Epistemological Commitments Research Articles

Genderqueer reflections on Weird Barbie

For better or worse, Barbie (2023) was part of a summer blockbuster phenonemon. Much of the fanfare around the film included conersations about feminism, ‘girlhood’ and whether or not the film was reductive in terms of upholding an iconic yet often criticised doll. This article attempts to wade through that noise by focusing on my own experience of the film as a genderqueer feminist academic. Blending personal reflection with queer theory and feminist critique, I unpack the use of the gender binary in Barbie Land and the implications, if any, for viewers and the overall ‘feminist’ positioning of the film (and whether or not that matters). In particular, I focus on Jack Halberstam's concept of gender failure and what that failure looks like in the idyllic world of Barbie. Following my own feminist epistemological commitments, this article makes use of academic as well as non-academic texts, in addition to blogs and other pop culture sources. Ultimately, this article considers the role of whiteness in the acceptance of the non-normative characters in Barbie – particulalry Weird Barbie – and why it is essential for white queers to remember that their experiences are not the queer experience.

The Evanescence of Ritual and Its Consequences: Reflections on the Phenomenology of Human Communication in the Rise of Cybernetic Culture

This paper addresses semiotic elements of ritual in human encounter. The notion of an essential ritual presence in the existential/communicative connection of persons has been established in the work of Langer, Gadamer, and Jakobson. Yet, as Richard Lanigan maintains, vital aspects of Jakobson’s model of communication are typically missed in the application of his work, a consequence of which is that social science no longer differentiates between “communication” and “information”. As such, everything perceived as meaningful is reducible to “message”, and thus, effective communication means merely “finding the right message”. The regression to our current cybernetic world, along with the intellectual paradigms enabling it, was never a foregone conclusion, but the entrenchment of social science in information theory makes it clear that an epistemological commitment to a semiotic phenomenology of communicative existence—and the visibility of ritual life—may well be our only way out.

Understanding the Normativity of Health Technology Assessment: Ontological, Moral, and Epistemological Commitments.

The inherent normativity of HTA can be conceptualized as a result of normative commitments, a concept that we further specify to encompass moral, epistemological and ontological commitments at play in the practice of HTA. Based on examples from literature, and an analysis of the example of assessing Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT), we will show that inevitable normative decisions in conducting an assessment commits the HTA practitioner to moral (regarding what makes a health technology desirable), ontological (regarding which effects of health technology are conceivable), and epistemological (regarding how to obtain reliable information about health technology) norms. This highlights and supports the need for integrating normative analysis and stakeholder participation, providing guidance to HTA practitioners when making normative choices. This will foster a shared understanding between those who conduct, use, or are impacted by assessments regarding what are conceivable and desirable outcomes of using health technology, and how to collect reliable information to assess whether these outcomes are (going to be) realized. It also provides more insight into the implications of different normative choices.

Practice framework theorizing in correctional rehabilitation: Lessons from constitutive penology

AbstractThis paper applies key insights from constitutive penology to advance the practice framework literature in correctional rehabilitation. First, I provide some brief commentary on the origins and subsequent development of constitutive thought in studies of governance, crime and justice. Second, I outline the central ontological convictions and epistemological commitments of constitutive penology. Third, I explain where and how the ontic and epistemic ‘lessons’ of constitutive penology contribute to the conversation about practice framework theory and therapeutic practice in correctional rehabilitation. These comments especially emphasize the importance of (a) rethinking the responsibility of theory in therapeutic practice; (b) reframing the method of study in the practice of therapy and (c) repurposing the practice guidelines for undertaking therapeutic work.

Justificative conformity in ontologically ring-fenced fields: Problematizing the scholarly nomenclature in qualitative studies

Ontology is implicitly or explicitly the impetus of any study. However, what are the implications of a scholarly field whose prevailing ontological assumptions and resultant epistemological commitments impede more nuanced theorizing? In this paper, we caution against theorizing norms in fields characterized by a non-diverse and non-inclusive set of ontological assumptions. We contend that editorial practices therein create a certain kind of methodological conformity and conduct, that is, an undue justification and explanatory overtones related to methods that are set against the predominant grain. Through a thematic review of qualitative papers in international marketing as a case in point, we argue against narrow onto-epistemological arsenals, we discuss the value of critical theorizing and put forward two modest proposals to address this kind of scholarly conformity in the future.

