20 research outputs found

    Immersive systemic knowing : rational analysis and beyond

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    Applied systems thinking has rapidly developed through successive waves of development, and the current reigning paradigm is the revisioned approach to critical systems thinking.This research scrutinizes systemic intervention. It employs the methods of second-order science to apply some of its principles reflexively back on to the domain to discover two gaps: one between the espoused aims of systemic intervention and the adequacy of its methods, the other about its dependence on dialogic rationality. It also delves into its philosophical underpinnings to trace the reason for this gap to the ‘ghosts’ of rationalism. This is because modern Western thinking equates consciousness with intentionality. I argue that there is another well-recognised mode of consciousness, that of non-intentionality. I name these two modes as the becoming-striving and the being-abiding orientations.To address the gap, firstly, a characterisation of the systemic ontology is attempted. Three basic features are identified: mindful interconnectedness, enactive cognition and teleonomy. I also describe plausible political, epistemic and pragmatic goals for systems thinking arising from this ontology.Four methods from adjacent disciplines are examined in detail to show that these address the systemic ontology in better fashion than existing systemic approaches. These mature global contemporary approaches access knowings corresponding to the being-abiding orientation, absent in systems thinking.A suitable ontoepistemology for systemic knowing must comprise of two ontologies and epistemologies corresponding to each of the two consciousness modes: four component elements. Suitable conceptual models from other disciplines serve the purpose of these four components. Thus, a model of immersive systemic knowing is assembled, which meets the requirements of a framework for systems thinking in terms of the goals posited.A key feature of this research is the espousal of experiential knowing: not in a phenomenological sense, but in terms of a radical empiricism. It argues for the value of practical knowings that go beyond rationalistic formulation, which are always held in the margins (in the language of boundaries). Systemists must actively seek such experiential knowing to enact truly creative improvement. The only answer to the problem of knowing the world better is to know the shadow aspects of the knowledge generating system. This requires truly radical methods and an extended epistemology, all shown to be available plentifully in other practices and cultures. Testimony is provided from two field projects that were a part of these inquiries, and from practitioner accounts

    A Mixed Methods Perspective: How Integral Leaders Can Contribute to the Growth of Emerging Leaders

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    Given that organizational complexity continues to increase, leaders are looking for credible information, and a process that helps them become a better leader. Emerging leaders are faced with trying to be the best leader they can be while leading teams of people who think and act differently from them. To assist emerging leaders with their leadership, this study explores the literature and looks to highly respected and admired leaders for how they became the leader they are today. The purpose of this study was fourfold: first, to identify and describe first and second tier integral theory leaders from a sample of leader respondents from a U.S. Midwestern city; second, to describe how first and second tier integral theory leaders define leadership; third, to determine what second tier integral leaders see as leading to their becoming the leader they are today; and fourth, to identify the integral leader’s perspectives and advice that can be shared with emerging leaders. This study focused on the convergent space of three theories. The first theory is the field of adult development theory with transformational leadership, the constructive-developmental theories, and meaning making; the second is the field of integral theory with Wilber’s all quadrants, all levels (AQAL) theory, and first and second tier consciousness; and the last is the hero’s journey as described by Joseph Campbell, and the quest for truth. The (AQAL) framework was used in a mixed methods perspective to explore how people assessed as integral leaders defined leadership, developed into integral leaders, and how they can contribute to the growth of emerging leaders. This study was dual-phased: Phase 1 was a quantitative and qualitative survey completed by 624 leaders, and Phase 2 was a telephone interview with eight integral leaders. From the thematic analysis of all the data, four themes emerged: looking inward, looking outward, being a good leader and paying it forward by mentoring others. Implications for emerging leaders, leadership and change, and future research are discussed. This ETD is available in open access in OhioLink ETD, http://ohiolink.edu/Center and AURA http://aura.antioch.edu

    Ethics, Religion, and Spiritual Health

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    What does human enhancement technology (HET) and artificial intelligence (AI) have to do with religion? This book explores, specifically, the intersection of HET and AI with spiritual health, Christianity, and ethics. The exploration strengthens an emergent, robust body of publications about human enhancement ethics. What does it mean to make us “better” must also address the potential spiritual implications. Concern for spiritual health promises to make the study of religion and human enhancement ethics increasingly pressing in the public sphere. Some of the most significant possible and probable spiritual impacts of HET and AI are probed. Topics include warfare, robots, chatbots, moral bioenhancement, spiritual psychotherapy, superintelligence, ecology, fasting, and psychedelics. Two sections comprise this book: one addresses spirituality in relation to HETs and AI, and one addresses Christianity in relation to HETs and AI

