'Midwife for Power': Towards a Mujerista / Womanist Model of Community Organizing

In recent years, communities have responded to police violence in U.S. cities through confrontational models of community organising that evolved from patriarchal and male approaches. Very often, these approaches have not produced the hoped-for outcomes. In this article, I argue that a women-led community organising model, grounded in feminine relational power-with epistemologies, can lead to innovative policy changes, including in contexts of intractable problems, such as police misconduct. This article presents the Midwife for Power community organising model, which creates space for women organisers to nurture solidarity and creativity across all lines of difference, centres personal testimony and uses collective inquiry to create relational power to address injustice. Theoretically, this model draws on the rich insights of Black and Latina organisers and scholars, as well as traditions of intersectional solidarity. In order to illustrate the model, this article presents an empirical case study of a successful police accountability campaign.

The Method of Bifurcatory Division in Plato’s Sophist

The strange and challenging stretch of dialectic with which Plato’s Sophist begins and ends has confused and frustrated readers for generations, and despite receiving a fair amount of attention, there is no consensus regarding even basic issues concerning this method. Here I offer a new account of bifurcatory division as neither joke nor naïve method, but instead a valuable, propaedeutic method that Plato offers to us readers as a means of embarking upon the kind of mental gymnastics that will stretch us properly in preparation for further, more challenging dialectical work. Considering several interpretive issues, I argue that bifurcatory division is a process of collective inquiry into the common through which an account, both definitional and taxonomical, is discovered. Depending on the level of understanding exhibited by the inquirers, this account may or may not allow for noetic understanding of the object in the deepest sense.

Intimacy as Inquiry: Collaborative Reading and Writing With Deleuze and Guattari

This article performs the becoming intimacy of a reading (and, later, writing) group who met once a month for 2 years to discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Through this collaborative piece, we explore the question of intimacy as both a form of activism and a mode of inquiry. We ask, “Where is activism as we subvert the hierarchy of academia by meeting as an assemblage of differing perspectives and positions in the university?” Furthermore, we ask, “What does the intimacy that occurred, that is occurring, do for both inquiry and activism?.” This article contains two sets of writing from our monthly meetings that we offered as performative conference texts. We contend that it is affect that brings our theorizing to life, and transfers it meaningfully between each other. We are affected by Deleuze and Guattari, by A Thousand Plateaus, and by how we form linkages with our lives to these bodies. Intimacy is what sustains and gives life to our collective inquiry, without which our affect might be more constrained. The complexity of the becoming of “intimacy as inquiry” becomes twofold, as it is not only a becoming of intimacy, love, and care for those in our assemblage but also a reterritorialization of the act of inquiry. Through the act of disrupting power structures in the group of “We 5,” the act of writing and presenting this work in an academic context pushes against the striated spaces that exist in the academy, that course through the milieu we occupy, and provides the means and necessity for reterritorializing the epistemic space. “Epistemic intimacy,” then, becomes a manifestation of engaging with the inquiry process and embodies an active resistance to the business transaction that the act of inquiry has become in the neoliberal development of the academy.

Scientific conclusions need not be accurate, justified, or believed by their authors

We argue that the main results of scientific papers may appropriately be published even if they are false, unjustified, and not believed to be true or justified by their author. To defend this claim we draw upon the literature studying the norms of assertion, and consider how they would apply if one attempted to hold claims made in scientific papers to their strictures, as assertions and discovery claims in scientific papers seem naturally analogous. We first use a case study of William H. Bragg’s early twentieth century work in physics to demonstrate that successful science has in fact violated these norms. We then argue that features of the social epistemic arrangement of science which are necessary for its long run success require that we do not hold claims of scientific results to their standards. We end by making a suggestion about the norms that it would be appropriate to hold scientific claims to, along with an explanation of why the social epistemology of science—considered as an instance of collective inquiry—would require such apparently lax norms for claims to be put forward.

An Analysis on the Implementation of Professional Learning Communities in Malaysian Secondary Schools

The main objective of the study was to examine the implementation of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) in Malaysian secondary schools. The study was conducted by using quantitative method whereby a total of 971 principals, senior assistants and teachers were involved in the survey. The descriptive statistical analysis was employed to obtain scores and means whereas the t-test and ANOVA were adopted to test the significance of the concerned variables. The result revealed that, i) the schools were rated as Quite Good in practising PLCs; ii) comparing the two dimensions of PLCs, Organizational Factor achieved a higher mean score than Non-organizational Factor; iii) among all the sub-dimensions, Principals’ Commitment and Support achieved the highest whereas External Support System achieved the lowest mean score. The study summarized that although contextual factors such as decentralized school system, the policy environment and teachers’ workload are potential factors that might impact the development of PLCs, the incompetence of the teachers in practising Collaborative Learning, Collective Inquiry and Reflective Dialogue would significantly hinder their professional practices in PLCs. The study offers an analysis in exploring PLCs towards sustained school improvement and may help move the current available literature to a more coherent, theoretical perspective for practical engagement. Keywords: Collective inquiry, External support system, Principals’ commitment and support, Professional learning communities, Reflective dialogue

Fa’afaletui: A Pacific Research Framework

While typically North American and Anglo-European stances have dominated discussion on different paradigms advanced about mixed method research, recently there has been a call for examination of other cultural worldviews. This article contributes to the field of mixed methods research by presenting a worldview based on collective inquiry, whereby different perspectives are woven together to create new knowledge. Fa’afaletui, a Samoan research framework, literally means “‘ways of’ [fa’a] ‘weaving together’ [tui] deliberations of different groups or ‘houses’ [fale].” It is derived from the Pacific philosophy of connectiveness and a collective holistic approach. We give a case example of how this framework is directing our research.