Epistemics and Education

By engaging in the epistemic practices of a disciplinary area, students are able to build their capacity for learning and expand their repertoire for reasoning. These epistemic practices are intrinsic to knowledge-producing communities and need to be examined from a sociocultural perspective. In this paper, I describe epistemic practices and the related topics of epistemic and ontological cognition and epistemic tools. I consider the epistemological commitments of the communities constructing knowledge and the spheres of application for epistemics in education. These epistemic domains of education are each illustrated with examples from curriculum design. The value and limitations of the perspective are discussed. In a post-script, I answer common questions about the uses of epistemic practices in education.

Towards a praxis of care in post-pandemic fieldwork: Comparing ethnographic encounters during Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of ensuring the wellbeing of both researchers and participants throughout the research process. In this paper, we argue that in order to produce caring research, the wellbeing of researchers must not be neglected. Using our experiences as three doctoral researchers undertaking ethnographic fieldwork during the pandemic, we consider what it means to do research which has a ‘praxis of care’ at its core. By consciously embedding care into the research process, we argue that we can work towards research that prioritises multiple modes of care and compassion. To demonstrate this, we present and reflect on our three related, but individual experiences as ongoing case studies. Grounding our own research encounters within broader literature focused on self-care in early career research alongside feminist perspectives, we ask the following questions: In the pursuit of knowledge, what does taking a step back to care for ourselves look like? How can we plan fieldwork which operates without harm for both researcher and participant? Finally, we contemplate what fieldwork with an epistemological commitment to ‘care’ for both researchers and participants could look like and propose some practical recommendations for incorporating a praxis of care throughout the research process.

Ontology and interdisciplinary research in esports

ABSTRACT This article identifies the benefits of adopting a critical realist ontology to researching esports in the social sciences. The article outlines some of the challenges in researching esports, paying particular attention to the emerging specialisms and sub-disciplines. The article suggests that different schools of thought have different ontological and epistemological commitments, resulting in a complex and somewhat fragmented or contested set of definitions and research directives. The article considers how the philosophy of science can enable researchers to gain a more complete understanding and appreciation of esports. More specifically, the article outlines some of the central philosophical commitments of critical realism and considers their benefits for researching the multi-layered and multifaceted nature of esports. What results is a stratified ontology of esports, in which various biological, psychological and sociological factors interact to produce emergent outcomes at micro, meso and macro levels of causality. Such an interdisciplinary approach resists previous attempts to reduce esports research to singular (and competing) epistemological claims. Instead, this article invites sports researchers to investigate the complex ways natural and social factors interact to generate and change esports structures, institutions and agential behaviours.

Human Rights Penality and Violence Against Women: The Coloniality of Disembodied Justice

AbstractDespite the persistence of violence inside and around prisons, and the dubious adequacy of criminal law to respond to victim–survivors, international human rights (IHR) discourse increasingly promotes the mobilisation of the state’s penal apparatus to respond to human rights violations, including violence against women (VAW). Using an anticolonial feminist approach, this article scrutinises the ontological and epistemological commitments underlying ‘human rights penality,’ by analysing features of the Western-colonial register vis-a-vis more relational worldviews. Separateness, abstraction, and transcendence broadly underpin the exclusion of embodied experience, context, and material reality from the juridical field. In the second part, through discourse analysis of Inter-American and European case law, the author shows the deployment of human rights penality, the displacement of experience, and the disregard of context in IHR discourse. VAW is construed as a procedural and penal matter: it is the absence of a penal process that courts regard as failure to protect women, rather than the state’s inability/unwillingness to address structural subordination. Moreover, the ‘virtues’ attributed to the penal system justify its expansion, which facilitates the continuity of penal violence and debilitates alternative approaches to justice. Finally, the author posits penal abolition as an anticolonial praxis, pointing at examples of anti-carceral feminist work.

