The epistemological complexity of ideal care: long-term care professionals’ perspectives

The article elaborates what aspects of knowledge eldercare workers describe concerning everyday long-term care practices. The article utilises a thematic analysis of Finnish long-term care workers’ semi-structured interviews (n = 25), and in doing so, it contributes to the discussion concerning the epistemological basis of care. The analysis specifies four aspects of knowledge in long-term care work: objective/objectifying, particular, corporeal and tacit. In line with existing literature on knowledge and care, the findings indicate that rational-technical epistemological approaches are insufficient when complex and fluid care relations are concerned. Moreover, cognitive impairments and other particularities of eldercare provide previously under-researched epistemological perspectives for consideration.

Conceptual Fields and Magnetic Field: a theoretical model for epistemological classification of tasks in magnetostatics

This work presents a theoretical model for epistemological classification of tasks in magnetostatics aimed at High School and Higher Education. The approach is based on the theory of conceptual fields and includes classification in terms of thought operations necessary to solve the tasks and in these situations’ parameters. Four primary classes of situations are proposed, namely, description of magnetic interactions, analogic symbolization of magnetic fields, non-analogic symbolization of magnetic fields and calculation of magnetic fields. These classes cannot be reduced one to another, however they can occur simultaneously in the same task. Each one was subdivided in secondary classes of situations based on parameters they can assume and ordered by epistemological complexity. As contributions for physics teaching research this work offers a theoretical-methodological model for analyzing students’ progression in the conceptual field of magnetostatics, a conceptual structure for building situations based on predicative and operational competences for understanding the concept of magnetic field, and a practical example of epistemological classification of situations that can be adapted for other areas of Science like Quantum Mechanics, for example.

Wolfgang Welsch’s concept of transculturality: towards a transversal paradigm of social pedagogy

The article is an attempt to answer the following questions: how, in the context of Wolfgang Welsch’s concept of transculturality (1998a,b,c,d;2004), together with its transformations towards transversality, a new interpretation of the categories of interculturalism and multiculturalism is possible? This proposal helps to find justifications for Helena Radlinska’s thesis that social pedagogy is at the crossroads of sciences and also allows us to think about the epistemological consequences of this view. As a result of the analysis of the values of the concept of transculturality/tranversality, the assumption was formulated that it can be a reference for constructing a transversal paradigm of social pedagogy and a basis for its ontological framework. As a result of adopting such a view, a transversal paradigm of social pedagogy was proposed, which is formed by three frameworks: ontological – transversal reason, methodological – long duration plus breaks and discontinuities, and epistemological – complexity of processes and phenomena occurring in the field of practice.

A rural gentrification theory debate for the Global South?

Phillips and Smith’s attempt to refresh (rural) gentrification theory is successful as they provide a prolific set of epistemological comparative threads and substantiate this position via analysis of the UK, France and the US cases. Nevertheless, in my opinion, academia should go beyond the Western European/North American comfort zone and embrace theoretical and epistemological complexity, the currently extended and variegated planetary space presents.

Matter Unmoored: Trash, Archaeological Consciousness and American Culture and Fiction in the 1980s

This article considers the cultural significance of the garbage panics of the 1980s, including the voyage of the infamous Mobro 4000 “garbage barge.” The article argues that the trash at the centre of these panics is important to our understanding of both the 1980s and the present because it demanded – and still demands – that Americans see and understand it as a class of matter unmoored from temporal as well as spatial boundaries. The alarming durability of the supposedly ephemeral refuse of a culture of mass consumption invoked an “archaeological consciousness” prone to muse upon the longevity of material remains. This consciousness was expressed in various cultural and discursive arenas throughout the 1980s, revealing that durable detritus was not just a pressing public policy issue but a marker of cultural anxieties emerging out of the operations of archaeological consciousness. From concerns about contingency of the mass-consuming culture of the late twentieth-century United States to reflections on trash's own epistemological complexity, trash spoke in unexpected ways throughout the 1980s, raising important questions about the relationship between producers of culture and their audience, whose receptiveness to the urgencies of archaeological consciousness suffers from a frustrating transience as far as trash is concerned.

Educación y comunicación para el cambio climatico. Un punto de vista critico de los obstaculos y resistencias

- Climate change has become a recurring issue not only in media, but also in common citizens' daily life. Several phenomena - shortage and consequent high cost of food, increased vulnerability of coastal areas, desertification, etc - are ascribed to its effects. The public and political interest around climate change has reinforced the importance of environment in the national and international agenda after the silence followed to the Rio '92 Conference. Climate change presents extreme epistemological complexity because it condenses the multiple contents that scientific disciplines use to keep separated. It also calls for a new definition of environmental literacy: not a simple acquisition of information about the environment, but a process lean on a political and ethical substratum, and on a critical social practice, referring to the idea of citizenship.

The shaping of rationality in science and religion

In this paper the focus is on the extreme epistemological complexity of the relationship between religion and science as two dominant forces in our culture today. This complexity is aggravated by a seemingly conflictual postrnodern, pluralist challenge to a culture that already reveals itself as decidedly empirically-minded. For theology and science a meaningful dialogue becomes possible only if both modes of reflection are willing to move away from overblown foundationalist epistemologies and, for theology at least, from the intellectual coma of fideism. The paper finally argues for a postfoundationalist epistemology where theo-logy and science, although very different modes of reflection, do share the richness of the resources of human rationality. In so doing it attempts to answer three crucial questions: i) are there good reasons for still seeing the natural sciences as our clearest available example of rationality at work? ii) If so, does the rationality of theological reflec-tion in any way overlap with scientific rationality? iii) Even if there are impressive overlaps between these two modes of rationality, how would the rationality of science and the rationality of religious reflection differ?