Knowledge Structures: Module I

Module I: Knowledge Structures and Moral Order

• Knowledge and Experience

• Knowledge and Practice

• Multicultural Perspectives: Deconstructing Orientalism

• Historical Perspectives: Deconstructing the Enlightenment

• multiple perspectives of the processes that shape the production of knowledge (and representations), and its circulation; how knowledge creates epistemes (schemas for processing of information) and how epistemes can be critiqued; experience and practical engagement as basis for critique of established perspectives.

Module I: Knowledge Structures and Moral Order

• experience: knowledge built through community memory and immediate reality, localization of experience in contrast to ‘hyperreality’ of mediated experience; communities seek autonomy and self-reflection

• practice: formal knowledge systems (education) vs. informal knowledge (situational); legitimation of knowledge through traditional modernist science regulates what can be said under the flag of scientific authority; practical knowledge is excluded from this discourse yet it is the practical knowledge accumulated through work / practice that may influence the creation of knowledge and innovation; practitioner research vs. expert research (practitioners closer to purposes, cares, everyday concerns, and interests of work); need to acknowledge the progressive impact of practical knowledge

Module I: Knowledge Structures and Moral Order

• multiculturalism: the position of the knower that is related to institutional authority, reflects power relations and ruptures of East / West, South / North; knowledge is a system shaping reality but it is perspectival; knowing styles are localized but in the postmodern condition the perception of the world is fragmented

• historical: epistemes are shaped by communities of practice and institutional discourse; knowledge trails: knowledge is cumulative and shaped by antecedents; institutions maintain privileged knowledge systems

Knowledge and Experience: deCerteau

“The grand narratives from television and

advertising stamp out or atomize the small

narratives of streets or neighborhoods”

(deCerteau, pp. 142-3)

Knowledge and Practice: Lave

JPF mathematics in action vs. story problems and the classroom context

Cases: bowling, Weight Watchers, abandoning problems (supermarket calculations of prices)

The Theory of Practice: Social Practice Approach

• Cognition is “socially situated activity” – Comprises of person-acting, activity and setting– Person experiences the self:

• As in control of activities & interacting with the setting• As generating problems in relation to the setting• As controlling the problem-solving process

• Investigation for cognition should be located in everyday activities of the lived-in world

Case Studies

• Adult Math Project– Shoppers correctly computed to decide best-buy

items 93% of the time but did poorly on arithmetic test 59% of the time

• Weight Watchers Study– Dieters substituted equivalence for measuring

activities

• Money Management Study– Creation of different stashes of money

demonstrated the assembly of quantitative relations in situationally specific ways

Conclusions• People learn most effectively in the lived-in world

when using all their physical senses through hands-on experience

• Knowledge transfer is not effective when done out of context

• Problem solving activities are not always a quest for the ‘right answer’

• Problems may be redefined in the course of solving them, leading to different problems and resulting in new or changed knowledge

• Need? / caution regarding the predictive value of school testing for success in the workplace

• Knowledge is not a compendium of facts but a process of knowing (librarians need to grow already acquired knowledge to evolve that base)

• Knowledge does not have to come from a think tank to be of value / knowledge created by just plain folks in everyday activities has value

• Be on guard for pre-conceptions since the self is socially constituted

• Examples of knowledge acquired in everyday activities?

Implications (for Information Work)

• Edith Beckett and Margaret Eng presentation slides (Spring 2004)

Source (for Lave):

Multicultural Perspectives: Said

Is knowledge self-replicating, fatalistic, a text that does not have the ability of reflecting experiences or perspectives of the Other?

Historical Perspectives: Said, Foucault

Texts create realities and these realities become the models for creating new texts and establish the constraints for what can be knowable. Said explores this cumulative effect of authoritative texts and discourses of scholarship. Foucault develops his idea of post-Enlightenment rationality by focusing on the historical construction of “madness.”

Origins of Knowledge Systems

knowledge systems• related to post-Enlightenment epistemology

• critical analysis of knowledge practices in particular time periods (discursive formations supported by institutions)

• concepts: ideology, hegemony

• assumption: knowledge systems are not neutral, they promote the interests of the ruling class

• situated knowledge • personal experience

• ‘communities of practice’ and information infrastructures supporting information flow

Origins of Knowledge Systems

history of knowledge

• by subject? by period? as succession of epistemes?

• history or ‘archaeology’ of human sciences (Michel Foucault) avoids producing the traditional unity of

subject, spirit,or period

Origins of Knowledge Systems

history of knowledge

• history of knowledge represented as a dynamic, constantly changing totality

• shift from a traditional historical inquiry into ‘what’ was known at a given moment to discursive practices that rendered something knowable

• discursive practices are first hand evidence to understand what was knowable

Origins of Knowledge Systems

• analysis of an episteme = theorization of the grounds of knowledge by analyzing the representational paradigms which organize the theorization

• what could be knowable? boundary objects? anomalies? displaced categories?

• episteme = historically specific, dynamic field of representations of knowledge

Origins of Knowledge Systems

episteme

• defined in Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge: as the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems

• Foucault’s Order of Things (17th / 18th century shift): the idea of order as organizing episteme

• episteme is multiplied by communication among different disciplines

• language + technology of transmission + totality of people’s interactions + ...

Instead of a search for the perfectly proportioned image containing the 'soul' of the knowledge to be remembered, the emphasis was on the discovery of the right logical category. The memory of this system of logical categories and scientific causes would exempt the individual from the necessity of remembering everything in detail ... The problem of memorizing the world, characteristic of the sixteenth century, evolved into the problem of classifying it scientifically.

(James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory, 1992, 13)

Origins of Knowledge Systems

constraints

• a range of fields in a given historical moment demonstrates a set of discursive practices common to all the fields

• constraints and limitations imposed on a range of discourses in the human sciences and other knowledge practices

In the late 18th century, science becomes established as cultural apparatus, in the form of materialized semiotic fields.

(Haraway, Modest Witness@Second_Millennium)

Origins of Knowledge Systems

post-Enlightenment epistemology

• ‘modernity’: ideas of progress, science, nature (as logical and ordered), reason

• reflected in the discourse of science and technology (technocriticism: Haraway)

Origins of Knowledge Systems

studies of science and technology

• focus on nature / culture / discourse / + infrastructure (bureaucracy, institutional contexts for the circulation of knowledge)

• dichotomy of nature / culture (cf. Haraway’s natureTM

or ‘nature as not nature’ and cultureTM )

The Laboratory, or, The Passion of OncoMouse

(Lynn Randolph 1994)

From: Donna Haraway’s, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan _Meets_OncoMouseTM), 46.