Time of a Thesis: Academic Marginalia; Or Postcards from the Road

Postcards share with others the highlights of holidays, memories of places and events, and brief stories of experiences abroad. They hold the quick jottings to a friend back home, made while in a moment of rest and reflection on a train, at the beach, in a café. They are intimate artifacts, yet they are also public. Their text is available for anyone to read, exposed and vulnerable outside of the safety of a sealed envelope. The postcardreveals itself to all who choose to turn their gaze toward it, to read its signs, and meditate on its meanings. The following postcards written to “R,” to the reader—and in parallel dialogy with another text addressed to “S”—are a narrative invitation to travel on a reflective journey through academia, tracing the experiences of graduate studies in science education and curriculum studies, the external and internal barriers that bounded the navigation of the field, and the cartography of decisions that opened up possibilities for successes at the margins of the academy

The twilight of the Liberal Social Contract? On the Reception of Rawlsian Political Liberalism

This chapter discusses the Rawlsian project of public reason, or public justification-based 'political' liberalism, and its reception. After a brief philosophical rather than philological reconstruction of the project, the chapter revolves around a distinction between idealist and realist responses to it. Focusing on political liberalism’s critical reception illuminates an overarching question: was Rawls’s revival of a contractualist approach to liberal legitimacy a fruitful move for liberalism and/or the social contract tradition? The last section contains a largely negative answer to that question. Nonetheless the chapter's conclusion shows that the research programme of political liberalism provided and continues to provide illuminating insights into the limitations of liberal contractualism, especially under conditions of persistent and radical diversity. The programme is, however, less receptive to challenges to do with the relative decline of the power of modern states

Constitutivism

A brief explanation and overview of constitutivism

Philosophy of action

The philosophical study of human action begins with Plato and Aristotle. Their influence in late antiquity and the Middle Ages yielded sophisticated theories of action and motivation, notably in the works of Augustine and Aquinas.1 But the ideas that were dominant in 1945 have their roots in the early modern period, when advances in physics and mathematics reshaped philosophy

Authority, Autonomy and Automation: The Irreducibility of Pedagogy to Information Transactions

"This paper draws attention to the tendency of a range of technologies to reduce pedagogical interactions to a series of datafied transactions of information. This is problematic because such transactions are always by definition reducible to finite possibilities. As the ability to gather and analyse data becomes increasingly fine-grained, the threat that these datafied approaches over-determine the pedagogical space increases. Drawing on the work of Hegel, as interpreted by 20th century French radical philosopher Alexandre Kojève, this paper develops a model of relational pedagogy which highlights three points of incompatibility with a datafied learning environment reduced to finite measures. Firstly: Kojève’s accont of authority in Hegel posits two aspects to the mimetic relation between teacher and student: recognition and realisation, which belong to the ipseity or about-self-ness of the subject, and are incompatible with a general definition of data. Secondly, the Hegelian approach to human historical time, in particular the assertion that time and desire are begun in the future, not the past, renders it incompatible with mathematical time as used in data processing. Finally, from these it is possible to derive a distinctive notion of the work of pedagogy, grounded in Kojève’s realist reading of Hegel, irreducible to information processing. In consequence of this threefold irreducibility, the paper draws attention to a need for relations of human pedagogical work to be inherent in the design of educational technologies and highlights the dangers of presuming a machine intelligence model in the design of learning environments.

Objectivity, Subjectivity, and Relativism: The Case for Qualitative Methodologies in Educational Research

In recent decades, the innovative approaches of qualitative modes of inquiry advocating the use of naturalistic and/or critical ethnographic techniques for the narratologically driven study of phenomena in pedagogical contexts have succeeded in beckoning for a reexamination of traditional views of research methodologies based upon the foundationalism of empiricist science within the dominant paradigm of quantitative forms of analysis. Reframing the discourse of the debate around the key issue of objectivity, and by implication subjectivity and relativism also, this essay addresses epistemological questions about the nature of ontology, theoretical questions concerning the knowledge of sense perception(s), and methodological questions regarding the scientific truth-effect of procedure(s) integral to arguments for and against the use of qualitative forms of analysis as a viable and effective means for conducting educational research

DECONSTRUCTION AND THE DEATHS OF PHILOSOPHY: OF METAPHYSICS AND MOURNING FOR THE ARCHIVE

Through a reading of Derrida, the author addresses questions concerning the "right" of philosophy's birth and death, and the ethics of its body of teaching. Taking into account Derrida's destruction of logocentrism, if any reaffirmation of "philosophy" as the interpretational moment of a disciplinary line of inquiry is to occur, it can only be through a responsible questioning of what is said and left unsaid in the Western tradition of metaphysics. How can deconstruction help us to untangle, demystify, transgress the limits and limitations of the aporia of the death of philosophy and resolve the question of its question, and of its right, its institution, as well as who has the right and responsibility to respond to it?À travers une lecture de Derrida, l’auteur pose les questions du « droit » de la naissance et de la mort de la philosophie ainsi que de l’éthique de ses enseignements. Prenant pour appui la destruction derridéenne du logocentrisme, si reste possible une réaffirmation de la « philosophie » comme moment d’interprétation d’une entreprise de recherche disciplinaire, cela n’est possible que par un questionnement responsable de ce qui est affirmé et tenu silencieux dans la tradition occidentale de la métaphysique. Comment la déconstruction peut-elle nous aider à dénouer, à démystifier, à transgresser les limites et les limitations de l’aporie de la mort de la philosophie et à résoudre la question de sa question, de son droit, de son institution, de même que de trouver qui a le droit et la responsabilité d’y répondre 

Explorations in the semiotics of text : a method for the semiotic analysis of the picture book

The premise for the study is based upon the observations of Lewis (1990), Kiefer (1988) and Landes (1987) who identify the bifurcate nature of the picture book form to be its most unique characteristic and express the need for a structural analysis of the textual dimensions of representative works within the genre. This study, therefore, addresses how textual form of the picture book works, both lexically and visually, as a system of signs and codes to create meaning. Dependent upon two systems of signification, lexical and visual, the picture book possesses "high semantic or semiotic capacity" (Landes, 1987, p. 30). In order to understand how the bifurcate nature of textual form in the picture book functions to convey meaning in the presence of a reading/viewing consciousness, the epistemological, theoretical and methodological principles of semiotics (after Eco, 1976; 1979; Greimas, 1983; Barthes, 1964; Saint-Martin, 1987 and others) are utilized within the context of the study to develop a method for the semiotic analysis of the picture book which is identified, defined and applied in the study to representative works within the genre. The findings of the study demonstrate in semiotic terms how the formal dimensions of text in the picture book work to guide the reader/viewer through the circumstances of its lexical and visual production, or structure, from the recognition of elements and levels below the sign (e.g., semes or coloremes) (Greimas, 1983; Saint-Martin, 1987) to elements and levels above the sign (e.g., possible worlds or fabula) (Eco, 1979). Meaning-making is shown to be dependent upon the reader/viewer's ability to actualize intensionally and extensionally motivated responses (cognitive, affective and aesthetic) according to individualized systems of conceptual apparati based upon real world experience(s).Education, Faculty ofLanguage and Literacy Education (LLED), Department ofGraduat