Numbers and interpretations: What is at stake in our ways of knowing?

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanne Marecek

This article reflects on a set of target articles concerned with the use of quantitative procedures in interpretive research. The authors of those articles (Osatuke & Stiles; Westerman; and Yanchar) discuss ways that numerical procedures can be brought into interpretive studies, using illustrations from research programs on psychotherapy process, schools, law courts, and work life. Instead of the usual quantitative—qualitative distinction, I use Geertz’s distinction between experimental science and interpretive science and Kidder and Fine’s distinction between Big-Q and small-q research to reflect on several procedural and epistemological differences among target papers. The diversity of approaches under the umbrella of qualitative methods is described, along with some recent developments. Even though US psychology continues to mount stiff resistance against incorporating interpretive approaches into its knowledge-producing practices, such approaches are flowering in other parts of the world.

Geography ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke Dickens ◽  
Iain Hay

Alongside the incorporation of moral and ethical philosophy into geographical thought (see our linked Oxford Bibliographies article Geography and Ethics), there runs a parallel and equally important set of debates focused on how geographers might enact and inhabit ethical practices through their work. These concerns have had a major influence on the development of geographical research methodologies, while opening up significant new terrain for ethical reflection about the conditions under which geographical knowledges and subjectivities are produced, and the intellectual and material spaces through which they circulate. Foundational in this regard has been the considerable influence that Feminist Ethics have had on showing that ways of knowing the world are necessarily produced through differently situated and embodied positions in the world. Resonating across subsequent developments, including significant steps toward a long-overdue reckoning with colonial and imperial power structures, these strands of Ethics in Emerging Geographies have advanced understanding of the intersecting forms of social difference that shape our ethics, politics, and pursuit of justice, as well as the motivations, perspectives, and experiences that inform notions about what it might mean to be a critical geographer in the contemporary academy. Recent developments also include challenging established distinctions between “researcher” and “researched” through calls for participatory ethics, and contemplating how research both with and by children, Indigenous societies, or marginalized groups might recast ethical approaches and procedures. Geographers, particularly those working with notions of embodiment, emotions, and affect, have experimented with new understandings of ethics beyond traditional forms of moral philosophy and the normative. These various waves of ethical praxis have increasingly challenged, recast, and fragmented established modes of doing geography, often by asserting non-Western intellectual visions of the world and engaging with posthuman philosophies in ways that recenter perspectives from the Global South and in the context of the Anthropocene. At the same time, a whole raft of critical questioning and discussion has sought to unsettle the everyday Ethics of Geographical Practice: concerning, for example, geographical writing, publishing, and citational cultures; the conduct of teaching, learning, and education; and notions of collegiality, care, and collective endeavor. Much of this work has called into question the motivations for scholarship and the very purpose of the academy itself. Nonetheless, such important provocations seem to have resulted in a stronger sense of what really matters and what is ultimately at stake in our everyday geographical practice. We would like to thank the generous response from an anonymous reviewer, whose constructive and encouraging feedback helped finalize this bibliography.


2016 ◽  
pp. 501-504
Author(s):  
Sergey Gudoshnikov

Beet pulp remaining after the extraction of sugar from beet is a good source of highly digestible fibre and energy used for animal feeding. Beet pulp is mostly used domestically but about 15% of global dried beet pulp production is exported to the world market. Although pulp have only little value as compared to sugar, sales of it abroad help generate additional income for the sugar industry with relatively low overheads. In contrast to sugar where import markets are protected by tariffs and non-tariff barriers while export volumes can be heavily regulated by governments, these restrictions are much less extensive for beet pulp trade. This article reviews recent developments in the world trade in beet pulp. The context of the article is based on the ISO study “World Trade of Molasses and Beet Pulp” MECAS(16)06.


2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-310
Author(s):  
Sabine Wilke

Every late spring since 1951, the Wiener Festwochen bring performers from around the world to Vienna for an opportunity to share recent developments in performance styles and present them to a Viennese public that seems to be increasingly open to experimentation. These festival weeks solidify a specific form of Viennese self-understanding and self-representation as a culture that is rooted in performance. This essay seeks to link two recent Austrian performances—one of them was part of the Wiener Festwochen in 2016, the other was staged in downtown Linz during the past few years—to this Austrian and specifically Viennese culture of performance by reading them as contemporary articulations of a tradition of radical performance art that can be traced back to the Viennese Actionism of the sixties and later feminist articulations in the seventies and eighties. They play on the dramatic effect of these actions, specifically their joy in cruelty, chaos, and orgiastic intoxication, by staging regressions and thus making visible what has been dammed up and repressed in contemporary society.1 Just as their historical models, these two performances merge the performing and the fine arts and they highlight provocative, controversial, and, at times, violent content. But they do it in an interspecies context that adds an entire layer of complexity to the project of societal and cultural critique.


2020 ◽  

Ibuprofen is a long lasting non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and still represents one of the most diffused analgesics around the world. It has an interesting story started over 50 years ago. In this short comment to an already published paper, the authors try to focus some specific important point. On top, they illustrate the recent, confusing and fake assertion on the potentially dangerous influence that ibuprofen could have, increasing the risk of Coronavirus infection. This is also better illustrated in a previously published paper, where the readers could find more clear responses to eventual doubts.


RSC Advances ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (26) ◽  
pp. 15776-15804 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Gensicka-Kowalewska ◽  
Grzegorz Cholewiński ◽  
Krystyna Dzierzbicka

Many people in the world struggle with cancer or bacterial, parasitic, viral, Alzheimer's and other diseases.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-167
Author(s):  
Deb Cleland

Charting the course: The world of alternative livelihood research brings a heavy history of paternalistic colonial intervention and moralising. In particular, subsistence fishers in South East Asia are cyclical attractors of project funding to help them exit poverty and not ‘further degrade the marine ecosystem’ (Cinner et al. 2011), through leaving their boats behind and embarking on non-oceanic careers. What happens, then, when we turn an autoethnographic eye on the livelihood of the alternative livelihood researcher? What lexicons of lack and luck may we borrow from the fishers in order to ‘render articulate and more systematic those feelings of dissatisfaction’ (Young 2002) of an academic’s life’s work and our work-life? What might we learn from comparing small-scale fishers to small-scale scholars about how to successfully ‘navigate’ the casualised waters of the modern university? Does this unlikely course bring any ideas of ‘possibilities glimmering’ (Young 2002) for ‘exiting’ poverty in Academia?


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