Radical Inquiry Research Articles

A radical inquiry, tamed: the Sebastopol Committee of 1855

ABSTRACT In January 1855, the British House of Commons appointed a Select Committee to investigate the parlous state of the British army then encamped before Sebastopol. Originally a radical project driven by the Radical MP John Arthur Roebuck, the Sebastopol Committee wound up tamer than its origins implied. At its outset, it collapsed a government, and prompted anguished complaints from traditionalists that it was overthrowing the constitution. Yet in choosing to work through a Select Committee – a long-established form, albeit one not previously used to investigate an ongoing military operation – Roebuck made a calculated gamble that did not entirely pay off. Sacrificing control over his Committee’s composition to secure wide parliamentary approval and thereby legitimacy, he wound up unable to influence its conclusions in his preferred direction. Instead, his more ‘establishment’ colleagues declined to censure individuals, refused even to consider the government’s wider strategic approach, and produced a set of recommendations almost identical to what the government was doing anyway. The effect was to neuter Roebuck’s radical inquiry. In the end, the fact that the Sebastopol Committee happened matters more than anything it did, or anything it found.

Radical Inquiry—Liberatory Praxis for Research and Evaluation

AbstractConventional social science research and evaluation too often replicate unjust and oppressive narratives and assumptions about young people of color's capacities, abilities, and needs, treating them primarily, and sometimes solely, as risk, problem, or disease. Overemphasis on “metrics of compliance,” such as personal behavior change, self‐efficacy, and resilience perpetuate this burden while ignoring those of survival, fortitude, and resistance in the context of structural/historical subjugation, discrimination, and state‐sanctioned violence communities of color have endured as part of US nation‐building. Invisible, insidious, and assumed, the dominant tropes and frameworks render white middle‐class subjectivities as the gold‐standard of achievement, status, and success. RYSE Youth Center in Richmond, California, creates safe spaces grounded in social justice that build youth power for young people to love, learn, educate, heal, and transform lives and communities. Toward this, RYSE employs Radical Inquiry through intentional, active, and ongoing listening. Radical Inquiry facilitates connection, proximity, and empathy—humanization.

EXPERIENCE “HUMAN DEATH” IN THE EVIDENCE OF THE EUROPEAN CINEMA (M. HANEKE)

The purpose of the article is the deployment of the philosophem of “death of man” in the films by M. Haneke. Such a statement of the problem is due to the understanding of art as the ground of philosophy that was to a certain extent already proclaimed by Nietzsche. The art provides such means of relation to the truth, which are deprived of rigid conceptualization and are working basing on the freedom of both the author and the recipient. This is characteristic of the non-classical type of philosophy. In XX–XXI centuries special care is taken over the elimination of subjectivist excessive theorizing, while retaining the attention to the experience of consciousness, phenomenology provides its version of attention to the true meaning with its intention to the reduction of redundant constructions and the discovery of the face and voice of intentional objectivity. If verbal art certainly tends to verbalized judgment, then the cinema provides the possibility of holistic visual, auditory and semantic (logos) perception. Novelty is due to this approach, when the appeal to the cinema is carried out in the interests of philosophy: we get the opportunity to get into the advanced experience, avoiding verbal transcription. This provides the possibility of implementing a philosophical set on critical thinking in the Kantian sense of understanding of the primordial principles invisible in everyday life. Haneke builds his cinema as an open question without a direct answer, which has the purpose of excite the mind and consciousness of the viewer. The active agent of the events is the moral dimension of personal life. According to Haneke, it is in this that one can see the foundations of human existence, the ineffectiveness of the moral and ethical dimension eliminates human in man, which becomes identical with death. Haneke’s interest in truth and contradiction is realized as a radical inquiry about the principles of civilization, which is exacerbated when the usual way of life is destroyed and the system of values does not work. The idea of European civilization moving beyond its own limits possesses not always clearly identified foundations. Contrary to the technocratic variants of the Übermensch as a posthuman, philosophical cinema Haneke returns the significance of personality-existential ethical practices, which involve critique and analytical comprehension of the principles of their own existence.

