Ontological disobedience: definitely! - {maybe} 2005

Youth in Trouble. Educational Responses, 1991

Education is a complex work of understandings and explanations in the process of which are constructed and expressed relations between self and world. fudgement, decision and action are integral to this work. The relationshif between self and others, judgements, decisions, actions and all the other sensory and emotional experiences of life do not arise for the individual as fragmentary bits awaiting scientific observation to find the laws to knit them altogether into a cohesive personal experience. They already arise 'connected', 'patterned', thematically related, as. events or episodls or phases in an ongoing story or stories, an evolving biography, Niarrative piovides a powerful structure through which the flux, diffuse' ness and iragmentariness of life experiences are drawn together into compelling accounts, and reasons which unify the self and the world intO rhythms of happenings, dramas, histories. Such narratives explain'how I goi here','why iomething had to happen','why I have no choice but to act in a certain way'. They reveal 'who i am' and 'how I relate to others and others to me'. ihey show'my place in the world'and the typical events, structures and processes which confront me. It has long b""n urg.red that narrative is central to understanding and explaining social and personal experience. Dilthey in the late nineteenth ."r,t.r.y arguing in reaction to the positivism of the time discussed thC distinciion in methodology appropriate to the study of human experiencc and culture comparing it with that appropriate to the natural sciencec'

Authorship formalisations are here thought of in terms of their influence on the expression of perspectives that in turn constitute legitimate authorship forms - So that the stories we tell; retell, and the schemas we reproduce, contribute to those that are formal, normative, and shared, and that influence us. Stabilised public representations, ‘the Big Other’, is both constructed by and constructs us and others. So why is it constructed anonymously; why is that which is considered legitimate, ‘authorless’? Ancestors and Gods speak through mouths devoid of agency and are listened to. Science is objective and Art is inspired. I discuss the extent to which narrative conditions that dislocate responsibility are persuasive, and suggest the allure of intersubjective expression of the collective imagination as the cause. I also, however, outline the ways in which authoritative power relations can result. I argue for self reflexive understanding of the legitimation practices that sanctify detached authorship of our shared schemas, and for the responsibilization of the re-authorship that legitimises representations. This subjectively intentional re-authoring is understood to ‘breach’ existing meaning and contribute to our shared ‘reality’, while not transcending it. After situating these issues theoretically, I expand a cognitive anthropological lens, which bases us to theorize out of ‘rationality’ and look at socially embedded predispositions to ‘belief’. I then discuss formalized ritual and traditional authority, followed by less formalised myth and story-telling. I look at grammatical formalisations employed in narrative and their effects and discuss ethically engaged narrative. I then discuss the disembedding effect of the Enlightenment on the Romanticist understanding of the imagination, sovereign guaranteed scientific empiricism – and resulting exceptionalism. This exceptionalism is then challenged with a ‘co-productionist’ re-embedding of science into social processes, where we focus on institutional expertise. I conclude with a critical appreciation of ‘post modern’ discourse and its relationship to anonymous authorship, commitment, and belief.

The Iowa Review, 1992

WHEN MARILYNNE ROBINSON came to Iowa City in the fall of 1990, we promptly planned an interview. So did other readers, for reasons of their own. As we became aware of these other interviews, and were given a chance to see them, we decided each had its own character, that they were complementary far more than redundant, and that a collection of short interviews would offer a fine portrait of a writer we very much admire. That is what we offer here. Each, of course, is much reduced. We have eliminated most, but not quite all of the redundancies and accen tuated the main themes of each interview.

2020

This book extends debates in the field of biographical research, arguing that causal explanations are not at odds with biographical research and that biographical research is in fact a valuable tool for explaining why things in social and personal lives are one way and not another. Bringing reconstructive biographical research into dialogue with critical realism, it explains how and why relational social ontology can become a unique theoretical ground for tapping emergent mechanisms and latent meaning structures. Through an account of the reasons for which reductionist epistemologies, rational action models and covering law explanations are not appropriate for biographical research, the authors develop the philosophical idea of singular causation as a means by which biographical researchers are able to forge causal hypotheses for the occurrence of events and offer guidance on the application of this methodological principle to concrete, empirical examples. As such, this volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in biographical research and social research methods.

Debre Markos University, 2023

Introduction Philosophical worldviews / interpretive frameworks are general orientations about the world and the nature of research that a researcher holds. These worldviews are shaped by the discipline area of the student, the beliefs of advisors and faculty in a student’s area, and past research experiences. A research paradigm is a broad framework of perception and understanding beliefs within which theories and practices operate. It is a way of looking at the world, which is composed of certain philosophical assumptions that guide and direct thinking and action. The objective of this paper is to overview philosophical worldviews / interpretive frameworks, and it discusses different research paradigms. Research paradigms: Positivism, post-positivism, social constructivism, transformative framework, postmodern perspective, pragmatism with its meaning, and critics are discussed in detail. Moreover, these research paradigms are also discussed in relation to philosophical assumptions (ontology, epistemology, axiology, and methodology).In addition, the criteria for selecting a research paradigm for the research study and the methodological implications of paradigm choice are discussed.

Qualitative Inquiry, 1999

This is a comment on Alessandro Duranti's 2015. The anthropology of intentions: Language in a world of others. Philosophers often point to the role of narrative in supporting judgments of agency and evaluative judgments of responsibility in cases of individual action and intention formation. Very few of them, however, suggest that narrative can play a similar role in collaborative decision-making and joint or collective action.