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Re-Interpreting Theory

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Created: January 7, 2002
Latest Update: January 7, 2002
E-Mail jeannecurran@habermas.org

Transforming Theory Construction

Copyright: Jeanne Curran, Susan Takata. January 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

The traditional academy has monopolized theory construction and the writing of theory by setting them apart from praxis and by reserving them for the most elite. This wasn't such a problem until issues of colonialization were bruited about even within the academy, albeit in the back hallways. Today, with the need to stop global violence and find some means of peacefully living together, we suggest that it is time to reinterpret theory construction.

This isn't a postmodern howl, or the standard complaint that students just don't want to devote themselves anymore to theory construction and all that entails. Actually, it's pretty much the opposite. Our students really do care, and they would like to study theory intensely. They just don't get the chance. Bourdieu reminds us in his studies of Academic Discourse that we don't teach students to take part in such discourse. We simply immerse them in the academy and presume that they will acquire the skills of discourse by osmosis.

And we tend to assume that this innoculation with academic discourse belongs in the academy. Balderdash! Theory is exciting, particularly in times such as these when we are being forced to confront our sacred cows. The complicity of denial, the willingness to insist that the current war is not related to political strategy for energy resources, but to revenge for evil, is disingenuous. Academics should have enough schooling to know that political strategies are complex. They should know of the "New Great Game" 1.

Susan, I'm making intellectual leaps right now, but have a headache. Here's general idea:

This kind of stratification maybe made sense several decades ago. The world was then moving slowly enough that we could follow traditional pathways. But the explosions in population and technology mean that today Ph.D.s no longer have the quality time for the research they once had. Seed money for grants dried up. Money period dried up, and doctoral students who were once privileged to share in the academic discourse at major institutions find more of the workload being forced on them. The average professsor at the myriad local commuter colleges are teaching overload with little discretionary think time for research. That means that many of us with Ph.D.s are underfunded and undersupported. But research at the university level is what keeps the disciplines alive and healthy. New ways to share the labor and need to be explored.

This doesn't mean getting someone else to do the trivial technical work so that we "scholars" can retreat to our offices to think in peace. It means rolling up our sleeves and working together. We have run an experimental program for more than 15 years at two state universities. This study is an interim evaluation report aimed at exploring effective field evaluation of innovative programs, in particular this program focussed on peace and social justice.

Endnotes

1. Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban, 2001. Chapter x, pp. x-x.

Notes
  • theory construction exclusionary and totalizing
  • but theory is used in personal conclusions
  • four year experiment of grounded theory - we just did it.
    We tried asking our students for permission to use their writing for our research. Didn't work. Didn't make sense to either them or us. Now we're discovering they do write, for the site, they do dialog with us - this is how we learned to make the personal part of our theory development.
  • Some piece of theory development should include the local, the narrative that doesn't come from the meta perspective. The expert and the popularizer and the real people. Without the inclusion of teacher and student you are locking the real practitioners out of the loop.
  • Praxis must either be controlled or open to those engaged in the practice.
  • This comes out of a concern to avoid structural violence, and that comes out of a concern to recognize that theory looks nice on paper but in real life you gotta deal with real warlords and real victims. Not to teach peace education this way is to not teach peace education. Freire.