Ways of Knowing

"By inviting educators from diverse backgrounds to participate in creative conversations I had hoped to reflect on experiences that had helped construct our theories of environmental education, and inform practice. I sought consistency across the espoused ethics of co-participants, namely critical perspectives grounded in environmental justice. However, this quest was interrupted by a growing awareness of the interference of power dynamics between myself and the other participants, and of my own commitment to respect the stories being told. This narrative describes my “dance” of meaning making.
The community dance examining privilege, identity and meaning is a study of how I may be contributing to the same oppressive situations I passionately strive to work against. Concepts of knowledge, power, and identity ebbed and flowed within stories drawn from the mountains of Tanzania to the hills of Colombia, and from the frozen shores of Kirkland Lake to the trout filled streams of Karman, Iran. Making meaning is itself an act of power and privilege, so I danced to make room for multiple understandings of these stories, of environmental education, and of research. This work offers an experience of disruption that raises questions and broadens the inclusion of people, ideas and other life into “accepted” research and pedagogical practices.
Conventions embedded within research and education were disrupted throughout this reflexive process. As the author of this text, I was uncomfortable with the role of being the dominant voice, and consciously chose not to impose my interpretation on the stories shared by co-participants. The struggle to resist the very privilege in which my own education practice and this research process are so deeply steeped revealed normative forces that often threaten to undermine attempts by educators and researchers to act according to critical theories and environmental justice ethics. To accept the invitation to dance with the text is to step into the rhythmic intricacies of a collaborative process of reflexion. Circling hand-in-hand and giving weight to fellow dancers’ movements shifts individuals from being carriers of truths to being community members sharing in the collaborative process of dancing the world into existence."

Emotional  capacity in  music  creates an  innate  human  resource  for  well-being,  learning,  and  interaction, inspired by sound environments, and integrated into life experiences through holistic, multisensory experiences. Sounds connect  with  natural  instincts and  cultural  history.  Today,  the  weak  position of  the  arts  strengthens  the  negative perception of  them,  shown in  hardening  societal  values. In  musical-artistic  experiences,  individuals  and  societies breathe  better,  and  cultural  phenomena  and  societies  are  thus  recreated.  This  article  proposes  Multisensory  Musical Design  (MMD) as  a  musical  cornerstone  for  human-oriented  education. MMD  is  motivated by  an  understanding of human  sensitive,  social,  and  emotional  qualities as  they  relate to  tacit  knowledge  supported by  music.  I  contemplate human  artistic  resources as  a  support  for  societal  wellbeing,  grounded in  education. At  the  core of  the MMD  model, sounds  and  music  create  a  natural  power  for  human  behavior  via  three  basic  concepts:  faces,  spaces,  and  timelines.Fetal  multisensory  processes  linked  with  musical  sounds for  multidisciplinary  dialogues  are  defined in  music.  The emotional  dimension  with  flow  (Csikszentmihalyi  2008), and  the  comprehension of  multiple  ways of  knowledge  with experience connect with music and tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1983), highlighted here as a foundation for human nature.

The primary aim of this work is to examine the varied outlooks that have influenced perceptions of the Tuareg and their architecture from both within Tuareg groups and without. Beginning with a sample of studies of the Tuareg throughout history, the story that emerges is ones of a mythic persona created of the European traveller’s hopes and fears. It becomes easy to see how contemporary ideas about culture and identity shape the dialogue more than actual interaction with the Tuareg themselves. Changes in perception are not a one way occurrence. Just as outsiders have used the the dialogue around the Tuareg as a cultural mirror, so have the Tuareg used their living situations to reflect their own changing ideals. We can speculate about  the ways in which the Tuareg tent may have always been used for the reflection of the ideas and ideals of Tuareg culture in the hopes that it will help us understand current patterns and further allow us to acknowledge the arbitrary frameworks imposed by ethnographers. Finally we can understand both ethnography and tent construction as  two of the many ways of making sense of the world around us.

