Mode Of Inquiry Research Articles

Biological Theories of Morphogenesis Based on Holistic Biophysical Thinking

AbstractThe roles played by physics in the study of the life sciences have taken many forms over the past 100 years. Here we analyze how physics can be brought to bear on the contemporary study of morphogenesis, where new tissue-scale forms arise out of simpler, more homogenous, initial structures. We characterize how morphogenesis has been studied through reductionist approaches and discuss their limitations. We suggest that an alternative way of approaching morphogenesis that begins with a consideration of the whole may also serve as a fruitful mode of scientific inquiry. Through historical analysis of concepts relevant for contemporary systems biology, we illustrate how physical thinking oriented toward the biological whole (“holistic biophysical thinking”) was exemplified in the biological theories presented earlier by D’Arcy Thompson (1860–1948) and Pere Alberch (1954–1998). We contrast the use of physics to develop the conceptual foundations of holistically oriented systems biology with the more prevalent contemporary use of physics that focuses on technological development and quantification, embedded within reductionist strategies. As an in-depth contemporary case study, we describe how in our research we have used holistic biophysical thinking to develop biological theories of vertebrate morphogenesis that account for and extend beyond genetic, molecular, and cellular processes. We propose a theory of skin development where both molecular and morphological patterns are orchestrated by emergent physical processes at the supracellular scale. We further posit that holistic biophysical thinking at the supracellular scale may advance theories of diseases such as cancer.

Just Sustainability Transitions: Politics, Power, and Prefiguration in Transformative Change Toward Justice and Sustainability

Facing the world's ecological, economic, and social challenges requires us to connect the concepts of justice, sustainability, and transitions. Bridging and discussing heterogeneous fields, we argue that these concepts need to complement each other, and we present just sustainability transitions (JUSTRAs) to do so. To define JUSTRAs, we review the state-of-the-art literature, focusing on the understanding of these three concepts and their pairings in various disciplinary fields and empirical settings (e.g., environmental justice, just transitions, sustainability transitions, energy justice, food justice, urban justice). We center marginalized voices to highlight the processes of radical transformative change that JUSTRAs seek. We offer three analytical lenses that further the understanding of JUSTRAs: politics, power, and prefiguration. We argue that these complementary lenses are necessary to remake the world in both critical and pragmatic ways. Finally, we present a research agenda on JUSTRAs, foregrounding three complementary modes of inquiry: analyzing, critiquing, designing.

Integrating Sustainable Development Goals in Local Plans: Unlocking Practices and Challenges of Local Governments in Nepal

Local governments are pivotal in the implementation of sustainable development initiatives. However, the integration of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into local plans remains a significant challenge. In Nepal, there is an increasing recognition of the need to align local plans with the SDG framework to achieve holistic and inclusive development. This study explores the practices and challenges faced by local governments in integrating the SDGs into their plans, programs, and budgets. The qualitative case study method was adopted as a mode of inquiry. The findings reveal that local governments have yet to fully incorporate the SDG framework directly into their plans, programs, and budgets. They have yet to recognize the benefits of localization in effectively implementing and achieving the SDGs. Local governments face several challenges, including a lack of ownership, limited financial resources, insufficient SDG-friendly data, lack of institutional capacity, and weak coordination and cooperation. Despite these challenges, some local governments have formulated SDG-friendly periodic plans, while others are in the process of doing so. This study sheds light on the shift from an indirect to a direct approach in integrating the SDGs into local plans, programs, and budgets. This paper contributes to on-going efforts to promote sustainable development in Nepal by offering valuable insights to those involved in formulating and implementing local plans.

Language, deconstructivism, and the Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

ABSTRACT In a series of articles critical of aspects of the idea of translanguaging, MacSwan (e.g. 2022) has suggested that deconstructivism has derailed the translingual project. This paper draws attention to a number of weaknesses in this argument that are important for taking critical questions about language seriously. The term deconstructivism operates more as a derogatory label than a description of a theoretical stance, an appeal to popular notions about the postmodern rather than to intellectual debate about modes of inquiry. The notion of deconstruction itself is a common term referring to the need to pull structures apart before reassembling them, as suggested by deconstructivism in architecture (to describe the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, for example). Ontological curiosity about languages also has a long history and is an important step before reconstruction, reinvention, or reconstitution. This paper makes a case for critical engagement, an argument for intellectual care when dealing with critical theory, and critical resistance, the question of whether contemporary language matters of concern are better served by traditional or current sociolinguistic frameworks.

