Epistemology Commons^™

In Defense Of Non-Anthropocentrism—A Relational Account Of Value And How It Can Be Integrated, Ian I. Weckler

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Climate change has been show to be caused by humans. Human-centric behaviors have affected the world to the extent that many believe we have entered a new geologic epoch. This epoch— the Anthropocene—has prompted exploration into the ethical relationship between humans and the rest of the world. We know that a purely anthropocentric ethical system of values has lead ecological imbalance and environmental destruction, and that a non-anthropocentric (or humancentric) ethical system of value would be better suited for maintaining and regaining a habitable environment. However, past conceptions of non anthropocentrism have relied on abstract conceptions of value that fail …

The Color Of Water: An Autoethnographically-Inspired Journey Of My Becoming A Researcher, Trude Klevan, Bengt Karlsson, Alec Grant

The Qualitative Report

In this paper, the first author autoethnographically describes, discusses and reflects on her process of becoming a researcher based on her PhD journey. She explores how the development of knowledge and her understandings of what counts as knowledge is entangled with her personal and professional development. The second and third authors join with her to explore and comment on the ways in which her doctoral topic knowledge and her process of becoming a researcher co-evolved. On this basis, all authors challenge and trouble what counts as qualitative knowledge and inquiry in contemporary academia and discuss the need for the provision …

“To Be Men, Not Destroyers”: Developing Dabrowskian Personalities In Ezra Pound’S The Cantos And Neil Gaiman’S American Gods, Michelle A. Nicholson

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Kazimierz Dabrowski’s psychological theory of positive disintegration is a lesser known theory of personality development that offers an alternative critical perspective of literature. It provides a framework for the characterization of postmodern protagonists who move beyond heroic indoctrination to construct their own self-organized, autonomous identities. Ezra Pound’s The Cantos captures the speaker-poet’s extensive process of inner conflict, providing a unique opportunity to track the progress of the hero’s transformation into a personality, or a man. American Gods is a more fully realized portrayal of a character who undergoes the complete paradigmatic collapse of positive disintegration and deliberate self-derived self-revision …

On The Lived Experience Of Truth In An Era Of Educational Reform: Co-Responding To Anti-Intellectualism, Matthew J. Kruger-Ross

Educational Foundations & Policy Studies Faculty Publications

The severity of the challenges made to traditionally and historically accepted understandings of truth, what is true, what is false and “fake,” and even what is real, continues unabated in American public discourse. Nevertheless, the primary argument in this paper does not aim to identify the causes of the breakdown of representation (i.e. in the Trump administration, within the education reform movement) and the correspondence-based conceptions of truth. Instead, the focus is on discussing the hermeneutic phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and offering a conceptualization of truth as lived and experienced. Challenges to truth are to be understood not as an …

Critical Embodied Praxis For Social Justice And Peace Educators: A Story Of Personal Transformation Through Analysis Of My Jewish And Settler Identities, Cara Michelle Silverberg

Capstone Collection

In this paper, I examine definitions of and relationships between violence, oppression, peace, liberation, and embodiment in the context of critical pedagogy in order to construct a theory of critical embodied praxis for social justice and peace educators. Considering the body to be a tangible vessel through which narratives and mechanisms of violence are expressed and maintained, I explore the potential of the body to be a vessel through which liberatory narratives may be generated and shared. After constructing a theory of critical embodied praxis, I illustrate this framework in action through a personal narrative that explores the intersections …

Academia Will Not Save You: Stories Of Being Continually “Underrepresented”, Lynette Deaun Guzmán

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

My entire life I have had to navigate educational structures labeled (by other people) as “underrepresented” in my fields—mathematics and mathematics education. As many people who are similarly labeled in this way know, this meant I had to navigate oppressive structures that positioned me as lesser (e.g., white supremacy, patriarchy). Making sense of these repeated interactions, I wrote my dissertation as a series of three articles, each prefaced with an essay that situated a broader social, cultural, and political context and also connected to my lived experiences navigating academia. These essays were some of my most personal academic writing, and …

Intersectionality: Engaging The Epistemology Of Leadership Theory, Carolyn J. Morales