The Ethiopian Highlands have been studied extensively, hosting a large amount of research for development projects in agriculture and forestry over several decades. The encounters in these projects were also encounters of different ways of knowing that were negotiated by the actors meeting in the space provided by the projects. This research explores these encounters and the social worlds they are embedded in, drawing on actor-oriented approaches as well as theories of narratives and framing. Ways of knowing and citizen epistemologies are taken as a lens to understand the role of identities in knowledge production and use.
The two case studies were agroforestry research projects in the Ethiopian Highlands. The research followed a range of qualitative and ethnographic research methods. Different types of farmers and scientists meet in the case studies. I recognise that they all have individual agency, nevertheless I use the terms ‘scientist’ and ‘farmer’ in this thesis. I use the terms to describe certain groups of actors who all draw on different ways of knowing, and different value systems, when interacting with each other and their environment.
The results indicate that the importance of social worlds at different scales and the contexts of research projects tend to be underestimated. In spite of good intentions scientific methodologies, terminologies and narratives tend to dominate. Scientists in the case studies acknowledged the existence of farmers’ ‘indigenous’ knowledge, but they determined the value of knowledge by its scientific applicability and the replicability of experiments. Research systems force the scientists into a certain modus operandi with limited possibilities to experiment and to respond to the complexities and diversities of people's social worlds.
Farmers in the case studies preferred observation from their parents, observing from others or the environment as a way of learning and gaining knowledge. Depending on their personalities and their life histories they also relied on alternative ways of knowing rooted in spirituality, emotions and memories. Powerful influences on ways of knowing resulted from the way languages and authority had been used. These often led to the exclusion of marginalised community members from access to knowledge and technologies.
Unfortunately, common narratives prevailed in the case studies, and alternative ways of knowing were often marginalised. By acknowledging different ways of knowing and the importance of different social worlds and different ways of doing research, both scientists and farmers could benefit and develop more sustainable pathways for agricultural and forestry land use.

My fascination with the Pythia began several years ago when I was writing a paper on different ways of knowing. Although the Pythia is surrounded in myth and has been written about by numerous authors both in the past and present, it seems to me she still has a story to tell which has not been touched on before. The Pythia was the priestess at Delphi and among other things, she had to be a virgin (pathenos), or at least originally. We also know that inscribed on the forecourt temple of Apollo was the maxim "Know Thyself". When we put these aspects together with the non-denominational method of meditation used by early cults in the Mediterranean area and other parts of the world known as Prayer of the Heart, a different meaning of the word virgin starts to reveal itself. This also suggests that these priestesses might have been mystics trained in an esoteric tradition, which leads to Self-discovery or the Godliness of humans.

This paper uses Gloria Anzaldúa's borderlands framework to resignify and recover the marginalized, forgotten sacred feminine and, thereby, South Asian motherlines. The borderlands is conceived of as a new consciousness, an alternative to that which is written in history. It offers a radical synthesis of spiritual healing with anti-oppression work. Creating self-affirming, complex images of female identity, and making revisionist myths-while engaging the self in relation to culture-constitutes a decolonial practice. It enables South Asian women—as the Others of colonial modernity and brahmanical patriarchy—to renew their relation to an episteme of the sacred that liberates their voices, vitality, and authority. The post-secular sacred locates as essential a critical interrogation of all forms of oppression. The researcher enacts her decolonial recovery at the edges of her South Asian/brown postcolonial feminist subjectivity. The borderlands framework makes possible a profoundly relational, integrative onto-epistemological praxis that forefronts the grandmothers, the foremothers, and the experiences of women of color on their own terms.