Westworld and Humans: The Sentimental Disposition of Popular Posthumanism

Popular trans- and posthuman TV fictions such as Westworld (2016-22) or Humans (2015-18) are replete with sentimental tropes and scripts–those inherited from an 18th-century sentimental tradition and the affective-political ones that allow the sentimental to continue to operate today, as a communicative code in an arena of ‘public feelings’. Here, it is activated in times of crisis and to hedge in experiences of radical contingency. Uncanny encounters with posthuman forms arguably constitute such moments of crisis. But how can the sentimental do its cultural work if these encounters threaten to decentre its humanist foundations? In Westworld and Humans, sentimental scripts are partially revised, develop ambivalent, multi-coded forms and are employed self-reflexively, both in the shows’ diegesis and in the way they address their audience: In ‘quality TV’ drama, fictions of the posthuman seem to engender a ‘meta-sentimentality’ – which in turn may allow for a critical mode of inquiry.

The Value of Variation: Embracing Heterogeneity in Intervention Research

If our goal in education research is to produce knowledge that is useful and used, we need to design impact evaluations that value understanding variation as much as understanding average impact. The context in which an intervention is implemented and the characteristics of participants are integral components of the intervention, and we need to study those components just as seriously as we do the intervention itself. Better understanding variation requires building a framework for what contextual information is likely to predict effectiveness, so researchers know what data to collect; measuring inputs into education systems, not just outputs; and increasing collaboration across disciplines and modes of inquiry. It will also require creating more space for practitioners to participate equitably in research so their insights can inform our research questions and findings. Most challenging, researchers will need to let go of some old ways of working in service of producing research that better serves the field of education.

Reckoning with landscape tensions, reflecting on creative methodologies

In this paper landscape painting is developed as a mode of enquiry through which to explore the tensions inherent to landscape. Set on the high street in a small market town and undertaken by individuals with varying artistic experience, this methodological experiment explores the tensions between the non-representational and representational realms of landscape. By using Elizabeth Grosz’s writings on art, I develop this landscape painting methodology through an understanding of art and artmaking as intensifying sensation. Here, Grosz’s ideas become the foundation for a participatory arts method that decentres the human, whilst remaining focused on the presence of pleasure within landscape. It is by drawing together methodological experimentation and feminist theory that I revisit feminist geographies’ already existing interest in pleasure in/through landscapes through a more-than-representational lens.

Feminist Posthumanism, Environment and “Response-Able Memory”

Abstract This article explores the entangled relationship between memory and environment through a feminist posthumanist framework while it takes seriously an ecological and response-able perspective in shaping the traumatic past and the troubled climatic present. In so doing, it introduces the concept of “response-able memory” which encourages us to reimagine the established humanist underpinnings in cultural memory studies. In order to discuss how “response-able memory” surfaces as a mode of enquiry and highly productive new strategy to accommodate nonanthropogenic and entangled ways of remembrance in the twenty-first century, this article examines Zarina Muhammad’s (b.1982, Singapore) contemporary art which is deeply entwined with a critical re-examination of local histories and silenced (female) accounts in Southeast Asia.

Gender in Post-Pandemic Research: The Potentials of Grounded Theory to Explicitly Guide Gender-Sensitive Inquiry on Discrimination and Violence.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a re-exacerbation of gender inequalities and violence against women was reported. For adequately responding to the causes of this situation and its aftermath, a detailed understanding of the gendered impacts of the pandemic and of subsequent developments is necessary. This aim may be supported by particularly using gender-sensitive modes of inquiry. Against this backdrop, we explore the methodological potential of grounded theory (GT) to explicitly guide gender-sensitive research. Given its methodological variations, we argue that an adequate handling of gender in GT can only be determined in relation to a researcher's positioning within the GT landscape. Thus, to assist readers in translating their gender sensitivity into GT practices, this article outlines various interpretations of GT elements, discussing their relation to gender. Furthermore, strategies addressing gender-related challenges are presented and underlined by, among others, studies on discrimination and violence.

The Art of ‘Creatical Writing’: Unlocking Insights Through Creative-Critical Fusion

ABSTRACT In this article I introduce a new mode of writing within the creative-critical paradigm termed ‘creatical’. This practice involves merging creative and critical discourses to generate embodied, theoretical, metatexual, poetological and plurilingual insights. I explore each of these five modes of enquiry against the backdrop of an illustrative anecdote recounting linguistic discoveries that I made while walking in a foreign-language urban setting.