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This dissertation investigates the potential of linking intersectionality and leadership theories utilizing a theoretical bricolage research strategy. In order to explore a theoretical merger between these two disparate disciples warrants a preliminary understanding of how the production of knowledge has constructed a long-standing epistemic bias against marginalized perspectives. This analysis will seek to illustrate how androcentrism pervades the corpus of intellectual thought and the resulting impact which extends beyond the traditional canon of epistemology to the field of leadership. Intrinsic to this analysis will be an exploration of social identity and how it interacts with larger social environmental factors such …

Epistemic Beliefs And The Innovation-Decision Process: A Mixed Methods Analysis Of Faculty Classroom Assessment Practice, Sharon G. Peterson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study focuses on epistemic belief change and the innovation-decision processes of 193 faculty who participated in a professional development workshop series on classroom assessment. From this study population, focus groups were conducted with a criterion-based research sample of 30 workshop participants (i.e., spring workshop completers n = eight, spring workshop non-completers n =eight, fall workshop completers n = seven, and fall workshop non-completers n = seven). Very little attention in higher education research is devoted to how faculty conceptualize new knowledge during professional development, and how decisions about new knowledge affect existing knowledge. This study addresses this gap by …

Radical Social Ecology As Deep Pragmatism: A Call To The Abolition Of Systemic Dissonance And The Minimization Of Entropic Chaos, Arielle Brender

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper aims to shed light on the dissonance caused by the superimposition of Dominant Human Systems on Natural Systems. I highlight the synthetic nature of Dominant Human Systems as egoic and linguistic phenomenon manufactured by a mere portion of the human population, which renders them inherently oppressive unto peoples and landscapes whose wisdom were barred from the design process. In pursuing a radical pragmatic approach to mending the simultaneous oppression and destruction of the human being and the earth, I highlight the necessity of minimizing entropic chaos caused by excess energy expenditure, an essential feature of systems that aim …

Millennial Culture And Epistemology: Exploring The Meaning-Making Discourse Of An Emerging Generation, Sophia Driscoll Gamber

Sociology Honors Papers

Millennial Culture and Epistemology takes a mixed methods approach to understanding the culture and epistemological processes of the current cohort of millennial undergraduate students at a small residential liberal arts college. The study first identifies specific trends in epistemological frameworks, ethics, and claimed spiritual/religious identities among a sample of undergraduate students and finds that students are commonly utilizing subjectivist epistemological frameworks that are built around cultural relativism and skepticism. The study then unpacks markers of undergraduate millennial culture as they relate to epistemology and finds that students’ stances on issues of community, social ethics and responsibility, religion, and spirituality are …

Zhuang Zi And The Education Of The Emotions, Jeffrey Morgan

Comparative Philosophy

This paper examines and defends a conception of the education of emotions found in the Zhuang-Zi. I begin by exploring four principal features of Zhuang Zi’s philosophy as it relates to the emotions: his epistemological perspectivism, his view of the self, his ethics of wandering and natural spontaneity, and his playful non-seriousness. Together these four features allow us to discern a general orientation to the education of the emotions, including a normative account of a good emotional life as well some suggestions for a pedagogy for the development of such a life.

Now You See Me: A Black Feminist Autoethnographic Poetic Polemic Of Radical Reflexivity And Critical Arts-Based Inquiry, Myntha Anthym

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an autoethnographic poetic illness narrative based on the author's year-long ordeal with unrelenting undertreated chronic pain. The project is grounded in the epistemological tradition of Black Feminist Thought and presented in alignment with the emergent methodological paradigm of critical arts-based inquiry. The purpose of the project is for the author to develop and articulate a radical reflexive praxis within the paradigm of critical arts-based inquiry while demonstrating the value of lived experience as a source of knowledge and poetry as a method of inquiry in revealing subjugated truths about the experiences of marginalized people. The dissertation lives …

Language, Literacy, And Conscientização In American Public Schools, Julie Ward

Theses and Dissertations

Language, Literacy, and Conscientização in American Public Schools synthesizes poststructural language theory to critique literacy teaching and assessment norms in American public schools in order to theorize a pedagogy of racial and economic justice that embraces globalization and immigration. Chapter I creates a theoretical framework for language that rests firmly on both Lev Vygotsky’s and Jacques Lacan’s sociohistorical approach to language acquisition and language use. Mikhail Bakhtin’s work demonstrates the heteroglossic nature of discourse, while Antonio Gramsci politicizes this framework through an understanding of hegemony. Chapter II sketches ethnographic research on teaching practices of various American communities, focusing on ideology …

