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Re: [xmca] Aristotle's PRACTICAL philosophy as providing historical perspective
Christine and all --
Important observations about the relationships among progressive modes of research praxis, dominant paradigms, and policy aims in this thread!
Doing genuinely collaborative-participatory research is really not easy for many reasons, including both the problems of including the very different cultures of academic researchers and of participants oriented to their own practice, needs, and goals AND the conflict between the nature of the system we create in such studies and the dominant paradigms of planned, controlled research.
Someone who has done a pretty good job I think on both counts is Michelle Fine at City U of NY Grad School, a former colleague whose work I much admire.
But I am rather conflicted about some of the paradigm assumptions. I don't happen to believe that there are useful general laws about social systems. They are not the kind of objects of study about which such laws are possible, primarily because what usually turns out to matter about them are more their differences rather than their similarities (as opposed to the ways in which natural science's objects are defined, so that similarities matter more than differences). Social systems are in this sense a bit more like literary texts. So there are ways of not having to start from scratch in understanding a new one, but not ways that rely on general laws of their behavior. More like check lists of things to pay attention to, and of possible or frequent kinds of connections seen before. Weak similarities, embedded in strong differences (the uniqueness, individuality, and unpredictability of real complex systems).
The methods of controlled research depend on predictability, and on the dominance of similarity over difference. They have their uses in social science and psychology, but they don't get one very far, and in particular they don't enable social engineering. Which may be a good thing! As someone like Latour might note, academic disciplines, and indeed all organized, historically long-lived institutionalized activity systems work at making things seem and sometimes even be more predictable and regular than they would be "in the wild". But when their norms are violated, when objects of study are defined in new ways, when systems under study combine things that do not normally combine, or combine them in new ways (e.g. combining researcher culture and practitioner culture), the predictability and the illusion of control and regularity quickly evaporates.
The pursuit of general laws is not a good route to the practical knowledge and wisdom needed to make our way toward a better society. We cannot afford to be misled by superficial generalizations when we are dealing with real, particular communities and their problems. We need particularist research that adds to our capacity to help out in the next particular case.
So how do you write a grant proposal, or a dissertation, or even a journal article about such studies? The dominant future-oriented genres are hardest: they expect predictability when what you're going to learn depends mainly on the aspects you can't predict and which will come as a surprise to you. The retrospective genres are easier, you can say what happened, and even what it probably means, but you can't meet the dominant expectation for broad generalizations, for universal laws, or even for findings people can count on seeing again in every new instance. What you can do is add to the checklist of phenomena, to the toolkit of methods, to our collective capacity to generate helpful hypotheses and potentially insightful theory. Theoretical models in this view are just little boats bobbing on the waves of particularity. They are not the currents that drive those waves. Research communities should aim to make good theoreticians, not general theories. Because very good research program has to create its own local theory. Good luck with yours! :-)
JAY.
Jay Lemke
Senior Research Scientist
Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
University of California - San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, California 92093-0506
Professor (Adjunct status 2009-11)
School of Education
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
Professor Emeritus
City University of New York
On May 6, 2011, at 9:17 AM, christine schweighart wrote:
>
> Dear Andy,
>
> Thanks for being so frank, it helps ! Research proposals which 'begin' having engineered access and manipulated various threads hide this really important observation. Not that this 'engineering ' is wrong necessarily, but it can be a blind spot ripe for many kinds of influences , including funding and prestige, to go through the back door in the context of agreements and publications. Things happen for the 'prestigious' in ways that they might not otherwise- of course.
> I tried to 'begin' to enter academic research practice 'officially' without doing this - probably too naively, with a notion that I would find out what the thresholds and ' advantages of belonging to a research community and its costs' were, perhaps I rather hoped to rediscover a reaffirmation of collaboration in academic research practice, which had seemed to be eroded in my teaching settings..... I remember thinking that if I failed to gain access to research in an educational context, it would still reveal something important to discuss about the nature of academic practice. I now think this might be one value which sits in the 'costs' - one that is not upheld as much as it might need to be- in many instances.
> Learning about the timing of what to propose and how to align that to personal preferences and sacrifices in morals, is as much part of the inter-generational project as writing and polishing research products ( appearing in many researcher conferences and communities). I get the feeling that the two are related (a need for frankness in relation to the process of doing and writing about research). Anyway for my part, hearing this acknowledged takes a bit of the edge out of an opaque boundary area, makes it easier to live with..
> Christine.
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