Cette recherche repose sur le projet de mise en place d'une démarche de formation ayant pour objectif d'aider les employés d'une Organisation Internationale à faire face à un climat psychologique de tensions, faisant suite à une restructuration accompagnée de licenciements massifs. Postulant la nécessité de rétablir une forme de méta-communication portant sur les enjeux inhérents aux échanges interpersonnels dans un tel contexte institutionnel, la démarche entreprise s'articule autour de trois objectifs. (1) Elle présente un aperçu de la littérature sur les enjeux inhérents à un downsizing, au développement d'une communication de soutien et à la promotion de l'affirmation de soi comme moyens pour faire face au stress vécu à tous les niveaux de l'organisation. (2) Les enjeux inhérents au développement d'une communication interpersonnelle ouverte sont abordés de façon critique. Se positionnant dans une perspective de formation, l'analyse porte sur la spécificité des savoirs, des finalités et des moyens pédagogiques propres à une telle démarche de développement personnel. (3) Cette réflexion est étayée par l'analyse d'une enquête par questionnaire, réalisée auprès des employés de l'institution, afin d'appréhender le rapport qu'ils entretiennent face l'entraînement de certains savoir-être et face à la mise en place d'une démarche de développement personnel. La démarche entreprise dans ce travail aboutit à l'élaboration de pistes de réflexion sur l'étude du rapport au savoir-être et sur la promotion du développement personnel en entreprise. Elle se conclut avec la formulation de recommandations favorisant l'établissement d'une démarche appropriative dont l'objet serait de sensibiliser les cadres de l'institution aux enjeux inhérents à un downsizing et au développement de la communication interpersonnelle dans un tel contexte institutionnel. Par sa thématique, autant que par la posture adoptée pour l'aborder, ce travail constitue une démarche d'appropriation et une tentative de sensibilisation aux enjeux d'une posture réflexive et critique dans les domaines du downsizing, de la gestion du stress, de la communication interpersonnelle et du développement personnel.

Ce document est la version électronique de mon mémoire de diplôme en Psychologie et Ressources Humaines (Université de Genève).

Swedish anatomists Anders and Gustaf Retzius, father and son, collaborated with artists, photographers, and printers to produce image plates for their many publications in normal, comparative, morbid, and microscopic anatomy. This article explores the role of images in their oeuvres, identifying impacts of changing scientific ideals, aesthetic sensibilities, and technologies of observation and visualization. It examines how the Retziuses mobilized historically contingent concepts of truth and beauty to support claims to authority. Anders Retzius, influenced by post-Kantian philosophy, viewed truth and beauty as inherent in natural phenomena, independent of the researcher. Scientific authority rested on abilities to observe and convey the truth and beauty of examined specimens, preferably aided by a skilled artist. For Gustaf Retzius, epistemic authority depended on his expertise as scientist, publisher, and illustrator of his own works. Like Santiago Ramón y Cajal he favored an “anti-aesthetic” style, while at the same time publishing sumptuous image plates.

One of the concerns of Greek philosophy centred on the question of how a manifold and ordered universe arose out of the primitive state of things. From the mythical accounts dating around the seventh century B.C. to the cosmologies of the Classical period in Ancient Greece, many theories have been proposed in order to answer to this question. How these theories differ in positing a “something” that pre-existed the ordered cosmos has been widely discussed.However, scholars have rarely made explicit how they differ in style of thought. In the span of four centuries the first deductive arguments of the Eleatic philosophers culminated in the emergence of logical proof and a form of explanation of natural phenomena, which consisted of searching for the simplest and fewest premises and deducting implications. In this paper it will be discussed how, at distinct stages of its development, the deductive thinking informed the solutions proposed to solve the chaos-order problem, that of how an ordered universe has been possible.