Unwrapping the Shrink Wrap

This chapter describes a team of teachers and university instructors' investigation of teacher-led instructional improvements in elementary classroom writing instruction through peer observation and collective dialogue examining everyday teaching practices. Established tools and processes in place such as district curriculum, the Units of Study, and tools of observation and collaboration, specifically Learning Labs (www.pebc.org) protocol and professional learning communities, supported a naturalistic inquiry of practice. Teacher leadership, like writing instruction, is a process, and these educators identified co-constructed observation as a tool for sustaining joy, an under researched element of teacher leadership and professional development. Additionally, collaborative debriefing fostered professional growth, and collective inquiry provided inroads to autonomy in curricular decision making. The team sought to lead from within to develop understanding of and improvements in writing instruction.

¿La innovación social como método de investigación participativo y sociopráctico?

La innovación social se ha constituido en uno de los ámbitos de estudio más activos no sólo en el campo de investigación sobre la innovación, sino de las ciencias sociales en general. Desafortunadamente, ese interés no ha conducido al desarrollo de una teoría de la innovación social. En la actualidad es posible identificar un intenso debate teórico en torno a tres áreas de interés fundamentales: la formulación de definiciones y conceptos sobre qué es la innovación social, la identificación de las etapas a partir de las cuales discurren los procesos de innovación social y, por último, el intento de elaborar modelos integradores sobre dichos fenómenos. Se pueden constatar diferentes esfuerzos de articulación de estos elementos focales. Uno nuevo que se abre es la reflexión sobre el carácter praxeológico de la innovación social, más allá de un conjunto de metaasunciones, elementos explicativos u objetivos de investigación. En la innovación social se reconocen significativos paralelismos con los modelos investigación participativa y de sociopraxis, de tal forma que se hace necesario elaborar la pregunta acerca de si es posible considerar la innovación social como un método propio de este tipo de metodología de indagación colectiva. El presente trabajo propone una discusión en este sentido, utilizando para ello una estrategia hermenéutica aplicada a una revisión sistemática e integrativa de la bibliografía especializada. En el desarrollo disciplinar en torno al fenómeno de la innovación social es posible identificar fundamentos epistemológicos que permiten caracterizarlo como un método propio de investigación participativa y de sociopraxis social específica para la generación de productos culturales de alto impacto social. Sin embargo, la dispersión y la debilidad conceptual y metodológica en torno a la innovación social se presentan como principal obstáculo para la consolidación de la misma como método.Social innovation has become one of the most active fields of study not only in the field of research on innovation but also in the social sciences in general. Unfortunately, that interest has not led to the development of a theory of social innovation. Currently, it is possible to identify an intense theoretical debate around three fundamental areas of interest: the formulation of definitions and concepts about what social innovation is, the identification of the stages from which social innovation processes run and, finally, the attempt to elaborate integrative models on these phenomena. Different articulation efforts of these focal elements can be verified. A new one that is opening is the reflection on the praxeological character of social innovation, beyond a set of meta-assumptions, explanatory elements or research objectives. In social innovation, significant parallels are recognized with the participatory research and sociopraxis models, in such a way that it is necessary to elaborate the question about whether it is possible to consider social innovation as a method of this type of collective inquiry methodology . The present work proposes a discussion in this sense, using a hermeneutical strategy applied to a systematic and integrative review of the specialized bibliography. In the disciplinary development around the phenomenon of social innovation, it is possible to identify epistemological foundations that allow it to be characterized as its own method of participatory research and specific social sociopraxis for the generation of cultural products with high social impact. However, the dispersion and conceptual and methodological weakness around social innovation are presented as the main obstacle to consolidating it as a method.

Knowledge and Assertion in "Gettier" Cases

Assertion is fundamental to our lives as social and cognitive beings. By asserting we share knowledge, coordinate behavior, and advance collective inquiry. Accordingly, assertion is of considerable interest to cognitive scientists, social scientists, and philosophers. This paper advances our understanding of the norm of assertion. Prior evidence suggests that knowledge is the norm of assertion, a view known as “the knowledge account.” In its strongest form, the knowledge account says that knowledge is both necessary and sufficient for assertability: you should make an assertion if and only if you know that it is true. The knowledge account has been rejected on the grounds that it conflicts with our ordinary practice of evaluating assertions. This paper reports four experiments that address an important objection of this sort, which focuses on a class of examples known as “Gettier cases.” The results undermine the objection and, in the process, provide further evidence for the knowledge account. The findings also teach some important general lessons about intuitional methodology and the curation of genres of thought experiment.