    Exploring Techno-Spirituality: Design strategies for transcendent user experiences

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    This thesis presents a study of transcendent experiences (TXs) — experiences of connection with something greater than oneself — focusing on what they are, how artefacts support them, and how design can contribute to that support. People often find such experiences transformative, and artefacts do support them — but the literature rarely addresses designing artefact support for TXs. This thesis provides a step toward filling that gap. The first phase of research involved the conduct and analysis of 24 interviews with adults of diverse spiritual perspectives, using constructivist Grounded Theory methods informed by relevant literature and by studies performed earlier in the PhD programme. Analysis found that TXs proceed in three phases — creating the context, living the experience, integrating the experience — and that artefacts support two phases and people desire enhancements to all three. This TX framework supports and extends experience structures from the literature: it recognises the top-level categories as phases in a cycle where integration may alter future contexts, and it extends the structure of TX by incorporating the relationships of artefacts and of enhancement desires to the phases of these experiences. This extended structure constitutes a grounded theory of transcendent user experience (TUX). The second phase involved the design and conduct of three “Transcendhance” game workshops for enhancing transcendence, which incorporated themes from the grounded theory and aimed to elicit design ideas in an atmosphere of imagination, fun, and play. Participants sketched 69 speculative ideas for techno-spiritual artefacts, and analysis mapped them to TX phases and identified possible extensions inspired by relevant research. The great majority of ideas mapped to the phase Creating the Context, with very few mapping to Living the Experience, which suggests that context may be easier than lived experience to understand and address directly. This point is especially important for experiences such as TX that are tricky to define, impossible to arrange or anticipate, and thus unsuitable for straight-forward “classic” user experience methods. The final phase involved the elaboration of workshop ideas to explore the extension of design fiction for TUX. Analysis related design fiction to the TX phases and suggested features that affect design ideas’ potential for TUX design fiction. This phase ended with the proposal and analysis of three new forms of design fiction — extended imaginary abstracts, comparative imaginary abstracts, and design poetry — using workshop ideas to illustrate the forms, their construction and use, and their benefits to TUX design. Transcendhance workshops and TUX design fictions approach techno-spiritual design peripherally, “sneaking up” on lived experience by addressing context and enabling the consideration of ineffable experience through storytelling, metaphors, and oblique imagery. This thesis combines the grounded theory of transcendent user experience with the Transcendhance workshop process and new forms of design fiction, presenting peripheral design as a promising strategy for facilitating design to enhance transcendent experience

    Performing Meditation: Vipassana and Zen as Technologies of the Self

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    The aim of this dissertation is to reflect on technologies of the self, a term coined by Michel Foucault to study western practices of self-formation. Influenced by his work on subjectivity and by Science and Technology Studies (STS), I explore two forms of meditation – Vipassana meditation in the tradition of S. N. Goenka and Thich Nhat Hanh’s practices of mindfulness – in order to analyze the entanglements between technologies, associations and subjectivity. Two research questions guided this study. First, how do Vipassana and Zen assemblages bring forth subjective transformations? Second, what are the politics of meditation practice, considering that Vipassana and Zen perform particular paradigms of subjectivity and aim at transforming the “social”? In order to address these questions, I relied on qualitative research methods, developing a multifaceted methodology that included participant observation at four meditation retreats, semi-structured interviews with meditators, the analysis of relevant literature and my own personal experiences as a beginner. I argue that the mechanisms of subjectification employed by meditation rely on two main devices: the transformation of habitual webs of associations, including couplings between selves, other humans, nonhumans and spaces and the installation of new automatisms. Vipassana and Zen technologies invite subjects to become aware of particular automatisms – regular ways of eating, sitting, walking and breathing - and to direct their attention towards them in novel ways, installing specific ways of managing their selves (stopping and breathing whenever they hear the sounds of bells; developing an attitude of equanimity when they are looking for sensations in their bodies). Vipassana and Zen are mediators that generate new experiences and ways of being informed by meditation, as well as a number of social applications that rely on the paradigmatic changes enacted by these practices. Informed by the dualism between modern and nonmodern, I argue that Zen and Vipassana can be understood as technologies of the nonmodern self (Pickering, 3 2010), suspending the dualism between body and mind, self and others, humans and nonhumans, contributing towards the establishment of nondual paradigms of selfhood and innovative forms of social organization that include new ways of performing human reformation, social action and humanenvironment couplings. The theoretical contributions of this dissertation are threefold. First, I want to extend current STS scholarly work on the self. Second, I want to contribute towards a post-humanist understanding of meditation assemblages. Finally, I am informed by Michel Foucault’s insights on technologies of the self to study meditation, but instead of focusing on the history or genealogy of the western self, I analyze a number of devices of subjectification mobilized to operate subjective changes and to transform the social.Foundation for Science and Technology, Ministry of Education and Science, Portuga