The newly created Indigenous Intercultural Universities in Latin America challenge the conventional conception of universities and their "universal" quality. Such universities seek to decolonize knowledge by generating knowledge that is relevant to the communities in which they are located. These intentions, however, do not necessarily exclude the knowledge and research methods imparted by long-established Western universities. Instead, they have been conceived as Intercultural institutions designed to train indigenous community leaders capable of hybridizing or carrying out a "dialogue of knowledges"(Mato, 2007) and research methods of what are ultimately two different, and often times, opposing and contentious paradigms, one stemming from conventional Western universities, referred to as Modern (global), and another originating from Indigenous people, better known as Traditional (local). Two specific programs offered by two intercultural universities have been chosen in countries with strong colonial and indigenous legacy, Mexico and Bolivia. This study examines and compares how these two distinctive institutions are interpreting and carrying out their conception of intercultural, a concept that not only appears to have multiple dimensions but it seems susceptible to different interpretations as well.

This critical/creative work responds to a call from Krauth and Watkins for a more radical form of the scholarly paper. Its hybrid form presents poems written in response to events at the second Poetry on the Move festival at the University of Canberra in 2016. Key ideas about the intersections between poetry and knowledge from David McCooey and William Carlos Williams are considered together with readings and discussions by poets Tusiata Avia and Simon Armitage. The article charts writing experiences, tracking the drafts and the editing process for ways in which my festival-inspired poems reflect on the intersections between poetry and knowledge, knowing and unknowing. Specifically, the poems concern the topics of knowing and observing the world; knowing memory and integrating the past with the present; and knowing the body. They embrace embodiment, imagination and biography, conscious of antagonisms between memory and the present. In this article, I problematise the use of the noun knowledge as opposed to the verb knowing and demonstrate that the former is unnecessarily privileged. I argue that articulating the full scope of poetry composition from inspiration to the final stages of editing demonstrates that artistic knowledge is best defined as a process of knowing. It is my contention that poets do demonstrate the knowledge of how to make things, as identified by Aristotle (1954); and also that we show 'knowing as a process of inquiry' (Johnson 2010). In doing so, we offer readers 'new ways of knowing and doing' (Webb 2012, my emphasis). At the same time, our own new work, as I demonstrate here, responds to knowledge as 'a living current' (Williams 1923), an active state characterised by the verb 'to know'.

The current study explored the relationships between Saudi tertiary students' beliefs (implicit theories) about intelligence and their ways of knowing, thinking styles and academic achievement. Three measurement tools were utilized in the study including: The Implicit Theory of Intelligence Scale (Dupeyrat & Marine, 2005), Attitude toward Thinking and Learning (ATTL) (Gallotti et al., 1999), and Thinking Styles Inventory (TSI) (Sternberg &Wangers, 1992). These tools were administered to 350 Saudi university students (179 males, 171 females) chosen from Riyadh Teachers College (120 from the English section, 50 from the Math section), Jeddah College for Girls (60 from the Social Science section), and the Faculty of Arts in King Abdulaziz University (120 from Psychology section). The results showed that Saudi university students tend more to adopt the Incremental theory of intelligence than the entity theory. Further, they reported that they prefer using connected ways of knowing rather than separate ways of knowing. There also were significant sex differences and domain-relevant differences in the three variables considered. Finally, the Incremental theory of intelligence was able to predict the two ways of knowing (connected vs. separate), eight of the thinking styles under investigation, and academic achievement. Results were discussed in relation to their general theoretical implications and with regard to the Saudi Arabian context and study subjects. The researcher suggested some recommendations and suggestions for further research.

Plausibly, an inference is an act of coming to believe something on the basis of something else you already believe. But what is it to believe something on the basis of something else? I propose an account of inference on which the answer to this question is disjunctive: to believe something on the basis of something else you already believe is either for your premise-beliefs to rationally cause your conclusion-belief—that is, on the view proposed: for the former to cause the latter in a way that is either actually or potentially productive of knowledge—or for your premise-beliefs to cause your conclusion-belief “deviantly,” but for you mistakenly (though rationally) to believe that the former have caused the latter rationally. This view, I argue, has many of the benefits of views that make appeal to what has been called “the Taking Condition,” but it avoids some of the most pressing objections to those views. The result is both a theoretically satisfying account of the act of inferring and a demonstration of the power of a knowledge-first approach to the philosophy of mind.