Arts-Based Education For Enchanting, Embodied And Embedded Sustainability, Hans Dieleman

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article sketches two contrasting ideal-typical narratives of sustainability, a disenchanting and an enchanting one, and argues that current thinking in sustainability is mainly situated in the narrative of disenchantment. This narrative is based on various obsolete philosophical assumptions, and hampers the transformation process, as it distances the population from being part of this. It then sketches the narrative of enchanting sustainability and shows how this has the capacity to engage, intrigue and motivate people to be involved. It is rooted in an arts-based approach of connecting aesthetics, associative thinking, reflective practice, emotion-based working, aspiration and intentionality. The article moves …

Walking As Ontological Shifter: Thoughts In The Key Of Life, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the …

On Craft, William Lentjes

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Craft is a relationship - a dialogue - between craftsman, tool, and material. Craft begins with the intent of all of these loci, and all of these loci are rooted in Being.

Being is known through the consciousness, awareness, and perception of a subject. Being is the inherent existence and totality of "what is."

Being crafts us; Craft imbues Being.

This thesis re-examines the pedagogical approach of an architectural education. The focus is placed on craft through presuppositionless phenomenology.

In an age of endless mechanized production and spiritless materialism, the practice of craft can teach us to return to the …

Epistemology Shock: English Professors Confront Science, Ian Barnard, Jan Osborn

English Faculty Articles and Research

This article raises questions and concerns regarding students from the sciences working with faculty in the humanities in interdisciplinary settings. It explores the experience of two English professors facing the privileging of "facts" and a science-based understanding of the world in their own classrooms. It poses both questions and pedagogical possibilities for addressing conflicts around epistemologies, scholarship, and teaching and learning.

Refreshment For The Soul: A Phenomenological Study Of The Student Experience Of Beauty In School, Paul Reiff

Dissertations

Prompted by the ratio-scientific emphasis in the curriculum, I conducted this study to explore the lifeworlds of students to understand their lived experience of beauty in school. This investigation entailed a phenomenological study, the method of which included in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with four high school students. This study aimed to examine the essence of beauty in the lived experience of students in school, to explore the perceptions of students regarding school as a place to appreciate beauty, and to understand the needs of students as a place that develops their aesthetic sensibilities. The findings include the description …

Service And Learning For Whom? Toward A Critical Decolonizing Bicultural Service Learning Pedagogy, Kortney Hernandez

LMU Theses and Dissertations

The notion of service has enjoyed historical longevity—rooted deeply within our institutions (i.e., churches, schools, government, military, etc.), reminiscent of indentured servitude, and rarely questioned as a colonizing practice that upholds oppression. Given the relentless insertion of service learning programs into working class communities, the sacrosanctity awarded and commonsensically given to service is challenged and understood within its colonial, historical, philosophical, economic, and ideological machinations. This political confrontation of service learning practices serves to: (a) critique the dominant epistemologies that reproduce social inequalities within the context of service learning theory and practice; and (b) move toward the formulation of a …

Wabi-Sabi Mathematics, Jean-Francois Maheux

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Mathematics and aesthetics have a long history in common. In this relation however, the aesthetic dimension of mathematics largely refers to concepts such as purity, absoluteness, symmetry, and so on. In stark contrast to such a nexus of ideas, the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi values imperfections, temporality, incompleteness, earthly crudeness, and even contradiction. In this paper, I discuss the possibilities of “wabi-sabi mathematics” by showing (1) how wabi-sabi mathematics is conceivable; (2) how wabi-sabi mathematics is observable; and (3) why we should bother about wabi-sabi mathematics

Is Intellectual Character Growth A Realistic Educational Aim?, Jason Baehr

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Giving A Voice To The Powerless: Participatory Monitoring & Evaluation As A Tool For Inclusive Development Through Microfinance, Evan T. Burke

Capstone Collection

The greatest experts on the situation of the marginalized peoples of the world are the marginalized communities themselves. This paper explores how participatory monitoring & evaluation can be a powerful tool for giving voices to marginalized communities, ensuring that the voices of beneficiaries and local stakeholders are heard and inform sustainable project design. It analyzes a participatory monitoring and evaluation methodology implemented for women’s credit cooperatives in Gujarat, India by the Human Development & Research Centre, and examines lessons to be learned to design evaluations facilitating inclusive development.