RYSE Youth Center: Youth Participatory Action Research

Since 2000, the RYSE center located in Richmond, CA has centered the voices of youth to combat issues in their local community. Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) has been one of the key tenets of RYSE’s approach and implementation of radical inquiry. RYSE’s radical inquiry strategy aims to shift what research looks like, sounds like, and feels like with an inquiry process that is humanizing and moves toward liberation. This involves ongoing listening and dynamic responsiveness to the priorities, needs, and interests of young people of color. This commentary documents two recent YPAR projects that developed from youth who were interested in exploring gender-based violence, bullying and coping. The commentary documents findings and youth reflections highlighting the liberatory and collaborative nature of YPAR.

Did the Revolution Happen?

The Russian Revolution, so often monumentalized as a singular event—not least by the Bolsheviks themselves—was an inherently plural happening, involving the disparate actions and aspirations of peasants, workers, national minorities, and many others. Although early Soviet cinema certainly partook of the dominant “productivist” and progressivist ideology of the period, it also explored, sometimes willy-nilly, the revolutionary “event” as something multiple and even uncentered. This paper, focused on the work of Dziga Vertov, investigates a number of ways—including the valorization of artisanal creative practice and a radical inquiry into the possibilities of montage—that film remained faithful to that plurality and might even offer strategies for critiquing the presentist ideology of our own time.

Oh Henry!: Physical Cultural Studies’ Critical Pedagogical Imperative

Over the past 30 years Physical Cultural Studies (PCS) (Andrews, 2008) has grown in the United States. This form of radical inquiry has been heavily influenced by the British Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. PCS research has focused on the various ways the corporeal has been a/effected by, and, indeed, (re)informs the contemporary socioeconomic context. However, while theoretical rigor has long been the norm in American PCS, I argue that the critical (public) pedagogy that radically contextual Cultural Studies has always called for has been a little slower in developing. As such, I will demonstrate how Henry Giroux’s influence in, on, and for critical pedagogy has more recently become and should be an essential component of PCS—particularly in our classrooms. As such, I will provide examples outlining how critical pedagogy informs my classroom practices to begin the dialogue about what constitutes good pedagogical work.

On Pragmatism and Esteem

Is the Penn State controversy a public relations crisis or a moral one? While all relevant parties have made public efforts to carry out public relations campaigns to salvage their individual reputations, efforts to address the moral aspects of their actions are lacking. A proper pragmatic and post-pragmatic effort to regain public esteem demands an institutional commitment to transparency; to look to the truth for aid and then tell the truth. A true pragmatic approach demands ethical agents look beyond temporary benefits in order to properly calibrate human aims and purposes. More contemporary forms of pragmatism grounded in critical and radical inquiry demand an even stronger commitment to social justice and truth-telling as appropriate moral interventions in times of crisis.

An Initial Encounter to the Semiotic Approach and Radical Inquiry of Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce is quite possibly the greatest philosophical genius the United States has ever produced. His thinking was radical and unconventional and illuminated profound novelty in the form of bold and at times wildly speculative ideas. The arbiter of history has shown his thinking to be well ahead of its time. Peirce has numerous scientific advances to his credit and his ideas both anticipated and helped create the ground for the physics of both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. In addition, he and his friend and colleague William James were the two most central figures responsible for the creation of the philosophy of Pragmatism. This paper is a personal exploration of an encounter with Peirce's approach to inquiry and illustrates how his willingness to courageously follow any line of questioning to its ultimate end led him to breakthrough insights that are still at the forefront of American philosophy today. Abstract

