Sleep of Reason: critical reflections on performance arts-based research as psycho-social commentary in expressive arts therapy praxis

This arts-based case study is a critical reflection on how performance art can be used as psycho-social commentary. It is an attempt to amplify arts-based inquiry using critical understandings of diverse and inclusive meaning making in expressive arts praxis and psychology. It examines the use of performance art in the expressive arts to understand psycho-social proximity to and complicity in dehumanization and structural racism. This arts-based research exists in the intersections of culture, race, the arts, and social commentary with the goals of learning how it facilitates awareness of psycho-social justice and how current uncritical expressive arts and psychology praxis and practitioners can perpetuate structural racism and racial trauma. It asserts performance art can be utilized as a catalyst for psycho-social transformation in creative ways.     

Professional migration from the United States to Europe: Composite vignettes of black male basketball players from underserved communities

ObjectiveTo explore how the intersectional perspective of being a Black male from an underserved community shaped the professional cultural transition of American basketball players to Europe.Designand Method: The seven Black male athletes, who met the criteria of playing at least one year in a professional European basketball league and spending their formative years in an underserved community in the USA, participated in this study. Life story interviews, lasting between one and 2 h, were analysed through the principles of narrative analysis. Creative non-fiction was used to represent the findings in the form of composite vignettes using the words of the participants to create an evocative and meaningful experiential reconstruction.FindingsThe analysis uncovered three primary themes; steppingstones to becoming a professional basketball migrant; from America to Europe: a whole new world once again; and “don't bother to unpack your bags:” from ups and downs to settlement plans. Within these themes, the intersectional identity of being a Black male from a poor community underpinned the storyline.ConclusionsAll seven participants left their underserved community at some point during their teenage years, and this transition into a more affluent, White dominated society proved beneficial for the move to Europe. Further, the shared intersectional identity of being an African American male from a low socioeconomic community had critical implications for how they experienced the cultural transition to Europe, and how they were received by the host environment.     

‘Familiar friends’: Catholic mother–daughter narratives

The main theoretical and practical focus of this paper is on the Catholic mother–daughter relationship, and how connections between women shape, and are shaped in, and through this nexus. It is contended that it is imperative that we begin to understand different representations of connections among, and between women, including that of mothers and daughters, as they compose part of the changing yet continual dialect of our (religious) feminine identities. The intent is to embrace the contradictions and polarities, which are apparent in these inter-generational relations. This article is set in middle class suburban Melbourne Australia, and spans the period from the early to late twentieth century. Conversations between an Anglo-Saxon Catholic mother and daughter act as a catalyst to discuss the matrilineal pedagogical dimensions that mark female relations within social and religious discourses.     

Argument as Inquiry in a Postmodern Context

Argumentation is a form of communication, rather than an application of(formal) logic, and is used in communicative activity as a means forinquiry, although it is more typically thought of as bringing inquiry toclosure. Thus interpretation is an intrinsic and crucial aspect ofconversational (interactive) argumentation. In order to further thisunderstanding of argumentative activity, I propose a procedure forinterpretation that draws upon hermeneutic phenomenology. In response tocriticisms by argumentation theorists (and others) who understand thistradition as oriented to psychological, perceptual, or textual objects, Iargue that hermeneutic phenomenology supports methods for analysis ofpublic communicative activity. The resulting conception of thick argumentation responds to contemporary (postmodern) claims that argumentation valorizes univocity, stasis, and certainty at the expense ofthe pluralism, fluctuation, and range of epistemic results thatcharacterize discourse in the public sphere.     

The Logic Of Reliable And Efficient Inquiry

Journal of Philosophical Logic - This paper pursues a thorough-going instrumentalist, or means-ends, approach to the theory of inductive inference. I consider three epistemic aims: convergence to a...     

Social epistemology as a rhetoric of inquiry

Fuller's program of social epistemology engages a rhetoric of inquiry that can be usefully compared and contrasted with other discursive theories of knowledge, such as that of Richard Rorty. Resisting the model of conversation, Fuller strikes an activist posture and lays the groundwork for normative knowledge policy, in which persuasion and credibility play key roles. The image of investigation is one that overtly rejects the storehouse conception of knowledge and invokes the metaphors of distributive economics. Productive questions arise as to how notions of creation and distribution might guide this rhetoric.     

The rhetoric of the reasoned social scientific fact

An analysis is provided for one possible practical link between rhetorical and social scientific inquiry. That link is found in the rhetoric of the reasoned social scientific fact. Understanding this point of intersection involves grounding a rhetorical theory of how to create and to evaluate arguments (a rhetorical theory of invention and judgment) in the practical problems that confront contemporary social scientists during their efforts to construct reasoned social facts. The applicability of this invention and judgment framework to analysis of the rhetoric of social science is illustrated with reference to a controversy over the legitimacy of rules theoretic explanations of human communication processes. Implications of the practical link between rhetorical and social scientific inquiry are then drawn out.     

In Defense of Seeking Wisdom

Abstract: Steven Yates has criticized my claim that we need to bring about a revolution in the aims and methods of academic inquiry so that the aim becomes to promote wisdom rather than just acquire knowledge. Yates's main criticism is that the proposed revolution does not have a clear strategy for its implementation and is, in any case, Utopian, unrealizable, and undesirable. It is argued, here, that Yates has misconstrued what the proposed revolution amounts to; in fact it is realizable, is urgently needed, and involves exploiting the kind of strategies utilized so effectively by the philosophes of the eighteenth‐century French Enlightenment.     

Sacred and secret stories in professional knowledge landscapes: learner agency in teacher professional learning

Set in a schooling practitioner research context, this article critiques instrumental forms of teacher professional development. An account of teacher professional learning and development is provided, as an inter-relational construct, where teachers reflect on practice to inquire into their students’ learning and foster their own and others specific interests and talents in creative ways. In an Aotearoa/New Zealand context, teachers are mandated to inquire into what their students need to know and understand, the strategies required for teachers to attain these learning goals, and how effective the approach implemented is in enhancing student learning. Emerging from qualitative case study research, a teacher’s narrative account of a student-initiated critical thinking episode in a secondary science classroom is analysed to demonstrate sacred, secret and cover stories of professional knowledge landscapes. Findings highlight the importance of agentic teacher-enacted forms of practitioner inquiry that support critical and collaborative reflective practice.     

Rethinking leadership education: narrative inquiry and leadership stories

This narrative essay shares observations and insights about how instructors can use creativity, student voice, and personalized learning to create more responsive educational leadership pedagogy. Three stories, as told by a professor and two former students, explore how students’ narratives can naturally inform educational leadership preparation across international borders. We aim to demonstrate how students’ narrative experiences in education can contribute to exisiting discourse and research on effective and innovative pedagogical practice in educational leadership preparation.