As You Like It or As You Don’t: Shakespeare's Arden, Thomas More's Utopia, and their discontents

Although As You Like It is criticised for the doubleness of its utopian vision, this article posits that the Forest of Arden challenges characters, spectators, and readers to evaluate alternative societies in the mode of Thomas More's Utopia (1516). Some characters, including More's Raphael Hythlodaeus and Shakespeare's Jaques, reject this dialectical education and refuse to apply their utopian experience to the governance of a ship of state. An alternative is embodied in Morus, More's narrator-character, and Rosalind, Shakespeare's poet-stage director. Shakespeare and More interrogate the relationship between the ideal and the real through a dialectically utopian mode of literary inquiry.

Beyond the Divide Between Qualitative and Quantitative Research: A Comparison of Grounded Theory and Structural Equation Modeling

Abstract Researchers in music education tend to rely on either qualitative or quantitative modes of inquiry. Although scholars are likely to choose one paradigm over the other, no study is purely qualitative or quantitative. To illustrate this point, we aimed to contextualize and discuss both qualitative and quantitative research within a common framework. We then conducted a comparative analysis of a qualitative and a quantitative research approach—grounded theory and structural equation modeling—along a set of philosophical and methodological continua. We showed that grounded theory and structural equation modeling follow a similar overarching research process while integrating both qualitative and quantitative components. Our analysis served as an example to contemplate nuances within research practices and identify similarities between qualitative and quantitative studies. Drawing on this analysis, we highlighted the importance of developing a common research framework in research and education research within the context of music education.

Global Threads, Unveiling Unevenness: Contemporary Maximalist Projects Interrogating Cultural Hybridisation and Marginality

Global Threads, Unveiling Unevenness: Contemporary Maximalist Projects Interrogating Cultural Hybridisation and Marginality. Within a frame that emphasizes the tension between the global and the local, this paper aims to investigate the ways in which complex narratives that incorporate the tropes of migration, periphery, and marginality, amongst others, can bring to light aspects of unevenness and cultural and formal hybridisation. Works like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, or Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other employ distinct maximalist modes of inquiry (Nick Levey) to question topics related to inequality, cultural relevance, or representational biases, in a type of novel about which James Wood claimed that it “suffered from an excess of storytelling and an almost paranoid preoccupation with linking up their many subplots in a web of forced meaning.” What stands at the core of this article is precisely this impulse to force a meaning which seems most frequently disrupted by an anarchetypal propensity to renegotiate a “rhetoric of inclusivity” (Franco Moretti) through which the maximalist author tries to exhaustively encompass the whole world (Levey). By selecting a corpus of maximalist novels to illustrate their evolution from the second half of the 20th century until more recent works, such as Evaristo’s, this paper investigates the shift through which these narratives have started to factor margins in, differently and more frequently than in the beginnings of this literary form. Keywords: Maximalist Novels; Hybridisation; Migration; Periphery; Marginality; Anarchetype; Postmodernism.

Challenges faced by learners who are survivors of school violence: implications for support structures

The main aim of this study is to explore challenges faced by learners who are survivors of school violence and the implications for support structures. Many schools are branded with violence, gangsterism, substance abuse and general crime. The scourge of violence in schools is cause for concern, citing daily reports that appear in the written and electronic media about high levels of violence, physical and sexual abuse, and gang-related activities in schools. Qualitative research design and phenomenology as a mode of inquiry were employed in this study. School principals' and teachers' experiences and perceptions were elicited through focus-group interviews, document reviews, and observations. The population comprised principals and teachers in five schools. Purposive sampling was used as a method of sample selection. The findings revealed that support is key, and lack of support can negatively impact learners’ access to schools and academic achievement in many ways. It was also found that most learners who leave school prematurely, through the fear of violence, do not report when they leave. The study recommended that support must be provided promptly, and parents, teachers, and caregivers must be capacitated to offer effective and efficient support.

Feeling Pulled in Different Directions: A Parsesciencing Inquiry.

The Parsesciencing mode of inquiry was used to advance understanding of a universal humanuniverse living experience of feeling pulled in different directions. Ten people engaged in dialogue to address the question, "What is your experience of feeling pulled in different directions?" The discerning extant moment of this inquiry was that feeling pulled in different directions is constrained vigor surfacing in wavering with cherished potentials.