The Truth is out There (and also in Here): Taḥqīq as an Investigative Modality in Mughal Culture and Scholarship

Abstract This article offers a brief examination of various uses and senses of the term taḥqīq (ascertaining the truth; investigation; verification) in Mughal intellectual circles in the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries. Often contrasted with another term, taqlīd (copying; imitation), taḥqīq could signify different kinds of epistemological commitments – and therefore different kinds of truth-claims – depending on the context in which it was being deployed. Here we examine the ways in which the notion of taḥqīq figured prominently in Mughal debates about religious toleration, in Mughal scholarly culture, and even in Mughal notions of kingship, justice, and statecraft. Along the way, we will also use Mughal ideas about taḥqīq as an opportunity to intervene in larger debates about the nature of global early modernity.

Strengthening the Theoretical Commitments Underpinning Therapeutic Jurisprudence Research: Ontology and Epistemology

Therapeutic Jurisprudence is a legal philosophy concerned with the human effects of the law. Its scholarly work promotes greater interaction between law and the social sciences to draw attention to the therapeutic and/or anti-therapeutic side-effects of law. Despite significant headway having been made in therapeutic jurisprudence scholarship during its relatively short lifespan, there remain gaps in theory, not least, in terms of the ontological and epistemological commitments that underpin and drive its research, as well as how its methodology resonates with those from its predecessor schools: legal realism and sociological jurisprudence. This essay will respond to these gaps and, in doing so, will also acknowledge some of the key similarities and differences in the methodological underpinnings of the claims from legal realism and sociological jurisprudence (as well as legal positivism and formalism).

Feminist Commitments Towards a Horizontal Women, Peace, and Security Critical Learning Community

Abstract This paper features the process whereby an experimental Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) program fostered a critical learning community around peace and security across 13 countries and with 40 women. It addresses the epistemological questions of doing research in collective ways (with and among activists/scholars), the axiological challenge of recognizing and embracing counter-expertise, and the possibilities for incorporating values and practices of care as well as non-extractivism in producing and disseminating knowledge. By articulating the core ethical principles that emerged from this experience, the paper suggests a critical feminist epistemological commitment in taking seriously grassroots women's knowledge in peace and security processes, rather than what is often done in both policy and academy: prescribing their needs from above, interpreting their knowledge from the outside, and advising what problems to tackle and how to live.

Introduction

Introduction

Muscles or Movements? Representation in the Nascent Brain Sciences.

The idea that the brain is a representational organ has roots in the nineteenth century, when neurologists began drawing conclusions about what the brain represents from clinical and experimental studies. One of the earliest controversies surrounding representation in the brain was the "muscles versus movements" debate, which concerned whether the motor cortex represents complex movements or rather fractional components of movement. Prominent thinkers weighed in on each side: neurologists John Hughlings Jackson and F.M.R. Walshe in favor of complex movements, neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington and neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in favor of movement components. This essay examines these and other brain scientists' evolving notions of representation during the first eighty years of the muscles versus movements debate (c. 1873-1954). Although participants agreed about many of the superficial features of representation, their inferences reveal deep-seated disagreements about its inferential role. Divergent epistemological commitments stoked conflicting conceptions of what representational attributions imply and what evidence supports them.

Epiteoría de la actitud: creer, saber, conocer Pensar por abstracción, luego, existir en el actuar por potenciación

The purpose is to build an epitheory of the attitude and its conceptual links, with believing, knowing, and knowing. In principle, the epistemological commitment to explain the religion-science conflict is assumed, making a modeled idea of how: to think by abstraction, then, to exist by acting in empowerment. To understand what was attempted, an operator agent is generated: a tetrahedron (regular polyhedron), whose vertices are conceptual receptors of a figure called a node and which are identified with the words believe, know, and know. Subsequently, a cognitive representation graph, a Mental Geometric Attitude plane, is exhibited. It is coordinated, in analytical quadrants, according to Cartesian theory. The closure is made up of the possible relationships that give meaning to the epitheory of the attitude: discovery and discovery, regular and systematic disposition, perception of its connections, and a fair conclusion. Conclusion? Derivation? The concluding discussion and imagination are left to you, respected reader.

