ICQI 2015 Day 3: Are We Post-Human?

I went to alot of different talks today..I worked out that in terms of clinical psychology USA is no further ahead than we are and made alot of new buddies, particularly community based researchers from Canada. We had a sharing circle of sorts, telling stories about where we come from, our work, the challenges of being an academic and lots of laughs.

In terms of content what struck me the most was a long workshop on what is being described as the new philosophical paradigm after post-modernism...Post-Humanism also called the New Empiricism or New Materialism, This is not a fad I hasten to add after some researching, but a growing movement in philosophy. It goes something like this.

So post-modernism challenged Logical Positivism, focussing on language and discourse, or diversity and the marginalised, rather than grand theories, determinism, colonisation.

Now the Post-Humanists are coming to see that we must re-engage with the material world, not just focus on discourse. We are embodied we also have relationships with inanimate objects as part of our process of meaning-making: technology, but also through hyper-consumerism and objects that give us meaning in our lives. In addition to this materialism as the breaking down of dualisms..between mind and body, animate and inanimate, self and other. Our "identities' are fluid, change and emerge as different all the time in relation to this assemblage described earlier.

So ontologically the focus used to be on reason, then on stories and language..now ..help! Im not sure

So lets have a practical example to make sense of it a little more

See this article  
excerpt...We argue, yes, in our new pamphlet The New Materialism: How our relationship with the material world can change for the better, published to coincide with Buy Nothing Day, if you embrace ‘stuff’ in a different way. Instead of rejecting the material world, which ‘hair shirt’ environmentalists are often accused of (ironically so, as they spend their days trying to protect it), the new materialism represents a more deeply pleasurable and respectful relationship to the material things that surround us. Having more stuff stopped making people in Britain happier decades ago

Here is another example..take a client i have whose depression is caught up inextricably with the internet.....he is in this sense experiencing a post-human dilemma,,who is he? Is his identity within him anymore? is his 'self' a product of the conglomeration of the net, his network online..the human-inanimate divide is no possible?

Lets see if really does become the next turn in road....certainly it related directly to a number of other things I been reading, particularly Lakoff's book on Embodiment, which argue for the dissolution of mind-body dualism and you can also see how it has affiliations with Bahktin's concepts relating to the 'self'.

Is it possible, however, that philosophers have just arrived  at an ancient place, non-dualism, visited by Taoism and Buddhism many centuries ago?

ICQI2015: Highlights of Day 1

Today I attended the fifth Psychology meeting for qualitative researchers. It was pretty amazing to meet thirty people all with similar concerns to me.
The highlights:
1. A growing realisation that I am way behind on understanding theory in Psychology. Thomas Teo gave a wonderful overview, especially on the ontological crises in our field and the dominance of the rational machine model in quant research.
2. I need to follow up the work of Ian Hacking on how diagnosis has a looping effect, creating on the diagnosed the fulfilment of its aims, a form of self-pathologising that confirms the medical model.
3. That I have no idea what post-humanism and the new materialism is and must find out at a talk tomorrow
4. That psychology can be a problem creator, psychologising socially derived issues rather than a problem solver
5. That epistomologically the best journals may be the least progressive
6. Teaching qualitative research, flipped, can involve actually doing a mini project, interviewing and coding, but must also include a history
7. Heather Adams gave some very clear examples on how to write ourselves into the research rather than being invisible

Episto-WTF? An Introduction to Epistomology

An engineer, an experimental physicist, a theoretical physicist, and a philosopher were hiking together through the hills of Scotland. They reached a hilltop. Looking over to the nexthilltop, they saw a black sheep. 

In delight, the engineer cried, “What do you know? The sheep in Scotland are black!” 

“Well, some of the sheep in Scotland are black,” replied the experimental physicist. 

The theoretical physicist considered this a minute, then said, “Well, at least one of the sheep in Scotland is black.” 

The philosopher thought for a second, then responded, “Well, it’s black on one side, anyway.”

What is epistomology? is a question that comes up a lot in my lectures so I thought id try for a brief introduction...it is a philosophical concept that is fundamental to doing research...


Essentially it is the branch of philosophy that looks at notions of knowledge, particularly tackling the question of whether something can ever be considered true or not.....if your a determinist you believe truth is out there (and in many cases quantitative researcher you are more likely to seek generalisable truths)... although in reality many scientists might shy away from the idea that scientific method can find truth rather than approximations...

....if you are a social contructionist you are more likely to see truth as a somewhat ridiculous concept given that "truths" are constructed socially, through dominant narratives that can keep us from living 'preferred' lives...

Of course, it all lies on a continuum..grounded theory is more likely to be modernist, unless you go round the post-modern turn by using situational analysis... interpretative phenomenology is somewhere in the middle (contructivist?)...discourse analysis looks directly at deconstructing language and revealing how notions of truth can be nothing more than power plays..

....below excellent slides re: psychology

Epistemologies for qualitative research

View more documents from marilini1ili

...a brilliant article HERE
Making connections: The relationship between epistemology and  research methods

The Australian Community Psychologist                                                                                                                     Volume 19  No 1 May 2007
Dawn Darlaston-Jones
University of Notre Dame, Australia
The ability to identify the relationship between the epistemological foundation of research and the methods employed in conducting it is critical in order for research to be truly meaningful. Unfortunately this connection is  often not taught in the research methods classes that most psychology students experience. Indeed the very names of these units emphasises the focus on methods and consequently the epistemology, theoretical frameworks and methodologies that influence the choice of  methods remain ‘hidden’ from view. This paper brings into focus these hidden (or often overlooked and ignored) elements of research and illustrates the importance and relevance  by drawing on example from the author’s research into the student experience of higher education.  

Do We Need to Know Philosophy?

A long time ago I remember enrolling in a few philosophy courses, covering Greek right up to social constructionism, I also tackled Foulcault's Birth of the Clinic and unsuccessfully read Derrida like every good liberal academic should but I am finding that many of my students aren't conversant in this field even though Psychology is essentially applied philosophy at it's core.

I would argue that clinicians need to understand basic philosophy is they are to learn more than technique and understand the paradigm and approach of the models they work by. See Burnham J. (1992). Approach - Method - Technique, Creating distinctions and creating connections. Human Systems , 3, 3-27 for more on this topic.

But what about researchers? Is there also a risk here that be are in danger of becoming technicians if we dont understand the epistomological basis of the methods we use? Can we simply pick from methods like a tool box? Is it possible to do a RCT one year and then a Discourse analysis piece of work the next? Can you do a mixed methods study employing methods from disparate epistomologies? 

Reminds me of a joke... "A scientist and his wife are out for a drive in the country. The wife says, 'Oh, look! Those sheep have been shorn.' "'Yes,' says the scientist. 'On this side.'" Get it?

Here's another philosophy joke: "A blind man, a lesbian, and a frog walk into a bar. The barkeep looks up at them and says, 'What is this — a joke?'"

If you get these your safe!