Introducing Marxist Literary Criticism

Marxism as an ideology and mode of practice continues to exist in the twenty first century. It is not as orthodox and dogmatic as it used to be in the mid twentieth century. It has absorbed and reformulated many contemporary critical trends like post-Marxism and has reappeared in different theoretical garbs. Marxist literary criticism is by no means a bygone critical mode; it is very much in practice and has taken on different forms of enquiry like post-colonialism and cultural studies. Given the all-pervasive nature and presence of Marxist literary criticism in academic and research world and its usefulness in exploring hidden aspects of texts, it is significant to know its basics and recent developments in its pursuits. As long as people are still thinking dialectically, they are still disagreeing with each other, and as long as people are still disagreeing with philosophers, Marxist literary criticism will be important. Marxism, in particular, had several modifications. It is important to note that someone who really believes in and supports Marxist political theory ought to put it into reality. The present paper tries to briefly sketch its basic assumptions and its mode of enquiry. Researchers and students need to get their ideas and views about Marxist literary criticism clear so that they can apply its tenets to texts for insightful understanding.

Ensuring a just transition: The electric vehicle revolution from a human rights perspective

Despite the potential of electric vehicles (EVs) to mitigate climate change and reduce reliance on fossil fuels, their rapid adoption presents nuanced challenges to both social equity and environmental stewardship within the transportation sector. While the EV revolution contributes to energy independence, job creation, and sustainable development, it also raises concerns regarding its potential impact on the human rights of people impacted by the production, use, and end-of-life of EVs. Unfortunately, current studies on transportation electrification often fail to provide a systematic review of such human rights challenges and concerns. This paper aims to fill this gap by analyzing the potential impacts and challenges that EVs present for human rights throughout their life cycle, and by proposing potential measures to address human rights violations. Our analysis draws on international human rights norms, law, and standards because of their universality and suitability for developing baseline indicators, modes of inquiry, and reporting that can be used to assess the potential harm of EVs to vulnerable communities and degraded ecosystems. The aim is to enable stakeholders (i.e., actors within civil society, government, and the private sector) to better understand the potential social and environmental challenges of EVs and ensure that the transition to low-carbon transportation is equitable, sustainable, and supportive of human rights.

Royalty, Racism, and Risk

Abstract W. E. B. Du Bois provides a thesis on Black masculinity formation that includes primary traits of this social identity and dynamics that can engender or stymie its development. Yet his framework does not directly reference sexual minorities. This study considers whether and how Du Bois’s framework on masculinity is germane to the experiences of young Black people with diverse sexual identities by assessing whether they recount similar tropes and features. The analysis is theoretically informed by a New Millennium Du Boisian Mode of Inquiry and a qualitative analysis for 168 young Black persons who reside in the South. Three themes emerge that adopt, amplify, and adapt dimensions of Du Bois’s thesis and demonstrate that key aspects of his framework resonate with Black persons excluded from his original work. Despite nuanced sexual identities, it was common for individuals to espouse Du Bosian tenets associated with Black masculinity such as a protector/provider trope, respectability, racial pride, educational attainment, economic mobility, and self-help as well as concerns about racism. These findings inform research on expectations about masculinity into which many men are generally socialized as well as possible hierarchies among intersecting social identities.

Methods for dreaming about and reimagining digital education

Utilising emancipatory approaches to educational technology in higher education allows welcoming creative and artistic modes of inquiry. This article presents two methods, a virtual makerspace and a guided fantasy story that were applied in a project concerned with rewilding higher education pedagogy. It is argued that the methods encouraged curiosity and care to address diversity and inclusion. They afforded mindfulness of individual needs and welcomed explorations of new directions that challenged potential biases (gender, race, disability or professionality). The article illustrates how these two methods may offer a safe space to dream and imagine educational spaces.

Future Directions for Community-Engaged Research in Clinical Psychological Science with Youth

ABSTRACT Despite advances in clinical science, the burden of mental health problems among youth is not improving. To tackle this burden, clinical science with youth needs methods that include youth and family perspectives on context and public health. In this paper, we illustrate how community-engaged research (CEnR) methods center these perspectives. Although CEnR methods are well-established in other disciplines (e.g. social work, community psychology), they are underutilized in clinical science with youth. This is due in part to misperceptions of CEnR as resource-intensive, overly contextualized, incompatible with experimentally controlled modes of inquiry, or irrelevant to understanding youth mental health. By contrast, CEnR methods can provide real-world impact, contextualized clinical solutions, and sustainable outcomes. A key advantage of CEnR strategies is their flexibility—they fall across a continuum that centers community engagement as a core principle, and thus can be infused in a variety of research efforts, even those that center experimental control (e.g. randomized controlled trials). This paper provides a brief overview of this continuum of strategies and its application to youth-focused clinical science. We then discuss future directions of CEnR in clinical science with youth, as well as structural changes needed to advance this work. The goals of this paper are to help demystify CEnR and encourage clinical scientists to consider adopting methods that better consider context and intentionally engage the communities that our work seeks to serve.