Methods of Analysis by Stephen Petrina
Methods of Analysis, 2023
Although Foucault (e.g., 1969/1972, 1971a, etc.) fails to mention key sources of the method dubbe... more Although Foucault (e.g., 1969/1972, 1971a, etc.) fails to mention key sources of the method dubbed archaeology, some of these are obvious. And with regard to genealogy, Caldwell’s (1982) observation still holds: Foucault’s “debt to Nietzsche [e.g., On the Genealogy of Morality (GM)] has been acknowledged, but much more needs to be said” (p. 498) (i.e., Foucault, 1971/1977). To his credit in response to an interviewer’s comment— “it’s been said that you've given us a new way of studying events”— Foucault (1971b) corrected: “In the first place, I am not at all sure that I have invented a new method, as you were so kind to assert; what I am doing is not so different from many other contemporary endeavors, American, English, French, German. I claim no originality” (p. 192). The reality is that Foucault offered nothing original in either archaeological or genealogical method as he was simply responding to trends of the times (Huppert, 1974). At the confluence of Foucault’s archaeology, two trends converged: 1) genetic method with derivatives such as genetic epistemology and genetic phenomenology; and 2) Freud and psychoanalysis, which tended to tow along genetic psychology (Freud, 1951; Hartmann & Kris, 1945).
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Methods of Analysis, 2022
Although curriculum analysis (CA) is one of the most common practices of curriculum design, resea... more Although curriculum analysis (CA) is one of the most common practices of curriculum design, research, and theory, it is one of the least understood. More specifically, the methods of CA are arbitrary or unclear. This stems partially from disagreements over whether CA should emphasize autobiographical, cultural, or social content and processes.
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Methods of Analysis, 2021
Simply stated, policies are value choices among goals for action. They are mechanisms for realizi... more Simply stated, policies are value choices among goals for action. They are mechanisms for realizing change but some critics hold that they are by and large for maintaining status quo. As goal-directed courses for action, policies serve as guides toward the mitigation of cultural, legal, natural, or social problems. The connotation is “collective public efforts aimed at affecting and protecting the social wellbeing of people” (Adésínà, 2009, p. 38). With due regard for environmental policy, this might also entail the wellbeing of nonhuman creatures and natural things
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Methods of Analysis, 2021
It’s often said as a truism that “psychology influences every aspect of life." Should researchers... more It’s often said as a truism that “psychology influences every aspect of life." Should researchers take this to mean every datum and every dataset? If each conscious and unconscious behavior, belief, feeling, and thought is predicated on psychic agents and agency, then isn’t psyentific analysis of data the default method? With the expansive increase of psychological complexes, conditions, disorders, stressors, and vulnerabilities— within all animal communities— over the past 150 years, one might reasonably conclude that every analysis of data and experience ought to be psyentific. This was certainly an ambition of psycho-analysis as it demonstrated its value in everyday interactions and research.
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Methods of Analysis, 2021
In many ways, phenomenological analysis is the epitome of analysis, with its procedure of “eideti... more In many ways, phenomenological analysis is the epitome of analysis, with its procedure of “eidetic reduction.” Hence, it is not clear why Merleau-Ponty (1956) thought otherwise, stressing that phenomenology “is a question of description, and not of explanation or analysis” (p. 60). Certainly for phenomenologists, “the world is there before any analysis,” but he insists that “the relation with the world as it utters itself indefatigably in us is nothing which can be rendered clearer by analysis” (pp. 61, 67). Perhaps Merleau-Ponty was over-reacting to the fabrication of an analytic-continental divide in philosophy during the 1950s and 1960s. After all, phenomenology was considered to be constituent to “continental philosophy.” The truth is that Husserl, who passed away in 1938, would never have juxtaposed phenomenology against “analytic philosophy.”
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Methods of Analysis, 2021
Environmental critique aside, environmental analysis within the sciences is interchangeable with ... more Environmental critique aside, environmental analysis within the sciences is interchangeable with ecological analysis, ecosystems analysis, or natural analysis. Similarly, economists routinely refer to “business environments” and rely on forms of environmental analysis for strategic management and policy. Eventually, business environments and school environments have to countenance natural environments but greening ‘business as usual’ is merely a way of tinkering with challenges of sustainability. Environmental analysis of an individual’s or organization’s “ecological footprint” is constructive for establishing accountability to natural environments (Wackernagel & Rees, 1996). Ecocriticism (e.g., green cultural criticism) often faces similar challenges to establish depth of environmental analysis.
