Self-reflexive Approach Research Articles

Rethinking Gender, Reimagining Healing in Minjung Theology: An Indonesian Feminist Theological Rupture

This article rethinks gender and its impact on a reimagination of healing in Minjung theology. I argue that rethinking gender in Minjung theology by reconnecting its three features of collectivity, art, and event from a feminist trauma perspective ruptures the dominant masculine, heterosexual, and liberation grammar in Minjung theology and creates a new imagination of Minjung theology as a discourse of healing. I call this oscillation between rethinking gender and reimagining healing a feminist theological rupture embedded in a grammar of trauma and resilience. This grammar is a theological addition to Minjung theology’s core emphasis on resistance and liberation. I intend to extend and complexify Minjung theology’s masculine and heterosexual grammar and make it more accessible to feminist, queer, and broader contemporary theological praxes for healing. Methodologically, I use a self-reflexive approach by weaving the feminist and queer voices of South Korea and Indonesia with my own voice as rupturing voices to examine the complex tapestry and relevance of Minjung theology. As a result, this article unveils the plausibility of Minjung theology as a grammar of healing that resonates with the rich and complex stories of trauma, witnessing, healing, and liberation in Asia.

Response to: “Looking back to launch forward: a self-reflexive approach to decolonising science education and communication in Africa”. Recognizing and validating multiple knowledge ecologies

This is a response to Sesan and Ibiyemi's essay [2023], which rightly urges “scholars and science communicators” to resist the colonial legacy of science in African countries. The essay argues that northern paradigms, focused on science as the only true form of knowledge, need to be replaced with functional Indigenous knowledge systems. However, the authors adopt the framework of the global north when reimagining and advocating for a radical ‘power literate’ agenda thus confounding knowledge with science, and education with science communication. These approaches obscure the fundamental importance of reimagining power dynamics in a world of multiple epistemologies. Instead, we propose that ‘knowledge communicators’ facilitate a multi-knowledge world through participatory processes.

Response to: “Looking back to launch forward: a self-reflexive approach to decolonising science education and communication in Africa”. Decoloniality opens up new epistemic vistas for science communication

Decolonial perspectives open up epistemic and practical insights for science communication. Following critiques of a deficit-model framing of the field, science communication has been redefined as an inclusive cultural space of meaning-making around science. From a decolonial lens, however, a cultural perspective necessitates a fundamental reckoning with the historical and contemporary politics of knowledge claims, including the erasure and devaluation of entire knowledge-systems in the process of Westernization. In recognizing and learning from these histories, science communication can learn from parallel developments within the sciences. It can also learn from contributions made by decolonial scholars to the global challenge of navigating sustainable futures. This piece briefly discusses one such example, drawing from scholarship on the ontological cosmovision of Ubuntu and its relevance to climate change dilemmas today.

Looking back to launch forward: a self-reflexive approach to decolonising science education and communication in Africa

The imbalance in the global scientific landscape resulting from the enduring legacy of colonialism in the south and the hegemony of scientific paradigms originating in the north is immense. Our paper makes a case for employing traditional knowledge systems and paradigms as tools for redressing this imbalance in African societies. To achieve this goal, the paper argues, scholars and science communicators must actively pursue a radical, “power-literate” agenda of scientific decolonisation on the continent. Central to this mission is the need for scholars to be equipped with a keen sense of the past — including an understanding of what worked for knowledge production and perpetuation in pre-colonial African societies — without which science education and communication in those societies will remain untethered from the realities of the present and their visions for the future. Concurrently, attention must be given to nurturing home-grown paradigms and platforms for research in higher education that are rigorous yet unencumbered by the age-long tendency to refract African experiences through northern lenses.

Building Intercultural Communication Competence in Translator Training: A Metacognitive Approach

Intercultural communication competence and skills have become increasingly essential for translators to succeed in the global language industry. While some university translation programs offer a specific course explicitly covering intercultural communication, others teach it implicitly, embedding it in other practical courses. The main aim of the study is to shed light on the ways of adapting intercultural communication courses for translation and interpreting students by uncovering student perceptions of the relationship between intercultural awareness and translation and discussing the role of cross-cultural interaction-oriented assignments with a metacognitive approach, giving impetus to the aspiration of self-improvement and life-long learning. For this purpose, we conducted this research at a state university in Turkey during a 14-week Intercultural Communication course in the 2021/2022 spring semester. Our data-gathering method is based on focus group discussions and qualitative content analysis on student assignments using MAXQDA 2020. Following the analysis, three main themes have been identified: experiencing intercultural interaction, building intercultural awareness, and developing intercultural competence and skills. The results of the study show that an interpersonal and practical assignment contributes to translation students’ intercultural competence in several aspects: gaining self-confidence, improving their intercultural sensitivity and mindfulness, noticing cultural stereotypes, and reflecting on cultural similarities and differences. Furthermore, benefiting from a self-reflexive approach, students realized that being aware of the effects of cultural differences, as well as commonalities in mindset, language, and certain behaviors is a necessary skill for future translators.

