Near Co-Laborations

The contribution discusses the formation and collaboration in the VERSUS project (Versorgung und Unterstützung in Zeiten von Corona/Provisioning and support in times of Corona) as a relational epistemic practice. VERSUS formed as research project to investigate how provisioning recon-figured during the pandemic in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The researchers involved come from different yet ‘near’ scholarly backgrounds: anthropology, sociology, and political theory. Such ‘near’ interdisciplinarity poses specific challenges and frictions for a co-laborative project. In analysing our own forms of working on working together, we aim to contribute to an emergent literature that focuses on co-laboration in projects of such ‘near’ disciplines used to take their differences serious. We discuss VERSUS through the notions of a) co-laboration, working with a shared epistemic orientation (tertium) for creating knowledge for specific fields, and b) collaboration as the everyday practice of working together during the unfolding pandemic. The collaborative software Slack enabled quick and less formal interaction, yet the instant-ness of the platform created challenging situations that we then discuss as important and generative moments in the project.

Epistemic corruption and the research impact agenda

Contemporary epistemologists of education have raised concerns about the distorting effects of some of the processes and structures of contemporary academia on the epistemic practice and character of academic researchers. Such concerns have been articulated using the concept of epistemic corruption. In this article, we lend credibility to these theoretically motivated concerns using the example of the research impact agenda during the period 2012–2014. Interview data from UK and Australian academics confirm that the impact agenda system, at its inception, facilitated the development and exercise of epistemic vices. As well as vindicating theoretically motivated claims about epistemic corruption, inclusion of empirical methods and material can help us put the concept to work in ongoing critical scrutiny of evolving forms of the research impact agenda.

Teaching Grounded Theory. Analysis of an Epistemic Practice

In this paper, we look at our own teaching practice in seminars on Grounded Theory against the background of a pragmatist–interactionist perspective. We analyze situations that we have documented in the form of reflective notes focusing on central action problems of teachers and students, on their different positions for negotiation, and on strategies to “solve” and legitimize them. These problems arise in the course of teaching methodological classifications, the appropriateness of the methods, the logic of the research process, the analysis process, and analytical attitudes in the teaching process and must be worked on jointly by teachers and students. Using procedures of the Grounded Theory methodology, we conceptualize the action problems and reconstruct teaching Grounded Theory as a situational treatment of irritations as well as a negotiation and legitimation of (intersubjectively shared) meaning. Against this background, we show that teaching can be understood as a joint epistemic practice of teachers and students.

The politics of generating best practice knowledge: Epistemic practice and rendering space technical in a European Commission working group on education policy

This paper seeks to understand how best practice knowledge is constructed and maintained as a hegemonic form of policy knowledge. The paper argues that best practice is based on two claims: firstly, that best practice draws on situated practices of ‘what works’ in specific policy contexts, and secondly, that best practice uses these practices to build universal policy lessons that can be transferred across political space. How do policy actors tasked with generating best practices manage to deal with the challenge of integrating knowledge that is situated in particular places with knowledge that holds true across political space? The paper explores this question through the lens of political discourse analysis and studies the relationship between epistemic practice and the social construction of space. Drawing on observation and interview data, the paper analyses how best practices are generated by a group of education policy experts coordinated by the European Commission. Analysis demonstrates that producing best practices involves ‘rendering space technical’ whereby the complex, relational nature of political space is transformed into a series of ‘contextual variables’ from which universal policy mechanisms can be extracted. This allows for the enactment of an epistemic practice which draws clear distinctions between policy and political space rather than understanding them as co-constitutive – a dualism which is pivotal for upholding the hegemonic status of best practice. By analysing counter-hegemonic moments where the claims of best practice are called into question, the paper also considers alternatives to rendering space technical in policymaking practices.

Are Epistemic Norms Fundamentally Social Norms?

People develop and deploy epistemic norms – normative sensibilities in light of which they regulate both their individual and community epistemic practice. There is a similarity to folk's epistemic normative sensibilities – and it is by virtue of this that folk commonly can rely on each other, and even work jointly to produce systems of true beliefs – a kind of epistemic common good. Agents not only regulate their belief forming practices in light of these sensitivities, but they make clear to others that they approve or disapprove of practices as these accord with their sensibilities – they thus regulate the belief forming practices of others in an interdependent pursuit of a good – something on the order of a community stock of true beliefs. Such general observations suggest ways in which common epistemic norms function as social norms, as these are characterized by Cristina Bicchieri's (2006) discussion of various kinds of norms. I draw on this framework – together with an important elaboration in Bicchieri (2017) – as it affords an analysis of the various related ways in which normative sensibilities function in communities of interdependent agents. The framework allows one to probe how these normative sensibilities function in the various associated choice situations. I argue that epistemic norms are fundamentally social norms, and, at the same time, they also are widely shared sensibilities about state-of-the-art ways of pursuing projects of individual veritistic value. The two foundations suggest the analogy of an arch.