Este artigo, que provém de pesquisa etnográfica realizada entre os anos de 2013 e 2016 com pessoas que se concentram em um grupo de oração e uma comunidade católica na cidade de São Paulo, tem como eixos questões relativas à “libertação”, ao “discernimento” e à “abertura”. Ele se dedica à análise dos conceitos de um coletivo de cristãos em que libertar não é se emancipar, mas se vincular e se comprometer cada vez mais fortemente com Deus. Em suma, trata-se de uma circunstância que não visa à liberdade, e consequentemente à autonomia, associada ao individualismo moderno, mas sim à aliança com a divindade. Esta incita a violência do demônio, que busca abrir uma “brecha” na “abertura para Deus”, o motor da libertação. Como se verá, o caráter comungatório da relação com Ele resulta no discernimento: um modo de conhecimento divinamente orientado que, como tentarei assinalar, se caracteriza pela realização de “distinções”, em lugar de divisões e misturas, e que viceja em um mundo intrinsecamente “aberto”.

Palavras-chave: libertação; discernimento; abertura; conhecimento

Based on fieldwork developed between 2013 and 2016, this article is an ethnographic study concerning the concepts of “deliverance”, “discernment”, and “openness” among Christians who gather in a prayer group and/or are members of a Catholic community in São Paulo/SP, Brazil. Its aim is to describe a mode of existence in which to deliver is not to emancipate, but rather to attach, to commit oneself ever more intensely to God. It is not a path towards individual freedom, and consequently to the kind of autonomy associated with modern individualism. This commitment to strengthen the alliance with divinity instigates the Devil’s efforts to open a “breach” in the person’s “openness to God”, the driving force of deliverance. As it will be argued, the commungatory character of the relationship with divinity results in discernment: a divinely oriented way of knowing characterized by the realization of “distinctions”, rather than divisions and mixtures, which thrives in an intrinsically “open” world.

Keywords: deliverance; discernment; openness; knowledge

The Mountain Path is a quarterly Journal founded in 1964 by Arthur Osborne and published by Sri Ramanansramam. The aim of this journal is to set forth the wisdom of all religions and all ages, especially as testified to by their saints and mystics, and to clarify the paths available to seekers in the conditions of our modern world.

Technocratic decision making has been long criticized for dampening participation and limiting the range of adaptive choices through its overreliance on infrastructure-based solutions. There has been growing attention to how technocratic approaches shape long-term resilience of water systems, especially under the threat of climatic change impacts. In Brazil, even under its highly decentralized and participatory water management system, technical expertise and science-based decisions have been often promoted as a desirable mechanism to insulate governance outcomes from the country’s prevailing clientelistic and rent-seeking politics. Yet, Brazilian river basins continue to struggle with long-standing problems (such as universal access to sanitation) and increasing challenges for guaranteeing water provision under recurrent drought. In this study, we examine how technocratic insulation, different ways of knowing (WoKs), and participatory governance shape long-term resilience in one of Brazil’s most important river basins, the Piracicaba-Capivari-Jundiaí (PCJ). By taking an in-depth look at how the PCJ River Basin’s governance system responded to the 2014 Brazilian water crisis, we seek to understand how planning decisions in the aftermath of the crisis were influenced by different actors, and how the outcomes of those decisions are likely to shape long term resilience. Based on 27 in-depth interviews with members of the PCJ River Basin Committees, we show how a distinct preference for infrastructure-based solutions to deal with ongoing and upcoming challenges may be unsustainable under climate change as the basin’s traditional technocratic approach failed both to insulate its decisions from politics and to explore adaptive water management solutions that might be key to shape long-term resilience.