Learning to unlearn - Tracing Failures Within Arts-Based Participatory Research

In this article, I trace my own research practice in a process of unlearning from an individual self-reflexive approach. Striving towards a more participatory and collective approach, I turn my attention to relational aspects between people, materials and discourses, and give them a central role in knowledge production as I move and find myself being moved in and out of apparently incommensurable paradigms: the qualitative and the post-qualitative; the humanist and the post-humanist; the post-humanist and the decolonial. I will unpack some of the emerging challenges, tensions and potentials as a becoming researcher pushing against boundaries in a space of conventional academic expectations within my researcher education.

Reflexivity and the perpetuation of inequality in the cultural sector: half awake in a fake empire?

ABSTRACT Discourses of social justice offer the sense of a progressive and developing narrative within the arts sector. Cultural democracy, cultural equity and cultural diversity address broad policy issues related to production, consumption and representation. This article questions whether these approaches have failed in their challenge to the long-established power dynamics of the cultural sector. We take this position of failure as a starting point for a self-reflexive account of the lack of progressive change in the sector. We argue that reflexivity is needed to avoid the elision of the progressive impulse through the inauthentic and rhetorical promotion of ‘fakequity’. As scholars from divergent yet mutually Anglo-centric traditions, our aim is to better understand how a self-reflexive approach might counter the (non)performative behaviour of the cultural sector. Without such an approach, initiatives supposedly designed to be culturally democratic risk enforcing structures of exclusion and facilitating a ‘non-performative woke democratisation of culture’.

Contextualising nationalism

This paper seeks to relate the scholarly analysis of nationalism – and of the ways in which nation-states relate to minorities and migrants – with the actual socio-political context within which such analysis takes place. Looking back into the theories of nationalism as they have developed since World War II, the focus of nationalism theorists has shifted from the effort to explain why nations emerged and when they emerged, looking at the wider processes of industrialisation and print capitalism; to the effort to analyse nationalism from the ground up through the lived experiences of citizens; to, more recently, the effort to explain why and how nationalism persists and whether and how it evolves in more plural or more exclusionary ways. I am arguing in this paper that it is important to adopt a self-reflexive approach so as not only to link our understanding of nations and nationalism in their contemporary socio-economic and political context, but that we also need to adopt such self-reflexivity in relation to our own work and ask: why do we focus on a particular perspective or evolution? How does this relate to our wider context and positionality as scholars? In this paper, I am proposing a periodisation of nationalism studies from the post-WW II period to this day, arguing that the focus of nationalism theories was guided interactively by the wider socio-economic developments of each period. I conclude with a critical reflection on nationalism in a (post-)pandemic world.

Play for Today and Northern Ireland in the 1970s

This article sets out to explain the factors influencing the making of Plays for Today about Northern Ireland during the 1970s and how these partly account for the characteristics of the work that was produced. The discussion initially identifies the problems posed by filming in Northern Ireland and the managerial scrutiny to which plays dealing with the ‘Troubles’ – such as Carson Country and The Legion Hall Bombing – were subject. It then goes on to examine how these factors encouraged the ‘oblique’ artistic strategies evident in Taking Leave and Your Man from Six Counties and the more self-reflexive and anti-naturalist approach adopted by Come the Revolution, Catchpenny Twist and The Last Window Cleaner. In doing so, the article aims to retrieve a largely ‘forgotten’ period of television drama production and add to our understanding of how television drama first tackled the contemporary Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’.

