synthetic approach to sustainable agriculture and resource conservation

The NeoSynthesis Research Centre (NSRC) was organized to promote sustainable agriculture and resource conservation in the island nation of Sri Lanka. Staffed by people with varied life and cultural backgrounds, NSRC has attempted to develop frameworks or ways of understanding agriculture from more than a single perspective. It is assumed that even a partial understanding of agriculture requires many perspectives because no single set of opinions or discourse based upon a narrow range of life experiences can account for the life processes that capture and process energy through many species,H. Sapiens included. NSRC participants are expected to relate their respective disciplinary paradigms toward a synthetic approach of resource management to be demonstrated under specific environmental and social conditions. Using ecological and energetic perspectives as baseline conceptual frameworks, both scientific and non-scientific descriptions have been incorporated to provide greater understanding of the functioning of Sri Lanka's living communities. Sustainability is not promoted through sound empirical description alone. Broad community participation is required if resource and management is to be modified in any significant way. The notion of sustainability is again translated into a more political and policy language and the forums involved include the public media, administrative and legislative branches of the national government, and the civil service. Is Sri Lanka on a collision course with disaster because of heavy population pressure and irresponsible and unwise landscape management? From experiences over the past 11 years at the NSRC, the steps toward sustainability seem best cast in terms of a discovery and learning process rather than something to be invented in the abstract.

Taking Liberties, Writing from the Margins, and Doing It with a Difference

This essay suggests several intersections betweenfolklore andfeminist theory by reviewing three women who have engendered significant dislocations in the economy of cultural representations. Discussion of my work with Helen Cordero points up the needforfeministfolklorists to attend not only to women'sfolklore and womenfolk but to examine and redefine disciplinary paradigms and discursive practices offolklore scholarship. The invisibility of Elsie Clews Parsons and her work illustrates the need to rewrite the history of the discipline to include women and to review the contributions of womenfolklorists. The Statue of Liberty and the events of her Centennial are discussed as a monumental reason why we need cultural analysisfrom afeminist point of view andfolklore analysis of woman as sign.

Classical studies, patriarchy and feminism: The view from 1986

Approaching the study of Greco-Roman civilization from a feminist perspective presents special problems: classical studies is one of the most conservative, hierarchical and patriarchal of academic fields, and women classicists, even those professing themselves feminists, remain strongly male-oriented. The historic use of classical studies as a self-enhancing cultural emblem and a gatekeeping mechanism designed to control access to education and power explains its present appeal to reactionary elitists, along with its tendency to attract female practitioners with an intense ‘daughterly’ ego-investment in the prevailing system. Research on women in antiquity, though popular and well-regarded among male and female classicists, is therefore conservative by feminist standards and makes relatively little use of new cross-disciplinary scholarship on women. Critical neglect and/or trivialization of the work of the several women poets of ancient Greece provides a telling example of how knowledge that does not fit male disciplinary paradigms can be dismissed, even by women scholars doing women in antiquity research. Recent critiques of the field by both mainstream and feminist members nevertheless offer hope for gradual disciplinary change.

Abundance and American Democracy: A Comment

AINYONE CONCERNED to think clearly and well has to make at least two principle decisions. The first, and often most neglected, involves separating the from the trivial: making distinctions between things that we need to know now, from those that we might want to know at a later, less perilous time, from those that we really can do without now and forever. This is not necessarily easy as the advocates of pure science often remind us. Still, I suspect that the choice is not as difficult as it may seem, especially in a world of widening extremes between the winners and the losers, that is busily engaged in pulling the ecological rug out from under its own feet while developing more clever and more probable ways to incinerate itself. The second decision involves making distinctions within the category of important between the true, the less true, and the false, knowing all the while that reality is more complex than our ability to think about it. Moreover, the characteristics of relativity, randomness, indeterminacy, and incompleteness found in the physical/mathematical universe doubtless have analogs in the social world, which are compounded by problems of irony, values, ethics, and social choice. Moreover, disciplinary paradigms, research methods, and the institutional context of research and thought can seriously distort what we think to be true. The two decisions, of course, are related. The choice of what is depends to some extent on what is thought to be true and vice versa. In both decisions a healthy concern for good thought en-

Using social policy research for reducing social problems: an empirical analysis of structure and functions.

Investigating three samples of social policy research in The Netherlands, the authors analyzed the conditions and functions influencing utilization (impact). Interorganizational context, intergroup relations, and role interaction were found to relate to utilization. The impact of social policy research upon organizational decisions is cognitive, communicative, and diagnostic. The cognitive function correlates negatively with publishing for scholarly audiences. Of the communicative function, six feedback strategies were evaluated with targeting scoring highest on impact. In the diagnostic function, creating consensus among decision-making groups has the greatest impact on decision making. The results suggest the latent operation of a professional paradigm of social policy research, distinct from the disciplinary social science paradigm.

Second Language Acquisition/Learning: Psycholinguistic Factors

Ten years ago, research in second language acquisition manifested an array of doubts about the potential of major disciplinary paradigms for providing a comprehensive theory of second language acquisition. Linguistic theory and psychological theory alike were viewed as only marginally useful either for stimulating fruitful research or for undergirding classroom practices in second language teaching. But the skepticism of the 70s had its virtues. We had outgrown the childishness of seeking clear-cut distinctions and final answers. Consequently, we probed deeper and wider, beyond the confines of “established” disciplinary models to seek new worlds of possibilities, yet with philosophical lifelines firmly secured in the collective expertise of centuries of the study of human behaviour.

Conceptual Dimensions and Boundaries of Participation in Organizations: A Critical Evaluation

This paper outlines a broad conceptual framework for participation in organizations, which provides an overview of four defining dimensions of participatory social arrangements in organizations and their often complex interdependencies. The dimensions of participation discussed in this paper include the social theories underlying participatory social systems and the values and goals each of them implies for participation, the major properties of participatory systems, the outcomes of participation in organizations, and the contextual characteristics of participatory systems which limit or enhance their potential. The view of participation presented in this paper is of a multidimensional, dynamic social phenomenon, the study of which transcends questions unique to any given discipline paradigm and which requires an integration of micro and macro questions. The implications of this conceptualization for theory building, research, and methodology are briefly discussed.

MULTI‐CULTURALISM IN SOCIAL CONTEXT: CONCEPTUAL PROBLEMS RAISED BY EDUCATIONAL POLICY ISSUES

Reassessments of culture theory and the concept of culture are current intellectual issues inl anthropology. Conspicuous contention over the defiliition, discovery, analysis, and applicatioii of the culture concept is a signal that our disciplinary paradigm is shifting. Several major contributors to this reassessment have been influenced in their theoretical formulations by their practical applications of the concept in attempts to deal with the processes of modern social change-usually perceived as progress or in our American folk cultural view. Much of what Ward Goodenough lias taught us about the cognitive conception of culture, for instance, was communicated in a manual identified with development in which the title, Cooperation in Change (1963), deliberately conveyed a philosophy of social action. Originally attractive as a model of the professional practice of applied anthropology that would put anthropologists inito direct responsibility for facilitating community action, it is now recognized as a theoretical treatise leading to a cognitive view of culture. The combination of Goodenough's cognitive view with a semiotic conception of culture (from Geertz and Schneider, as suggested by Keesing, 1974) offers us a new way of looking at the practical political issues of multi-cultural education. The contribution of this con-