Modernism, Postmodernism and the Nature of the Times: A Conversation with Randall Stevenson

The interview offers a comprehensive, paradigmatic overview of the experience of literary modes within the broad frameworks of modernity and postmodernity. It invites reflection and rethinking of epistemic change from a major literary historian and theorist whose work in the Anglo-American context has become synonymous with the examination of temporality, historicity, and poeticality in twentieth century experimentation with form. Revisiting central concepts and aesthetic categories in literary criticism and theory, Randall Stevenson contributes a highly contemporary, ground-breaking vision of the literary act against the backdrop of the new structures of knowledge pertaining to the digital age and the post-humanist crisis.

Representing and Reasoning with Event Models for Epistemic Planning

The standard representation formalism for multi-agent epistemic planning has one central disadvantage: When you use event models in dynamic epistemic logic (DEL) to describe the action of one agent, the model must specify not only the actual change and the change of that agent's knowledge. Also required is the epistemic change of any agents that may be observing the first agent performing the action, plus the epistemic change for any further agents that failed to observe that anything had taken place. To overcome the gap between this complex DEL notion of events and a more commonsense notion of actions, we propose a simple high-level action description language for multi-agent epistemic planning domains with just one type of effect laws: a causes x if y. Effect x can either be a physical effect, or an observation from an independent set that is specific to individual agents. We formally prove that any DEL event model can be described in this way. We show how this language provides a framework for expressing a variety of executability and action models; such as describing actions that are both ontic and epistemic, partially observable, or nondeterministic. We further combine our representation of event models with a description language for finitary initial epistemic theories, and we show how this allows us to reason about the effects of a sequence of actions in a multi-agent epistemic domain by updating a single multi-pointed epistemic model.

Pre-Service Teachers’ Reflection Logs: Pieces of Evidence of Transformative Teaching and Emancipation

With critical social design put into practice, this study described and investigated transformative teaching and emancipation pieces of evidence from 21 Music, Arts, Physical Education and Health (MAPEH) pre-service teachers. The participants’ reflection logs were analyzed, with Butin’s technical lens framework as a guide. Findings revealed that the pre-service teachers encountered challenges with the students, parents, cooperating teachers and principals, which turned out to be opportunities for pre-service teachers to exercise their decision-making skills. These participants’ springboard to transformative learning and emancipation, henceforth, were the teaching strategies, principles and learning activities they acquired from their instructors. Pre-service teachers realized they could explore epistemic change as a result of reflection and contemplation.

Autoethnographic Dance and Transformative Learning: Exploring Self-Reflexive Identity Work and Change

This retrospective case study investigated how learners in a transformative autoethnographic dance course engaged in and navigated self-reflexive identity work and corresponding learning outcomes. Data were drawn from 15 diverse undergraduate students enrolled in a course for credit at an urban community college. Findings indicated that learners used choreographic motifs to evoke emotional aspects of a biographic experience and to manage their emotional vulnerability. Learners differed in their self-disclosure, types of reflection, and degree of resolution in their dance narratives. Transformation of identity was found for one third of the class with evidence of change both from exploration of preconscious emotions and epistemic change in perspective.

Research metrics, labor markets, and epistemic change: evidence from Britain 1970-2018

In this paper, I study the effects of quantifying knowledge on the organization of disciplinary fields. Using an original dataset of about 44,000 British social scientists and bibliographic information about their published, peer-reviewed articles, I show that the introduction of standardized research evaluations disrupted local academic labor markets in British higher education, leading to patterns of interinstitutional mobility that altered the epistemic diversity of social science disciplines and the organization of their academic fields. Much like market-based interventions, research evaluations lead to a form of epistemic matching that has distinct consequences on how knowledge is generated. In particular, when evaluations affect organizational units (such as academic departments) and stress disciplinary norms, they foster forms of isomorphism that lead to reductions in a discipline’s thematic diversity and a more homogeneous structure for the field. This paper thus advances the sociology of knowledge by showing how epistemic change occurs not only through the individual realignments of quantified scholars but, as importantly, through the mediation of interinstitutional mobility.