The performative photograph

By reexamining the empirical relationship between ethnography and photography, this article explores the phenomenology of photographic experiences in a French banlieue. Photography may be a powerful practice to critically depict social phenomena in the field. Taking into account the basic assumption that photography is more than visual evidence of observed realities, I analyze the creative and nonindexical dimensions of visual experiences. Based on collaborative, sensorial, and pragmatic practices, I discuss the politics of visual representation in marginalized and racialized urban spaces from an intersectional point of view. The analysis developed here contributes to the definition of a creative and critically self-reflexive approach to the depiction of ethnographic experiences. In doing so, this article explores the plastic, poietic, and performative dimensions of photographic narratives in visual ethnography.Figure 1. (Author, 2017)View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint

Mentorship, Critical Autoethnography and the Practices of Self-Reflexivity: Investing in an Academy that Does Not Yet Exist

Abstract I explore the topic of mentorship as a powerful form of feminist contestation from within, particularly for students and faculty of color. Inspired by the scholarship of women of color Communications and Media Studies scholars and specifically the literature on critical autoethnography, I argue for a more self-reflexive approach to mentoring rooted in an awareness of the dynamics of power and in-/exclusion embedded in the smallest of everyday exchanges. I assert that critical autoethnography can serve as a powerful analytical tool for highlighting and contesting historic asymmetries of power within Media Studies, Communications and beyond, in a self-reflexive manner that can radically transform our mentorship and pedagogical practices.

Designing Inter- and Transdisciplinary Research on Mountains: What Place for the Unexpected?

In recent decades, research on mountains has become more inter- and transdisciplinary, but a greater effort is needed if such research is to contribute to a societal transformation toward sustainability. Mountain research centers are a crucial actor in this endeavor. Yet, the literature has not paid sufficient attention to how these centers should (re-)design inter- and transdisciplinary research. In this study, we explored this question with a self-reflexive approach. We analyzed the first 15 months of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mountain Research (CIRM) of the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) through qualitative data collected via interviews and observation. We used a simple model of inter- and transdisciplinarity at the organizational level of a research center. Special attention was devoted to the individual and collective ability to exploit the unexpected (serendipity). Our results indicate an interdependency between the coconstruction of research objects and the creation of integrative partnerships. They also shed light on the types of institutional resources and integrative methodologies that enhance inter- and transdisciplinary research, as well as their challenges. Our experience shows that implementing inter- and transdisciplinarity requires deep changes in research evaluation procedures, research funding policies, and researchers themselves. Serendipity is in turn shown to play an important role in inter- and transdisciplinarity due to its potential to change the research process in creative ways. We speculate that serendipity offers unique opportunities to capitalize on hidden resources that can catalyze a radical transformation of mountain researchers, research organizations, and society in the face of unprecedented global change.

Forming critical selves through lived experiences of interculturality in an internationalizing university in China

ABSTRACT Based on ethnographic data, the present study examines how being critical has been understood, valued and practiced among students enrolled in international English-as-the-medium-of-instruction (EMI) Master’s porgrammes in a top-rated comprehensive university in China. Drawing on the Foucauldian ethico-political axes of self-formation, this article presents three case studies and finds that international and local students form critical selves in diverse ways as influenced by lived experiences of interculturality at personal, institutional and disciplinary levels. The Foucauldian axes enable a holistic understanding of students’ formation of critical selves in relation to their past, present and prospective intercultural life trajectories as situated within the social and institutional contexts. It also helps call for a culturally-enriching, self-reflexive approach to critical pedagogy in the context of internationalization of higher education that breaks away from theoretical conceptions of critical thinking as traditionally grounded on essentialist views on cultures and relevant pedagogical norms.

