My purpose, after finding use in John White’s distinction between two types of autonomy, is to explain how academic work, unlike much other work, needs to be seen as in its nature autonomous, insofar as academics would engage in their work authentically. This is also in the service of challenging the mechanistic world-view which dominates policy and dictates parameters for practice, characterised in, for instance, the polemics of Richard Dawkins. The basis for the challenge lies in John McDowell’s post-Kantian thesis (...) foregrounding the ‘space of reasons’ of the world. I shall present the key points of the argument succinctly and phrase questions to provoke discussion, since this session provides opportunity for participants to explore the implications of these lines of thinking for practice and policy, especially with the advent of the new Researcher Development Framework and with the now pressing question of sustaining the Development agenda post-Roberts. (shrink)

I consider the nature of research, both as a mode of learning about the world, with the focus on the object of research, and as a role for staff and students in the higher education sector, with the focus on the practice to be learned, on the pedagogy of research. The domain of research and researchers has, like other domains of higher education and like education more widely, has received a good deal of policy attention. In the UK, there has (...) been the growing “impact agenda”, an attempt to measure the worth of research projects by the social, and especially economic, benefits they would bring about. Critics of this agenda need, in order to maintain their stance, to appreciate the metaphysical importance of Kant’s noumenon, supplemented by Priest’s “torn boundary” thesis, for the object of research. The new Researcher Development Framework, being launched in 2011, will supplant the 2001 “Joint Skills Statement”. Criticisms that this “skills agenda” is too generic to be useful and not sufficiently academic in character to be appropriate for the pedagogy of research are wide of the mark. Examination of the various senses of the “tacit dimension” in Polanyi variously inform discussion of these criticisms. (shrink)

We investigate some of the ways in which higher education institutions can, and do, provide effective research and skills development for postgraduate and other novice researchers, students and staff, and also new supervisors. This workshop offers an overview of the skills and competencies that are recognised, in the context of challenges to the skills agenda in higher education. It discusses the notion for an appropriate balance between formal and informal means of developing transferable skills and the need to embed skills (...) development into developmental programmes of all sorts. Participants will consider the relevance of learning needs analysis and personal development profiling for researchers and the place of assessment in development provision, informed by a CETL funded project investigating this theme. Participants should be happy to contribute in such a way which, after anonymisation, informs the ongoing project. (shrink)