Este artigo debate em que medida a qualidade das palavras proferidas por alguns cristãos brasileiros revela o aspecto vinculativo (comungatório ou de aliança) de sua " libertação " , que é dita " estar em e vir " de Deus, uma afirmação que inquieta o demônio. A localização e a origem dessa liberdade contrapõem-se a supostos corriqueiros de que libertar tenha como componente central a autotransformação. Buscarei problematizar essa diferença através de formas de enunciação disseminadas no Cristianismo: o " testemunho " , a " partilha " , a " direção espiritual " e a " pregação ". Argumentarei que estas permitem descrever um modo de conhecimento que, em vez de revelar o indivíduo autônomo e emancipado, faz emergir através da " abertura para Deus " , de deixar que Ele " aja " e de reconhecer que não se é " nada sem Ele " , uma pessoa cuja submissão e obediência são os elementos centrais de sua liberdade.

Palavras-chave: Libertação; Conhecimento; Autotransformação; Vínculo.

This article discusses how the quality of the words spoken by some
Christians in Brazil reveal the binding aspect of their “deliverance”, which is
said “to be in and to come from” God (as communion or alliance), a statement
that disturbs the Devil. The location and origin of this freedom oppose
to taken for granted assumptions according to which self-transformation is a
central component of deliverance. Based on fieldwork conducted in the city
of São Paulo, I will problematize this difference through modes of enunciation
disseminated in Christianity: “testimony”, “sharing”, “spiritual direction” and
“preaching”. I will argue that these enunciations allow us to describe a way of
knowledge that does not reveal an autonomous and emancipated individual.
Instead, through the “openness” to God, following His designs and recognizing that one is “nothing without Him”, emerges a person whose submission and
obedience are the central elements of her freedom.

Keywords: Deliverance; Knowledge; Self-Transformation; Attachment.

This paper provides a reflective account of a teaching experience which explores the connections between (academic) teaching, knowledge and identity. The narrative metaphor of ‘maps of meaning’, as discussed by White and Denborough (2005), is used as a framework for this discussion of ways of thinking about and reflecting on teaching practice. The role of the teacher in facilitating open and constructive dialogue, countering the polarised, ‘win-lose’ nature of public discourse, is a central theme.

By presenting Shamanism as a form and tradition of indigenous knowledge, this paper aims to reduce the uncertainties attached to the concept in common approaches to indigenous research. Most indigenist researchers, who are working to blend western and non-western ways of knowing, have inadequately explored indigenous research procedures. In order to understand indigenous research procedures in the Nepali multi-cultural context, using interpretive, critical and postmodern research paradigms, the authors engaged with indigenous elders and traditional healers, and observed cultural events like shamanic performances. This paper reveals how achieving a profound understanding of indigenous knowledge traditions will be an integral part of how researchers approach indigenous communities in future studies

The article relates key aspects of the sociological theory of Boaventura de Sousa Santos with central issues in the field of Intercultural Theology. Thereby, it makes use of De Sousa Santos' critique of what he calls "the Cognitive Empire" in western academic reflection, to denounce the self-given position of privilege of academic western theology over other Christian reflections from around the globe, and to sketch the main differences between the theological knowledges from the global North and the ways of knowing from the global South. The article proposes De Sousa Santos’ Sociology of the absences and emergences as a suitable method to make present or to "emerge" these absences, so they may share the same epistemological status as their counterparts from the global North. Subsequently, it enunciates three kinds of emergences: seed ruins, counter-hegemonic appropriations, and liberated zones; and it elucidates the roles they could play in intercultural theological exchanges. Finally, as a conclusion, it deeps into the theoretical significance of De Sousa Santos’ sociological theory for current Intercultural Theology.

