24 research outputs found
A tentative return to experience in researching learning at work
This paper explores possibilities for more democratic approaches to
researching learning in and through everyday workplace practices.
This links with a concern with who is able to speak in
representations of learning at work, what is able to be spoken
about and how knowing, learning and experience are inscribed in
theories of workplace learning. I propose that Rancièreâs notion of
âthe distribution of the sensibleâ, which draws attention to an
aesthetic dimension of experience, knowledge and politics,
provides a useful way of exploring learning in and through
everyday workplace practices. The approach points to the
possibility of knowledge without hierarchies and a shift from a
knowledge â ignorance binary. An understanding of experience as
aesthetic enables accounts of learning which counter the story of
destiny in literature on learning in and through everyday practice.
It also points to a very different way of doing academic research.
The presupposition of equality is the point of departure in this
approach and the purpose of research is the verification of
equality (rather than the verification of oppression). The paper
makes a significant contribution to literature on learning in and
through everyday workplace practices by disrupting a prevailing
view that knowledge is necessarily tied to identity
Cognition-Enhancing Drugs: Can We Say No?
Normative analysis of cognition-enhancing drugs frequently weighs the liberty interests of drug users against egalitarian commitments to a level playing field. Yet those who would refuse to engage in neuroenhancement may well find their liberty to do so limited in a society where such drugs are widespread. To the extent that unvarnished emotional responses are world-disclosive, neurocosmetic practices also threaten to provide a form of faulty data to their users. This essay examines underappreciated liberty-based and epistemic rationales for regulating cognition-enhancing drugs
Salvaging and secularizing the semantic contents of religion: the limitations of Habermasâs postmetaphysical proposal
âBy ones and twos and tensâ: pedagogies of possibility for democratizing higher education
This paper concerns the relationship between teaching and political action both within and outside formal educational institutions. Its setting is the recent period following the 2010 Browne Review on the funding of higher education in England. Rather than speaking directly to debates around scholar-activism, about which much has already been written, I want to stretch the meanings of both teaching and activism to contextualise the contemporary politics of higher learning in relation to diverse histories and geographies of progressive education more generally. Taking this wider view suggests that some of the forms of knowledge which have characterised the university as a progressive institution are presently being produced in more politicised educational environments. Being receptive to these other modes of learning can not only expand scholarly thinking about how to reclaim intellectual life from the economy within universities, but stimulate the kind of imagination that we need for dreaming big about higher education as and for a practice of democratic life
Aesthetic Freedom and Democratic Ethical Life: A Hegelian Account of the Relationship between Aesthetics and Democratic Politics
This paper presents a novel Hegelian view of the relationship between aesthetics and democratic politics. My account avoids the drawbacks associated with approaches that (like Rancièreâs) reconceive all of the political in aesthetic terms or (like Rockhillâs) reduce the aesthetic to art. Instead, I maintain that the aesthetic is best understood as a distinct relationship of individual freedom. My argument proceeds by highlighting shortcomings of Honnethâs account of democratic Sittlichkeit and then addressing these impasses by integrating aesthetic freedom into the picture. The first two steps of my argument concern the fact that the form of life outlined by Honneth aspires to be a form of free life, yet his account of democratic Sittlichkeit gives rise to two dimensions of unfreedom. The first problem of unfreedom pertains to the scope of freedom. The relationships of freedom incorporated into Honnethâs account fail to turn given social roles into the subject matter of a sufficiently unrestricted practice of freedom. The second problem of freedom concerns conformism. In a final step, I complete my argument that Honnethâs account is unsatisfactory and incomplete by showing that aesthetic freedom is socially valid and thus ought to form part of our accounts of democratic ethical life
Justice Through a Multispecies Lens
The bushfires in Australia during the Summer of 2019â2020, in the midst of which we were writing this exchange, violently heightened the urgency of the task of rethinking justice through a multispecies lens for all of the authors in this exchange, and no doubt many of its readers. As I finish this introduction, still in the middle of the Australian summer, more than 10 million hectares (100,000 km2 or 24.7 million acres) of bushland have been burned and over a billion individual animals killed. This says nothing of the others who will die because their habitat and the relationships on which they depend no longer exist. People all around the world are mourning these deaths and the destruction of unique ecosystems. As humans on this planet, and specifically as political theorists facing the prospect that such devastating events will only become more frequent, the question before us is whether we can rethink what it means to be in ethical relationships with beings other than humans and what justice requires, in ways that mark these deaths as absolute wrongs that obligate us to act, and not simply as unfortunate tragedies that leave us bereft