I explore issues surrounding the identity of persons arising out of a certain education-related biographical research programme. Particular research projects of the programme include in-depth biographical interviews with probing for how the interviewee would describe themselves and would describe their identity, allowing them to make their own links in the context of their whole life and the learning experiences within it. The interviews enquire about different points in the "lifecourse" of the interviewee and it is interesting to see how much (...) they want to identify themselves with their life story how much with personality traits and how much with social groupings, such as gender, ethnic or national affiliation. This Parfitian sense of identification tends to rest upon emotional and ethical significance. I use results from this qualitative empirical research to inform the philosophical conclusions about core and peripheral concepts of Self. Persons have an identity, or a collection of identities, composed of a dichotomy of social and individual aspects but such a claim, whilst true, needs elaboration if it is to be informative. A fundamental philosophical question is whether such descriptors, both individual identifiers and social categories, suffice in constituting selfhood, as would be the case in post-structuralist linguistic ontology, such as cruder versions of social constructionism. I suggest that theories of narrative identity offer much more towards explaining our concept of Self, through its power to transcend and integrate, through applying emotional and ethical significance, different facets which make up a person’s identity. It is a further philosophical question whether this is necessary or sufficient in order to have a core sense of Self. I dispute that the development of self-concept required for narrative identity is so necessary in order to have a core sense of Self, and so I take issue with Ricoeur and others to some extent. I maintain that the immediacy of self-consciousness provides a core sense of Self. This synchronic intuition underpins the transcendence of the Self, in Sartre’s terminology. Using a Sartrean metaphor, the diachronic Self of your past, of the autobiographical narrative, goes around with you as you would wear your cloak, which you may in turn take off. The Sartrean view of emotion is that it effects a “magical transformation of the world”, which explains in a narrative both the centrality of episodes of emotional significance and at the same time a self-distancing by the narrating self, a transcending of the emotion. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is chiefly one of conceptual clarification, linking with issues arising within certain current debates. I propose a typology to underpin the various applications of the “tacit” and the “non-discursive” for describing our state of knowledge as regards respectively both the practice and the object of research. The tacit/explicit dichotomy is a different one from the non-discursive/discursive one. This is key if we are to understand how the process of learning to research, as well as learning (...) most practices, occurs. The UK national research training agenda is crystallized in the 2001 document “Skills training requirements for research students: joint statement by the research councils/AHRB”. This is an attempt to lay out in generic terms the categories of skills that researchers should develop during their course of study. It is meant to be applicable to all subjects and therefore to educational and other social science and humanities newer researchers. Critics, such as Stephen Rowland, of the national policy point out that aiming to teach skills conceived generically out of context is a flawed approach. This is true but misses the point that codifications of practice inevitably fail to capture the practice in its entirety. This is for two reasons. The first is a function of the informal and non-discursive components of any practice, the particular actions of more experienced researchers which may need no discursive explanation for the novice to be able to pick them up in context, “on the job”. The point is not that this is essentially tacit knowledge, learnt unwittingly. Rather, it may or may not be explicitly recognized and considered by the learner, even in the “hot action” workplace scenario, but it is effectively non-discursive. Much of what we learn will turn into tacit knowing through the more straightforward process expounded by Michael Polanyi, in that it would become “second nature”, so we would not need to be explaining it to ourselves anymore to achieve phronesis. Polanyi allows us to see that much of what seems mysterious in what people do, because people are not inclined to say much about it, is not at the same time mystical. Immanuel Kant's concept of the noumenon, or noumenal world, by contrast is what has been always beyond our powers of cognition, a statement of our finitude, if you like, although we may make gradual incursion into it as we find out more about the world. The noumenon, tacit because ineffable, is therefore a way to conceive the nature of research generally from the point of view of its object, what it is trying to uncover. Does this framework apply to biographical research? 1) One answer says no. If the research outcome is the discursive telling of a biographical narrative of a particular person then, arguably, it is the latest arrangement of concepts that are already known to us, a life story which makes sense because familiar. This view plays into the hands of those, such as Galen Strawson, who are sceptical of the claims of narrative to be articulating what has actually happened to a person and what they are like as a person. This challenge is compounded when we introduce Robert Kirk’s “raw feeling” thesis, which claims that there is an important aspect in our experience which is beyond language and this aspect is all the richer: language can only fumble towards capturing it. A life story is just a story in this context, only able to brush the surface of the life proper. 2) But this gives us a clue to how we may answer yes to the question. Research is not just the uncovering of what is previously covered up but is the process of making sense of it. Even the PhD thesis in Chemistry must embody a narrative. The turning into sense of what is at first indeterminate is a function of narrative and is also a version of Kant’s epistemology insofar as he describes how we make cognitive judgements about the phenomenon at issue. Although this account of the biographical research process does push us towards turning people into ideal types rather than particulars, it does also allow us permanently to posit that there may be something as yet beyond the articulated phenomenon, something sitting tacitly in the noumenal world, perhaps the self and its possibilities, which cannot be fully captured by the narrative articulation. (shrink)

My purpose is to investigate the extent to which social capital is a useful tool for analysing performance of the higher and other educational sectors. Macroeconomic human capital analysis of higher education is not essentially flawed but highlights its anti-individualist and anti-humanist character, belying the presentation of it by policy analysts. Schuller, for instance, claims that what makes social capital interesting is that it gets away from the individualism of human capital and that it can bring about an output of (...) educational processes leading to wellbeing of communities on top of mere economic measures. This claim exemplifies a conceptual confusion about both human and social capital. The concept of social capital is theoretically weak at the general level but more specific usages of the term have more modest explanatory power, the central usage being level of trust. Considering it independently of its links to education and learning, it suggests an alternative social ontology to individualism. Social capital is seen in policy circles as a positive bulwark against social deprivation and community degeneration. It is, however, problematic to claim that top-down provision of educational resources, including higher education, can work towards this end, as opposed to undermining it. (shrink)