Strategies for the monitoring and evaluation of microfinance have evolved along with …

Mathematical Models Of Games Of Chance: Epistemological Taxonomy And Potential In Problem-Gambling Research, Catalin Barboianu

UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal

Games of chance are developed in their physical consumer-ready form on the basis of mathematical models, which stand as the premises of their existence and represent their physical processes. There is a prevalence of statistical and probabilistic models in the interest of all parties involved in the study of gambling – researchers, game producers and operators, and players – while functional models are of interest more to math-inclined players than problem-gambling researchers. In this paper I present a structural analysis of the knowledge attached to mathematical models of games of chance and the act of mathematical modeling, arguing that such …

Esquisse D’Un Projet Épistémologique Pour La Science Politique Dans Une Afrique Post-Génocide, Mame-Penda Ba

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article attempts to answer two main questions: “What does it mean to teach political science in an African university when oneself is African?” and “what social realities are we documenting (or should we document)?” As a political scientist, I came to ask myself these questions based on my encounter with the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, and based on the questions that this major event had kindled in me. My encounter with the subject of “genocide” was in all respects an upheaval because I understood suddenly a large weakness in the way political science was taught at Université …

Disciplinarity And Trandisciplinarity In The Study Of Knowledge, Jay H. Bernstein

Publications and Research

Scholarly inquiry about the nature and significance of knowledge has been shaped by disciplinary traditions and priorities that define “knowledge” differently and result in disconnected literatures. In the mid to late twentieth century, library science educator Jesse Shera sought to bridge the conceptual gap between epistemological and sociological approaches to knowledge in proposing a new discipline he called social epistemology. Around the same time, long-term projects by the economist Fritz Machlup and the physical chemist turned philosopher of science Michael Polanyi did not merely combine existing disciplinary approaches but transcended conventional frameworks for conceptualizing knowledge. These scholars can be viewed …

Developing Sustainable Strategies: Foundations, Method, And Pedagogy, Scott Kelley

Mission and Ministry Publications

While the United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) is a very positive development in the horizon of management education over the last decade, there are still many significant challenges for engaging the mind of the manager in ways that will foster the values of PRME and the UN Global Compact. Responsible management education must address three foundational challenges in business education if it is to actualize the aspirations of PRME: 1) it must confront the cognitional myth that knowing is like looking, 2) it must move beyond mere analysis to systems thinking, and 3) it must transition from …

(2014) Dialogic Schooling, David K. Kennedy

Collected Papers of David Kennedy

This paper offers a genealogy of dialogic education, tracing its origins in Romantic epistemology and corresponding philosophy of childhood, and identifying it as a counterpoint to the purposes and assumptions of universal, compulsory, state-imposed and regulated schooling. Dialogic education has historically worked against the grain of standardized mass education, not only in its view of the nature, capacities and potentialities of children (and therefore of adults as well), but in its economic, political and social views, for which childhood is understood as a promissory condition. Dialogic education is oriented to what Dewey called “a future new society of changed purposes …

Knowledge Studies, Jay Bernstein

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Intellectual And Curricular Spaces Of Knowledge Studies, Jay H. Bernstein

Publications and Research

The words “knowledge” and “information” are sometimes used interchangeably, but the connection between them is complex and problematic. Knowledge is a mental product gained from engaging with information. All educational subjects, scholarly disciplines, occupations, and activities produce knowledge as well as information. Because libraries encompass potentially all subjects, professional vision in librarianship would benefit from an examination of knowledge that transcends the methods and topical concerns of individual disciplines. An interdisciplinary (or transdisciplinary) framework in which to view knowledge was pioneered in the post-Sputnik age by Fritz Machlup and Michael Polanyi. Their insights have stimulated scholars to develop research, publications, …

Sites Of Passage: Art As Action In Egypt And The Us-- Creating An Autoethnography Through Performance Writing, Revolution, And Social Practice, Tavia La Follette

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

As a performance artist and arts activist I present my research project to the audience in performative writing, a postmodern research style that advocates the integration of the artist/researcher identity. In the summer of 2010, I left for Egypt to teach a performance and installation art workshop at Artist Residency Egypt, the first step of the Firefly Tunnels Project, a virtual and tangible exchange between artists in the United States and Egypt. This venture began with the awareness that the 10th anniversary of 9/11 was approaching. What I could not have foreseen were the other world events that would have …