    A Mixed Methods Perspective: How Integral Leaders Can Contribute to the Growth of Emerging Leaders

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    Given that organizational complexity continues to increase, leaders are looking for credible information, and a process that helps them become a better leader. Emerging leaders are faced with trying to be the best leader they can be while leading teams of people who think and act differently from them. To assist emerging leaders with their leadership, this study explores the literature and looks to highly respected and admired leaders for how they became the leader they are today. The purpose of this study was fourfold: first, to identify and describe first and second tier integral theory leaders from a sample of leader respondents from a U.S. Midwestern city; second, to describe how first and second tier integral theory leaders define leadership; third, to determine what second tier integral leaders see as leading to their becoming the leader they are today; and fourth, to identify the integral leader’s perspectives and advice that can be shared with emerging leaders. This study focused on the convergent space of three theories. The first theory is the field of adult development theory with transformational leadership, the constructive-developmental theories, and meaning making; the second is the field of integral theory with Wilber’s all quadrants, all levels (AQAL) theory, and first and second tier consciousness; and the last is the hero’s journey as described by Joseph Campbell, and the quest for truth. The (AQAL) framework was used in a mixed methods perspective to explore how people assessed as integral leaders defined leadership, developed into integral leaders, and how they can contribute to the growth of emerging leaders. This study was dual-phased: Phase 1 was a quantitative and qualitative survey completed by 624 leaders, and Phase 2 was a telephone interview with eight integral leaders. From the thematic analysis of all the data, four themes emerged: looking inward, looking outward, being a good leader and paying it forward by mentoring others. Implications for emerging leaders, leadership and change, and future research are discussed. This ETD is available in open access in OhioLink ETD, http://ohiolink.edu/Center and AURA http://aura.antioch.edu

    What Counts as Religious Experience? The Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences as a Tool for Analysis across Cultures

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    When operationalizing ‘religiosity’ or ‘spirituality’ or ‘religious experience’ as measurable constructs, researchers tacitly treat them as if they were cross-culturally stable ‘things’ rather than investigating the way culturally-laden concepts, such as ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual,’ are used to interpret or appraise contested aspects of human life within and across cultures. To illustrate the distinction, we contrast the traditional research design that the Religious Experience Research Centre used to survey and compare “religious experience” in the UK and China with the appraisal-based design used by the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE). Instead of operationalizing “religious experience,” the INOE distinguishes between generically-worded experiences and the way the experiences are appraised. When coupled with item level validation to ensure that queries are understood as intended, the generically-worded experiences function as common features that allow us to compare similarities and differences between culturally-embedded “lived” experiences. Separating generic experiences from appraisals allows us to (1) treat culture-bound concepts, such as ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual,’ as appraisals, and (2) view these and other concepts (e.g., dharmic, paranormal, psychotic) as advancing claims about how and why an experience occurred. In so far as we can establish the cross-cultural validity of common features, we can set up culturally-balanced (rather than Western-centric) comparisons and avoid operationalizing culture-specific concepts

    North of Here: Imagining the Human and Other-Than-Human in Late-Upper Palaeolithic Britain