Reflective Practice of Islamophobia Intergroup Dialogues in Higher Education

Hendricks, F. (2020). Reflective Practice of Islamophobia Intergroup Dialogues in Higher Education Background. Journalof EducationinMuslimSocieties,2(1),97–106.DOI10.2979/jems.2.1.07 • Copyright © 2020 International Institute of IslamicThought Reflective Practice of Islamophobia Intergroup Dialogues in Higher Education Fatima Hendricks Introduction T his practitioner’s note integrates reflections from a year of graduate coursework in the International Training and Education Program in the School of Education at American University (AU), and the role of intergroup dialogue facilitator at the Intergroup Dialogue Program on Islamophobia at the Center for Diversity and Inclusion during the fall, winter, and spring of 2019–2020. My graduate studies were undertaken while serving in the capacity of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and AU School of Education, International Training Education Program (ITEP) Partnership in Advancing Education in Muslim Societies (AEMS track). Intergroup dialogues enable facilitators and dialoguers to bring a self-reflexive approach to Islamophobia, applying a dialogue education approach at a time of significant divisiveness in the national milieu. The methodology of intergroup dialoguing personifies the integration of theory Fatima Hendricks is an occupational therapist, educator, and children’s author working at the intersection of health and education. Working in South Africa, Fatima has served as a community organizer, trainer and dialogue facilitator, and has diverse program development experience in grassroots programs for youth leadership development, 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, refugee anti-racism and xenophobia work, and nonviolence and peace with the Medina Institute Center for Non-violence and Peace Studies, to name a few. She is a graduate of the American University School of Education’s International Training & Education Program, through the partnership and support of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). Her areas of academic specialization include management, information management, and Islamic studies. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Chicago State University. 98 JournalofEducationinMuslimSocieties · Vol. 2, No. 1 and practice to reflect the rigor, respect for, and commitment to the overall mission of the School of Education, to coconstruct learning and prepare students to transform societies through education. In parallel to the journey of intergroup dialoguing at AU since 2004, training program design at AU has for the past two decades worked to enable facilitators with systems thinking for change agency. Specifically, the Islamophobia Intergroup Dialogues process located in the Center of Diversity and Inclusion weaves together key ITEP course concepts into a provocative and illuminating experience using mastery of key design, facilitation, and critical/systems analysis skills. Intergroup dialogue utilizes the four-stage educational intergroup dialogue model that focuses on building relationships, exploring systemic group differences and similarities, examining controversial issues, and action planning and alliance building (Zúñiga, Nagda, Chesler, & Cytron-Walker, 2007). Specifically, the goals of the Islamophobia Intergroup Dialogues are to (a) unpack Islamophobia by engaging across difference of perspectives and identities; (b) foster intergroup community through a diversity of identities; (c) explore personal experiences and societal impacts of Islamophobia; (d) provide tools for navigating difference on and off campus. The three key intended outcomes of the Islamophobia Intergroup Dialogues are to (a) raise consciousness by helping participants explore their own and others’ social identities/statuses, and the role of social structures in relationships of privilege and inequality; (b) build positive relationships across differences and conflicts; and (c) strengthen individual and collective capacities to foster intergroup collaboration for personal and social responsibility to promote social justice. At a macro level, higher educational institutions in the United States are increasingly engaging in addressing Islamophobia needs underpinned by the increasing incidents of Islamophobic attacks toward Muslims. Hence, AU’s initiatives of addressing religious bigotry through intergroup dialogues and mini grants for diversity and inclusion trainings is part of a larger tapestry of efforts to stem the tide against Islamophobia in internationalized higher education. Key Reflections The purpose of this practitioner’s note is to critically reflect on lessons learned from the Islamophobia Intergroup Dialogues in order to draw valuable conclusions that may improve future practice. Reflecting on action is important to reviewing, analyzing, and evaluating past practice ReflectivePracticeofIslamophobiaIntergroupDialoguesinHigherEducationBackground · Hendricks99 in order to gain insights that can shape future practice (Finlay, 2008). On a higher level, critical reflection provides the opportunity...

Encountering the colonial: religion in feminism and the coloniality of secularism

The debate on feminism and ‘religion’ has rarely been suggested as a critique of modernity that has silenced other possible cultural, epistemological and spiritual options. Efforts have been made to ascertain whether ‘religion’ is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for – or indeed an ally or threat to – women’s liberation. More specifically, in a European context, contemporary discussions of ‘religion’ and the rights of women have been very much centred on Islam. Yet, none of these narratives have resolved the intrinsic colonial character of modernity. This article explores the debate on both Islamic and Western feminism from a decolonial perspective. It argues that today, feminist theory faces the tremendous challenge of how to encounter the colonial and not only redefine, but also review the concepts and categories upon which Western feminism bases its arguments. Drawing on the work of the Spanish-Syrian Islamic decolonial thinker, Sirin Adlbi Sibai, this article develops a critical, self-reflexive approach that questions secular assumptions regarding feminist analyses of ‘religion’. In doing so, I present the decolonising of feminism as an invitation to (re)imagine our feminist encounters.