The sustainability of effective researcher development provision post-Roberts requires re-orientations of our thinking in a number of ways. Developers need to think from the perspective less of national policy and institutional organisation and more of the developing practitioner. Their autonomy needs to be the focus, understood in the positive, Kantian sense, freedom to explore new avenues of scientific and other enquiry and to direct their own development, underpinned by sense of value, individually and as a peer group. This emphasises the (...) place of consciousness and reason in the development process. Both proponents and opponents of the skills agenda at this level are stuck in a realist mindset which demands critique. It promotes, on the one hand, an unhelpful deficit model of skills as discrete concrete requirements and, on the other hand, gives licence to the equally unhelpful challenge that skills and academic endeavour are worlds apart. This session provides opportunity for participants to explore the implications of these lines of thinking for practice and policy, especially with the advent of the new Researcher Development Framework. (shrink)

My concern is with the dynamics within and between content, delivery and infrastructural components of programmes of professional workplace learning. I use the current education and training systems within Chartered Accountancy in the UK as an illustration which both points to solutions to, and in turn raises further, problematic issues for successful learning. How might such an integrative framework for the ACA qualification be operationalised across higher education and the workplace? There is no one type of organization which constitutes the (...) “educational institution”. There are different types of Accountancy practice, supported by respective professional institutes. The elite end of this field of knowledge enjoys in turn a peculiar relation to Accounting in higher education. To respond to this challenge requires enquiry into the ways in which workplace expertise may draw upon, and reconfigure, disciplinary knowledge. We might look first for integration at the level of content, for instance raising the profile of ethics in the formal curriculum. Depending upon how we do this, we might anticipate certain challenges to this project then from the system of delivery. In turn, we would find infrastructural obstacles to trying to make the system of delivery more integrative. Part of this is due to the field being transdisciplinary in the way emphasised by Gibbons et al., in that the Mode 2 knowledge component is very strong, with at the same time the profession owning the knowledge in important ways and keeping the Academy at arm’s length. The development of professional judgement goes beyond “social practice” and requires expertise that transcends a disciplinary specialism to become more adaptive, i.e. transdisciplinary in a further, richer and more integrative sense. It might appear that greater linkages across content, delivery and infrastructure between higher education and the profession would contribute to acceptable frameworks of lifelong learning. However, this is not as straightforward a solution as it may sound, as I shall explain through multiple interpretations of the training programme in this context. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. The New Production of Knowledge, London: Sage. Hoskin, K. & Anderson-Gough, F. “The context of learning in professional work environments: a case study of the accountancy Profession” in H. Rainbird, A. Fuller, & A. Munro Workplace Learning in Context. London: Routledge pp.71-88; also leading the project “Between Workplace and Qualification: Engineering Integrative Learning”, on which this paper draws. Silver, H. “The languages of innovation: listening to the higher education literature”, Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, a project in the ESRC Learning Society Programme, Working Paper No.1. (shrink)

What is it that is ruined, what is it that is destroyed in us, each time we become an image? It is our ruin that awakens after our death, living no longer as a man; without humanity. In being loved we give up our most human guise: we let it die little by little, until nothing remains but its corpse. More precisely, its image. For this reason, it is only insofar as we are loved--as images--that we are completely individual. Only (...) in love is a life made truly singular, taking leave of its common nature. An individual's most authentic substance exists, in fact, only as an image. This is why no-one will ever be able to love a people, a race, a community. If what is loved is, demonically, this absolute haecceity without species, then love love liberates us from every resemblance. Without love, every life again becomes generic, resuming obvious, universal characteristics, losing its demonic nature and becoming human. (shrink)

From the artistic genius to the tarot reader, a sense of communication with another order of reality is commonly affirmed; this 'other' may be termed god, angel, spirit, muse, daimon or alien, or it may be seen as an aspect of the human imagination or the 'unconscious' in a psychological sense. This volume of essays celebrates the daimonic presence in a diversity of manifestations, presenting new insights into inspired creativity and human beings' relationship with mysterious and numinous dimensions of reality. (...) In art and literature, many visual and poetic forms have been given to the daimonic intelligence, and in the realm of new age practices, encounters with spirit beings are facilitated through an increasing variety of methods including shamanism, hypnotherapy, mediumship and psychedelics. The contributors to this book are not concerned with 'proving' or 'disproving' the existence of such beings. Rather, they paint a broad canvas with many colours, evoking the daimon through the perspectives of history, literature, encounter and performance, and showing how it informs, and has always informed, human experience. (shrink)