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    What were the cosmogonies, mythologies, rituals and ontological beliefs of the LateUpper Palaeolithic peoples who returned to the ‘British’ peninsula when the ice sheets began to retreat, some 15,000 years ago? More specifically, can we come to understand how they conceived of place, landscape and the natural world? Those working within the field of archaeology are rightly circumspect, but artistic practitioners, I suggest, are not bound in the same way by material evidence, and can consequently venture more freely. What, therefore, can speculative creative writing say about the deep past, and how can it bridge the gulf of time between us and our ancestral selves? North of Here is a ‘Creative Geographies: Writing Place’ project in the form of a long poem; a dialogic and visionary narrative that imbricates both ancient and contemporary ways of being. Drawing on environmental science, archaeology and the anthropology of circumpolar Indigenous cultures, it explores the human and other-thanhuman in terms of shared personhood, and the values of respect and reciprocity that govern non-hierarchical ‘social universes’. In particular, it examines consent-seeking and transgression in hunting, and the role of ‘special’ animals such as the bear in cosmogonic beliefs. This thesis will document the evolution of my interest in landscape and otherthan-human studies leading up to this PhD project. It will primarily contextualise the poem itself within anthropological and mythological literature, and therefore argue that the creative writer can meaningfully engage with cross-disciplinary subject matter. Moreover, in light of the so-called ‘creative turn’ in the humanities, it will suggest ways in which creative writers can contribute to interdisciplinary knowledge exchange

    Orbs in the skyscape: An exploration of spiritual experiences with anomalous light phenomena

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    This thesis examines orbs, conventionally regarded as luminous orbital digital imaging artefacts, in their capacity to generate narratives evolving from active participatory engagement with them during the photographic process. Given the current dichotomy between the optical and paranormal explanations for orbs, with proponents of both emphasising the conventional optical explanation, academic interest is limited. In popular culture, orbs have acquired the status of indicators of ghostly presence which is commercially exploited at the cost of those individuals who report interactive experiences. For that reason, this thesis identifies these individuals as orb experiencers (OErs) and their claims to commune with orbs in their manifestations in digital imaging as conscious beings that can be interacted with. Hence, the study notes the hiatus in the academic understanding of the lived experiences of OErs, drawing comparisons with and contrasting their involvement as a living spiritual practice of building and maintaining a relationship to what they consider stemming from the divine, the sacred and Source. In that regard, the thesis explores conventional, paranormal and spiritual/esoteric viewpoints and considers them against the backdrop of religious or miraculous photographic practices involving rituals, symbolism and correspondences, in particular those found at Marian apparition sites. Departing from a phenomenological stance, it draws together the paramount importance of the visual aspect, the photographic image in this respect, and its interpretation, which implies an appropriated research methodology in answering the research questions. It results in not only bringing the photograph more prominently into the discourse, but it also warrants consideration of the positioning of the topic, which has been under-researched and neglected in academe due to its deviation from mainstream research. The study therefore seeks, through ethnographical research as praxis, to devise and apply a methodology that accommodates the topic, the orb experiencers and the researcher concerned. For that aim I shall introduce the mandorlic approach as an attitude and a working method which builds on the strong participatory and engaging research of other ethnographers of consciousness and the supernatural and those scholars in folklore and the folklore of religion and spirituality who include the possibility that humans are able to converse with otherworldly beings. Drawing from my ethnographic research, I point to the consequences of spiritual experiences with orbs and argue for a new framework that accounts for an open and scientifically rigorous approach to the study of anomalous encounters as spiritual experiences in general and offers a workable methodology that can be applied outside the field of anthropology

    Translanguaging About, With, and Through Code and Computing: Emergent Bi/multilingual Middle Schoolers Forging Computational Literacies

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    As computing pervades more aspects of life, and as Computer Science for All (CS for All) initiatives roll out across the U.S., the field must understand the experiences and language practices of emergent bi/multilingual K-12 students and use that knowledge to drive equitable pedagogical and programmatic approaches. But little is known about how emergent bi/multilingual students — a growing population that school systems have often viewed with deficit-based lenses and have thus struggled to educate equitably — use language in the context of CS education. This dissertation addresses this gap by (1) qualitatively documenting and using asset-based frames to analyze moments when emergent bilingual middle schoolers translanguaged (flexibly orchestrated linguistic, semiotic, and technological resources) as they participated in computational literacies in CS-integrated Language Arts, English-as-a-New Language, and Social Studies units co-designed by teachers and researchers working together in a research-practice partnership. It also (2) captures insights about how students understood their meaning-making choices in those moments and (3) uses findings from this empirical work to generate theory about the relationships between translanguaging and computational literacies. Findings provide evidence that emergent bi/multilingual students’ diverse language practices are assets in CS education, and enabled the forging of new meaningful computational literacies. This project lays groundwork for CS practitioners to meaningfully include emergent bi/multilingual students and for bilingual education to consider computing’s role in languaging and expression
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