Messages about valued knowledge products and processes embedded within a suite of transformed high school chemistry curricular materials

The way high school chemistry curricula are structured has the potential to convey consequential messages about knowledge and knowing to students and teachers. If a curriculum is built around practicing skills and recalling facts to reach “correct” answers, it is unlikely class activities will be seen (by students or the teacher) as opportunities to figure out causes for phenomena. Our team of teachers and researchers is working to understand how enactment of transformed curricular materials can support high school chemistry students in making sense of perplexing, relatable phenomena. Given this goal, we were surprised to see that co-developers who enacted our materials overwhelmingly emphasized the importance of acquiring true facts/skills when writing weekly reflections. Recognition that teachers’ expressed aims did not align with our stated goal of “supporting molecular-level sensemaking” led us to examine whether the tacit epistemological commitments reflected by our materials were, in fact, consistent with a course focused on figuring out phenomena. We described several aspects of each lesson in our two-semester curriculum including: the role of phenomena in lesson activities, the extent to which lessons were 3-dimensional, the role of student ideas in class dialogue, and who established coherence between lessons. Triangulation of these lesson features enabled us to infer messages about valued knowledge products and processes materials had the potential to send. We observed that our materials commonly encouraged students to mimic the structure of science practices for the purpose of being evaluated by the teacher. That is, students were asked to “go through the motions” of explaining, modelingetc.but had little agency regarding the sorts of models and explanations they found productive in their class community. This study serves to illustrate the importance of surfacing the tacit epistemological commitments that guide curriculum development. Additionally, it extends existing scholarship on epistemological messaging by considering curricular materials as a potentially consequential sources of messages.

Ontological and epistemological commitments in interdisciplinary water research: Uncertainty as an entry point for reflexion

Against the background of a renewed interest in interdisciplinary water research, we begin this paper by diagnosing a need for deeper engagement at the epistemological and ontological level. We then analyse the ontological and epistemological commitments of three modeling examples: an academic human-flood model, a nutrient transfer decision support model and a policy facing water security model. These examples demonstrate how research practices are not neutral but intervene in the world by distributing agency unequally, providing naturalized and de-politicized explanations of the past and pre-configuring certain futures while foreclosing others. Lastly, we position hydrology's uncertainty tradition and its problematisation of choices in the research process as an entry point for reflexion on the contingencies of and ethical responsibility for research practices. This uncertainty tradition provides more common ground for collaboration between hydrologists and critical water researchers than previously acknowledged, while such collaboration would still thrive on confrontation. We conclude with a call for greater humility in water research, especially when using models, and practical suggestions for how researchers could uncover ontological and epistemological commitments and live up to the ethical responsibility they entail.

The ‘Impact’ of YPAR: In their own words

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to present a conversation about how impact has been seen and felt by youth and adult co-researchers in a long-term, school-based youth participatory action research (YPAR) project, Courageous Conversations. To stay true to the epistemological commitments of YPAR, and in an effort to speak back to neocolonial and neoliberal definitions of impact, we have intentionally chosen to center the words of the school-based co-researchers (Emily, Katelyn, Mrwa, Ashleigh, and LeAnne) as they have conceptualized, identified, and discussed the impact of YPAR. Through non-traditional formatting, we seek to disrupt conventional, academic modes of conveying knowledge, which often have the result of silencing many voices and amplifying only a select few. We use various devices like text boxes and tables to reflect the messiness and fluidity of participatory knowledge creation and to connect the reflective conversation of members of our YPAR collective to broader and ongoing debates around the impact of YPAR.

Losing Culture: Nostalgia, Heritage, and Our Accelerated Times

Losing Culture: Nostalgia, Heritage, and Our Accelerated Times

New Knowledge from Old

The meaning of the library as a social institution has changed over time. The library’s role in human progress and in the generation of knowledge is alluded to briefly by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and, more frequently, by Shoghi Effendi. These references have historical precedents but are an expression of unique ontological and epistemological commitments in Bahá’u’lláh’s vision of an emerging global civilization. This paper compares conceptions of libraries in the writings of Shoghi Effendi to different meanings assigned to libraries throughout history, comments on Bahá’í beliefs that could inform the practice of librarianship, and suggests a number of avenues for future research.