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Methods of Analysis, 2021
Spiritual analysis developed in response to challenges of romanticism in the nineteenth century t... more Spiritual analysis developed in response to challenges of romanticism in the nineteenth century to retain elements of the ineffable or supernatural in culture and nature. In short, the challenge of romanticism is analysis with heart or soul. Spiritual analysis first refers to a method for divining depths of inner life or what transcends material and mechanical processes and things, and second to the resolution of religious or sacred practices, processes, and things.
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Methods of Analysis, 2020
It would seem that historical method has always implied case study if interpreted as the history ... more It would seem that historical method has always implied case study if interpreted as the history of single events, episodic history as different from universal history, courtes durées as different from longues durées. From the early twentieth century, historical case study was basically biography, particularities of individuals used to counter the “vast amount of generalization” marking most histories and textbooks (Nichols, 1927, p. 270). Yet historical case study, in the way historians think of it, is primarily a post-WWII methodology.
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Methods of Analysis, 2020
Non-historians struggle with historical understanding and analysis. History teachers consistently... more Non-historians struggle with historical understanding and analysis. History teachers consistently report that students’ “essays are the sites of massive, undifferentiated data dumps. They have paraphrased primary sources instead of analyzing them, ignored argumentation, confused past and present, and failed completely to grasp the ‘otherness’ of a different era” (Díaz, Middendorf, Pace, & Shopkow, 2008, p. 1211). As well, historians criticize each other for the dreaded salto mortale or “sweeping and ahistorical generic categories” and for caricatures of the past, simplistic assumptions, and shallow, trivial, unsubstantiated claims (Drumm, 2014, pp. 459-460).
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Methods of Analysis, 2020
Critical analysis gets taken for granted through a sentiment that “everyone is a critic.” From th... more Critical analysis gets taken for granted through a sentiment that “everyone is a critic.” From the playpen, children grow up criticizing each other and their elders for breaking rules. These and other “kin objections to cultural rule violations” are common and prolific across history and contemporary societies (Jenkins, 1991, p. 404). Similarly, giving and receiving a critique, or “crit,” are synonymous with education (Petrina, 2017). Given the volumes of information sorted by everyday users of the web and its social media platforms, critical thinking has resurged as form of logic looking for fallacies. If so naturalized, then is the method of critical analysis and “a whole set of new positive metaphors, gestures,” etc. all the more important?
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Methods of Analysis, 2020
Cultural analysis and social analysis derive from the development of anthropology and sociology i... more Cultural analysis and social analysis derive from the development of anthropology and sociology in the mid nineteenth century. At that point, cultural analysis was synonymous with anthropological and ethnological analysis and social analysis with sociological analysis. One implies the analysis of signification and the other an analysis of association, human and nonhuman. Does the analysis of culture imply analysis of society, and vice versa?
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Methods of Analysis, 2020
Self-analysis refers to either the disintegration and reintegration of what makes one partial and... more Self-analysis refers to either the disintegration and reintegration of what makes one partial and whole (i.e., systematic reflection) or an application of psychoanalytic techniques to one’s own ego identity (e.g., systematic re-education).
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Methods of Analysis, 2020
Narrative, often shorthand for narrative analysis or narrative inquiry, refers to both an ordered... more Narrative, often shorthand for narrative analysis or narrative inquiry, refers to both an ordered representation of fiction or non-fiction and a method for making sense of the representations. Alternatively, narrative refers to a process of storying or making stories while narrative analysis refers to destorying and restorying or unmaking and remaking stories. Stories unravel inasmuch as someone or AI unravels them. Narrative Analysis is the latest in a book I’m working on titled Methods of Analysis. It’s basically a side hustle for a few other research projects.
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Methods of Analysis, 2020
Artistic analysis refers to the analysis of art and an artful or arts-based analysis (ABA) of dat... more Artistic analysis refers to the analysis of art and an artful or arts-based analysis (ABA) of data, whether aesthetic data or otherwise. Typically, the first sense involves rendering artworks into analytical works while the second sense involves rendering or directing an analytical process into an artistic work. The first sense of artistic analysis, or aesthetic analysis, is often used interchangeably with “criticism” (e.g., art criticism, literary criticism) and “theory.” Artistic Analysis is the latest in a book I’m working on titled Methods of Analysis. It’s basically a side hustle for a few other research projects.
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Methods of Analysis, 2019
In other words, the analysts themselves, in so far as they wish for clarification of their own ac... more In other words, the analysts themselves, in so far as they wish for clarification of their own activity, must go on to Meta-Analysis. But what does that mean? (Heinemann, 1953, p. 125)
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Methods of Analysis, 2019
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Methods of Analysis, 2019
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Methods of Analysis, 2019
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Methods of Analysis, 2019
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Methods of Analysis by Stephen Petrina
Excerpted from Petrina, S. (2001). The political ecology of design and technology education: An inquiry into methods. International Journal of Technology and Design Education 10, 207-237.