There is a long-standing view in epistemology that perception is a way of knowing (WOK). There is a less long-standing but increasingly popular view that knowledge attributions have a relativist semantics (RKA). I discuss three things here. First, I show that it is a consequence of the logic of RKA that WOK and RKA are incompatible. Second, I argue that, even if WOK is incompatible with the main rivals to RKA, this is not a consequence of the logics of these views. RKA comes with a hitherto unobserved philosophical consequence that its main rivals do not come with. Third, I consider some responses to the effect that it does not matter that RKA comes with this consequence, and argue that they are all unsatisfactory as they stand. I conclude that, at the very least, the onus is placed on relativists to engage with more epistemology than they currently do to show that we do not need to worry about the incompatibility of WOK and RKA. I conclude with some suggestions about the broader relevance and implications of this paper.

Rationalization masquerades as rationality in human affairs. Rational discourse is displaced by social conformity in academia. Mind’s habitual mode of functioning leads to error in the name of rational thinking – among them, its tendency to divide and subdivide reality in an endless fragmentation of knowledge, to confound description with explanation, to view reality in terms of irreconcilable polar opposites, to mistake symbolic abstraction for the reality it represents, and to draw conclusions predetermined by its own premises. The apparently insoluble problems confronting humanity today are the result of mind’s divisive, piecemeal functioning. Solution to those problems lie in formulating a perception of society and the world as an integral whole. That is only possible by an action of the whole mind, which is the basis of the insights and intuitions that are the source of our greatest human initiatives,
scientific discoveries and artistic creativity. This is a call to transcend the limits imposed by mind’s characteristic functioning as a basis for formulating comprehensive solutions to the pressing challenges facing humanity today.

The purpose of this PLM is to provide a conceptual framework for effective collegial feedback and to enhance the educational process. It was devised to empower individuals through building capacity in identifying possible obstacles to effective collegial feedback and to acquaint individuals with resources and strategies to overcome obstacles in collegial feedback. This PLM was designed for educators who have to provide feedback, including mentors, instructional coaches, and peer observers. Because it aligns with the adult learners’ ways of knowing, it is geared toward those who give feedback to adults rather than K-12 students. View professional learning module.https://digitalcommons.gardner-webb.edu/improve/1024/thumbnail.jp

The Ethiopian Highlands have been studied extensively, hosting a large amount of research for development projects in agriculture and forestry over several decades. The encounters in these projects were also encounters of different ways of knowing that were negotiated by the actors meeting in the space provided by the projects. This research explores these encounters and the social worlds they are embedded in, drawing on actor-oriented approaches as well as theories of narratives and framing. Ways of knowing and citizen epistemologies are taken as a lens to understand the role of identities in knowledge production and use. The two case studies were agroforestry research projects in the Ethiopian Highlands. The research followed a range of qualitative and ethnographic research methods. Different types of farmers and scientists meet in the case studies. I recognise that they all have individual agency, nevertheless I use the terms ‘scientist’ and ‘farmer’ in this thesis. I use the ter...

Technocratic decision making has been long criticized for dampening participation and limiting the range of adaptive choices through its overreliance on infrastructure-based solutions. There has been growing attention to how technocratic approaches shape long-term resilience of water systems, especially under the threat of climatic change impacts. In Brazil, even under its highly decentralized and participatory water management system, technical expertise and science-based decisions have been often promoted as a desirable mechanism to insulate governance outcomes from the country's prevailing clientelistic and rent-seeking politics. Yet, Brazilian river basins continue to struggle with long-standing problems (such as universal access to sanitation) and increasing challenges for guaranteeing water provision under recurrent drought. In this study, we examine how technocratic insulation, different ways of knowing (WoKs), and participatory governance shape long-term resilience in on...

This short piece is part of an ongoing series on practical aspects of Catholic belief and life entitled "I've Been Wondering ...".  In this case it looks at the term "mystery" implicitly from the Eastern Christian perspective of the absolute unknowability of God.

Working with intuition and quiet, a deep sense of place, learning to move with the rhythms of nature, are my ways of exploring connection within the natural world.
This paper reflects on my year of MA Art, Space & Nature study at Edinburgh College of Art.