No (More) Philosophy Without Cross‐Cultural Philosophy

AbstractPhilosophy is a radical inquiry whose task is to interrogate the fundamental assumptions of some given activity, discipline, or set of beliefs. In doing so, philosophical inquiry must attempt to delineate a problem and to develop a method for resolving that problem. However, to be true to its intention, philosophy must be able to examine not only the object of its inquiry but also its own method of interrogation. To accomplish this task, philosophical inquiry must be able to create a distance not only from the assumptions under investigation but also from its own assumptions, which is to say, that it must be able to raise questions about its own method. This self‐reflexivity requires that any given philosophical investigation must be examined from an alternative vantage point. Since the assumptions which inform the inquiry are deeply imbedded within a given culture, immanent critique is insufficient. The only way to step outside the boundaries of these cultural presuppositions is to reflect on the given problem from the vantage point of another culture's philosophical tradition. Thus, I argue that philosophical inquiry is unable to go beyond certain limits without being cross‐cultural philosophy. I illustrate the way in which cross‐cultural philosophy does this with respect to the problem of the self by placing the Western philosophical approach to this problem in dialogue with the Indian Hindu‐Buddhist narrative.

The Boy in the Yellow Dress: Reframing Subjectivity in Narrativisations of the Queer Self

In my experience, religion strives to drive a wedge between queer folk and their sexuality. Further, by perpetuating the sexualised construction of identity, it excludes particular sources of knowledge as fit only for people situated comfortably within its heteronormative models. Yet there is plenty of evidence that many queer lives are open to sources of ‘spiritual’ insight (as I will define it) beyond the heteronormative filters of the standard model. I present an extract from my memoir, a work in progress titled The Boy in the Yellow Dress, to demonstrate how the practice of life writing can produce versions of subjectivity that are resistant to homophobic constructions. Such praxis works not only to ‘talk back’ to the culture but also to uncover and reclaim previously unrecognised knowledge resources, detoxified of the homophobia embedded in conventional religion and the pathologising discourses of medicine. The dis-illusionment that many gay men go through is re-presented as a stripping away of illusions, precipitating a radical inquiry into the nature of being that I propose is at the very heart of spiritual practice. Taking the famous Zen interrogatory ‘Show me your original face before your parents were born’ as a pointer, I argue that, rather than upholding a fixed notion of self that is culturally produced, historically situated, and politically defended, in its quest for continuing liberation queer intelligence can prove responsive to the deconstructive imperative inherent in certain ‘Eastern’ approaches to religious practice.

Christian Faith and the Theological Life

What does it mean to believe in God? This question still provokes a recalcitrant world. In spite of the apparent disinterest of our age, the religious question continues to task and to vex, sometimes quietly, sometimes dramatically. When religious divisions occasion civil strife, believers are faced with an even more radical inquiry. Wherein lies the real truth about Christian doctrine and its place in our lives? Can we appeal to any authority for belief? How do we escape the suspicions of a skeptical age? In this book, Romanus Cessario explores these questions and suggests responses taken from the history of theology. He offers a readable account of the accumulated wisdom of the Christian tradition concerning the faith-question, citing as major authorities the saints, those who have realized the will of God throughout the ages.

Emerson, Dickinson, and the Abyss

Arachne, maiden of legendary audacity, claimed she could weave more splendidly than the goddess Minerva herself; the challenge ended in self-inflicted death and metamorphosis into a spider-the cunning revenge of the Divine weaver. Dickinson betrays a similar boldness, placing her poems against the most powerful voices for her generation-the poets of Romanticism. Like the Romantics, she writes quest poems, for they seek to complete the voyage, to prove the strength of the imagination against the stubbornness of life, the repression of an antithetical nature, and that hidden mysterythe final territory of death. The form of the poems reflects their subject. She writes poems of radical inquiry,'1 riddles that tease the intelligence or alternatively achieve startling definitions which testify to the authority of her own consciousness. Such authority depends on power, and it is power that lies at the center of Dickinson's relation to Emerson. It is from Emerson that she learns the terms of the struggle and what she needs to conquer-to write poems that win from nature the triumph of freedom for the imagination.