“A Hideous and a Wicked Country”: Cornwall under the Travel Writer’s Gaze, and Receiving Travelers’ Texts as a “Travelee-Reader”

This article focuses on travel accounts about Cornwall from “the long nineteenth century,” including those by Wilkie Collins and W.H. Hudson. The article traces a shift from a general hostility to “deformed” Cornish topography to an almost universal celebration of its “rugged beauty,” coupled with a consistent tendency to exoticize local culture, and considers the changing impetus of this othering—from an integrationist ideology at the outset, to a desire to maintain an exotic “elsewhere” as counterpoint to the metropolis later on. The second part of the article takes a self-reflexive approach, drawing on my own background as a self-identifying Cornish person to consider how such outsider representations might interact with local auto-exoticizing discourses. Drawing on Wendy Bracewell’s work on “travelee polemics” and the “travelee reader,” the article argues that receiving exoticizing travel texts may have a validating quality in a community that self-identifies as “different” from a national mainstream.

NEW MIXTURES

Some have talked about a crisis in documentary photography since its inter- and post-war heydays. But more recently a new kind of art-documentary has developed with a self-reflexive approach towards the limits and the possibilities of photography. The spectrum between documentary and art provides photography with a specific opportunity to address difficult subject matter between the personal and the political. Leaving the discussion of “the politics of representation” — so dominant in the 1980s — aside and instead departing from a handful of newer theoretical framings which try to formulate an ethically responsive, activist and transitive form of photographic agency (such as Roberts, Thrift, Butler and Azoulay), this article identifies and discusses a current in contemporary photography of new conceptual strategies of socially and politically engaged documentary. This strategy is called “new mixtures” because it mixes hitherto separated photographic forms such as family and cell phone photos, reportage and conceptual and archival forms. It is identified as a global tendency, but more closely exemplified by the work of Scandinavian photographers Kent Klich and Tina Enghoff. As such the article identifies what is called both a “social” as well as a more “positive” take on both theory and photography, which has taken place in the decade that photographies has existed.

The Nature of the Space: Walls to Bridges as Transformative Learning

Community-based learning initiatives have the potential to have a meaningful impact on participants. When integrated into an academic setting, such experiential learning opportunities can initiate transformative learning within students and the broader community. Through a self-reflexive approach, this essay describes one such first-hand experience from a Walls to Bridges class, offered through Wilfrid Laurier University and facilitated in a Canadian Federal Prison. The learning model utilized within this class has the capacity to deeply engage students in ways where traditional classroom methodology falls short. Institutionalized education can learn a great deal from this model, which values diversity and community building, and which centralizes voices that are often absent or marginalized in academic settings. This essay examines the nature of a Walls to Bridges class as it compares to traditional educational experiences. The essay explores current, dominant educational paradigms that are influenced by capitalistic values and can perpetuate power imbalances and systemic barriers, while also highlighting alternatives to traditional education models. Teaching methodologies, such as collaborative rather than competitive learning, circle pedagogy, the creation of a safe classroom space, power redistribution, and creative means of critical classroom discussions, are celebrated as opportunities for deep learning.

Mind the Gap: Distinguishing Between the Perception and Intention of Curatorial Education

Abstract As the number of curatorial degree programmes has increased over the past thirty years, so too has the criticism about their methodology, pedagogy and overall worthiness. This article examines those critiques and exposes a variety of misconceptions voiced in the arguments made by the detractors of curatorial education. Drawing from experience in chairing a graduate programme, developing curricula, and mentoring students at the California College of the Arts, this article elucidates the practical, conceptual and relational aspects involved in teaching curating. In the contemporary context, the distrust of curatorial education is misplaced; rather than ‘flattening’ the profession of curating, the diverse and self-reflexive approach of curatorial programmes seek to provide students with a period of experimentation and discussion about the craft, history and methods of curating.

Learning, action and solutions in action learning: investigation of facilitation practice using the concept of living theories

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the practice of action learning (AL) facilitation in supporting AL set members to address their ‘messy’ problems through a self-reflexive approach using the concept of ‘living theory’ [Whitehead, J., and J. McNiff. 2006. Action Research Living Theory. London: Sage]. The facilitation practice is investigated through personal observations and explanations of learning and action through shift in identity, thinking and approach of AL members in resolving complex problems raised during the AL sessions. The paper demonstrates how AL can be applied as a methodology for supporting leaders to address complex organisational problems through inquiry, critical reflection and advocacy to gain new insights as well as new practice. The findings highlight that key theoretical principles in AL such as critical reflection and problem-solving can be applied to support managers and leaders to analyse and solve complex organisational problems. The paper also contributes to the current literature on AL through the application of the living theory approach as a discipline for critical inquiry, self-reflection and evaluation.