Intellectual Agreements and Disagreements

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2007

As social and cultural psychologists of learning, we are persuaded of the crucial role of interaction in development and learning. But how do we experience this assumption in our own research practices and in our collaboration with colleagues? Taking as our object of study our own participation in a European Research and Development project that aimed to enhance interactive and argumentative skills in learning settings, this study shows how collaboration among project partners is not something that is to be taken for granted, but something that is elaborated and evolves in time, takes diverse forms, and is mediated by multiple tools. The psychological processes-more particularly tensions and negotiationinvolved in collaboration are developed and discussed. The study explores the processes of establishing collaboration and, through the analysis of specific zones of tensions, sheds light on the way new knowledge (on how to do research, how to communicate, how to work together) is constructed. It contributes to the understanding of the issues and conditions for the development of a community of practice.

Qualitative Inquiry, 2008

The narrative in this discussion article portrays the quest by two researchers to find their scholarly identity in their craft. The central issue in this narrative piece as design type of this inquiry is the space of knowledge craftingdistinguishing between adopted knowledge from the theories that sustain our thinking and the realities that they encounter in the research fields where knowledge grows in dynamic ecosystems that they wish to engage with and try to explicate and to understand. The central conundrum or the academic puzzle in this narrative is thus that they receive mixed messages about the interface between them, the researchers, the presented empirical world, and the theories from which they have learned. They are not sure where or when they speak in their own voices or portray their own identities. Downloaded from Potgieter, Smit / Finding Academic Voice 215 thus far, without discounting who we are in this process. Therefore, we made a methodological choice of writing up our experiences in a metaphorical style using the constructs of voice and signature.

Australian Educational Researcher, 2022

This paper is about interdisciplinary collaboration in a higher education context. The authors have investigated their own experiences of interdisciplinary collaboration through reflexive autobiographical narrative writing and co-generative dialogue. The experience of working in a project which brought together students from different parts of the university was analysed with reference to critical readings about interdisciplinary work. The authors have identified moments of boundary crossing or 'nodes of tension' through which relationships were being negotiated and knowledge was being produced. The analysis of these moments shows that interdisciplinary work is intensely relational and dialogic; it takes time and involves significant labour. The authors contend that this labour is essential to building trust and openness to what is unfamiliar, and that universities which seek to promote interdisciplinary collaboration must acknowledge the significant additional work necessary to negotiate nodes of tension.

Sustainability Science, 2021

The urgent need to address the sustainability issues of the Anthropocene requires a dialogue capable of bridging different knowledge systems, values, and interests. This dialogue is considered one of the most crucial challenges in collaborative research approaches. With this research, we seek to break with monologues in collaborative research by offering a decolonising methodological approach that combines the notion of dialogue of wisdom, communication theories and ethical principles of Andean philosophy. The methodological framework, the circle of dialogue of wisdom, is the result of an iterative action-reflection process developed in a North-South collaborative research project for territorial planning in Bolivia. Our praxis confirms the potentials offered by a listening-based dialogue for (i) dealing with knowledge-power relations in collaborative research projects, (ii) promoting mutual learning and knowledge co-creation between different knowledge systems, (iii) re-valuating local and Indigenous knowledge, and (iv) decolonising the society-science-policy dialogue.

Methodological Innovations , 2023

Scientific innovations for sustainable development often make huge promises about overcoming climate change, or promote technological innovations that have potential development implications. However, the social outcomes of such interventions are often considered superficially; thus potentially reinforcing injustices or producing unforeseen, undesirable outcomes. Increasingly, projects claim to have an interdisciplinary dimension, but processes of interdisciplinary dialogue can be difficult to maintain. This means that researchers have to be prepared to engage in potentially extensive, transformative dialogue and be willing to learn from the disciplinary knowledge of the other. This can be methodologically challenging both for natural and social scientists. This paper reports meta-research exploring the methodological processes and learning experiences of academics involved in research on the implementation of second-generation biofuel technology. Through interdisciplinary meetings, workshops, reflections and interviews we built up sustainable relationships and bridged epistemological divides. Our approach to interdisciplinary dialogue offers insights into the methodological challenges of interdisciplinary work. We used the framework of transformative learning theory to identify key aspects of the interdisciplinary process and reflected on the need for sustained and open opportunities for dialogue in order to find genuine ways to communicate across disciplines. We explicitly revealed and considered our taken-for-granted assumptions to identify what we understood by key terms and processes, including 'sustainable', 'development', 'methodology', 'truth', 'marginal land' and 'outputs'. We found these encounters created opportunities to influence the trajectory of each other's research and thinking, with the ideal of social and environmental justice prominent in all our discussions. It was through ongoing learning and dialogue that we found that the multifaceted challenges of sustainable development research can become more open, more critical and more able to reveal appropriate solutions and promote relevant ongoing scientific research. This interplay between disciplines is an innovative way to influence decision-making directly.

Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science, 2021

Inter- and transdisciplinary research arise as necessary conditions to address societal problems. These collaborations, by definition, encompass experts from distinct domains, demanding an epistemic dependence between researchers. In such cases where, additionally, epistemic asymmetry exists, this might then lead to tensions and enhance epistemic disagreements. How should scholars behave when in peer disagreement? On the one hand, in philosophical literature on epistemology of disagreement, normative accounts about how one should respond when facing an epistemic disagreement are usually built upon hypothetical scenarios that do not portray real-life disagreements in scientific settings. On the other hand, Science and Technology Studies (STS) research that deals with academic and scientific disagreement typically uses a descriptive, empirical approach. We argue that before a normative account of responses to disagreement is developed, we need to understand how academic disagreement actually takes place in real interdisciplinary scientific practice. In this chapter, we address a case of academic disagreement within an interdisciplinary research team in Brazil during their development of a framework for transdisciplinary collaboration. Data was collected with ethnographic tools, while the analytic perspective of the investigation is grounded on recent debates about research groups in social epistemology and in the epistemology of disagreement. We will show that an interplay between trust and disagreement is required for dealing with inter- and transdisciplinary research practices. We hold that shedding light into disagreements and communications between collaborators may improve the epistemic performance of collaborative research teams by refining the dynamics of inter- and transdisciplinary investigations.

2008

Despite progress in interdisciplinary research, difficulties remain. In this paper, we argue that scholars, educators, and practitioners need to critically rethink the ways in which interdisciplinary research and training are conducted. We present epistemological pluralism as an approach for conducting innovative, collaborative research and study. Epistemological pluralism recognizes that, in any given research context, there may be several valuable ways

In this short piece, we argue for a fundamental reconsideration and reorganization of knowledge production. Intellectual and cultural inequality are part and parcel of socioeconomic inequality. How can we create a better world if we are not clear about the premises behind the knowledge that we have about that world and how it is produced? We need to look carefully at what is silenced and what is said out loud; at what is obscured, hiding in plain sight, or given centre stage. Not only is the task at hand to see clearly what comes into view when these embedded assumptions are excavated. It is also to create new words, new methods, and new institutions that do not repeat the same mistakes. It is a plea to train the next generation differently, so they are prepared to chart a new path toward producing, classifying, and using knowledge in more constructive and inclusive ways.

D. Starke-Meyerring, A. Paré, N. Artemeva, M. Horne, and L. Yousoubova (Eds.), Writing in the knowledge society. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press and The WAC Clearinghouse. pp 193-214., 2011

The view that academic writing is persuasive is not news. It dates back at least as far as Aristotle and is widely accepted by academics themselves. The ways that this persuasion is achieved however is more contentious, and raises a number of important issues, not least those concerning the relationship between reality and accounts of it, the efficacy of logical induction, and the role of social communities in constructing knowledge. These are big topics which have been debated for years in epistemology and the sociology of science, and in the past decade applied linguists have entered the fray. Corpus linguist have been particularly active in emphasising the importance of rhetoric in academic persuasion, and in this paper I want to bring my own small contribution to the discussion. In particular, I want to look at what differences in disciplinary discourses tell us about the ways academic knowledge is socially constructed, and in particular to focus on interpersonal features of language. I am interested in what this tells us about writers' ideas of appropriate writer-reader relationships and how this, in turn, contributes to knowledge-making in the disciplines. Academic discourse and scientific explanation I want to begin with a few words about academic persuasion. Academic discourse is a privileged form of argument in the modern world, offering a model of rationality and detached reasoning. It is seen to depend on the demonstration of absolute truth, empirical evidence or flawless logic, representing what Lemke (1995: 178) refers to as the discourse of 'Truth'. It provides an objective description of what the natural and human world is actually like and this, in turn, serves to distinguish it from the socially contingent. We see this form of persuasion as a guarantee of reliable knowledge, and we invest it with cultural authority, free of the cynicism with which we view the partisan rhetoric of politics and commerce.