Leigh is Associate Professor at Inland Norway University of Applied Science, Faculty of Education and Pedagogy, Lillehammer. She is also an honorary Senior Research Associate of the Learning and Research Center, Rhodes University and an Emeritus Research Associate of Institute of Education, University College London. She is General Editor of the Journal of Critical Realism, Director of the Roy Bhaskar Centre for Critical Realism and a member of the Centre for Critical Realism. Supervisors: Heila Lotz Sisitka, Annette Gough, Bruce Campbell, and Peter Frost
This themed issue of Journal of Critical Realism has a focus on interdisciplinarity, health and w... more This themed issue of Journal of Critical Realism has a focus on interdisciplinarity, health and well-being. Specifically, the articles address topics such as homelessness (Hastings), obesity (Kanagasingam et al.), alcoholism (Edwards and Burton), urban planning (Næss), issues of democracy and accountability in contexts of work safety (Weihe and Smith-Solbakken), the effect of neoliberalism on health (Alderson), and debates about mental health (Pilgrim). However, despite their varied content, each article shares a common engagement with interdisciplinarity. Critical realists will not be surprised that interdisciplinarity features in all the articles submitted to this issue, because, in the words of Bhaskar:
Why critical realism, environmental learning and social- ecological change? Introducing the book ... more Why critical realism, environmental learning and social- ecological change? Introducing the book The contemporary social-ecological condition is characterized by powerful changes in the way that we relate to each other and to the environment. This has led to increased ecological vulnerability, which is also accompanied by ongoing, and increased societal vulnerability. Nevertheless there remain opportunities for developing new social-ecological relations, and for social-ecological learning and change. This would seem to require a strong project of recovering ontology, and a challenging and broadening of dominant ways of knowing (Mignolo, 2000) that also tend to commit what Bhaskar describes as the ‘epistemic fallacy’, or the ‘the analysis or reduction of being to knowledge of being’ (Bhaskar, 2010, p. 1). In response, Bhaskar (ibid.) suggests critical realism as an alternative that embodies a ‘compatibility of ontological realism, epistemological relativism and judgmental rationality’. This includes a ‘re-vindication of ontology’ and the possibility of recognizing and accounting for structure, difference and change in the world in ways that escape ontological actualism and ontological monovalence or ‘the generation of a purely positive account of reality’ (ibid., p. 15). Addressing the social-ecological concerns of our times would seem to require intentional human agency of all ‘planetary subjects’1 (Spivak, 1999, p. 46), to achieve transformation towards sustainability in ways that ensure the flourishing of all current and future generations. Bhaskar (2008 [1993], p. 9) describes agency as: ‘radically transformed transformative praxis, oriented to rationably ground able projects’. This implies a role for education and social learning, as transformative praxis involves knowledge, values, skills, beliefs and motives that are learned in various sociocultural and educational contexts, both formal and informal. Bhaskar (2010), arguing from the standpoint of concrete utopianism, suggests that a key role for intellectuals and educators is be involved in the envisaging of alternative possible futures for humanity. The field of environmental education has been engaging with these ideas and possibilities for the past 40 or more years, but has experienced difficulties which are ascribed to underlying commitments to unten able philosophical positions of either positivism, participation or postmodernism (Price, 2007). In this book we explore how critical realism can offer possibilities that overcome these difficulties. In doing this, we recognize that our efforts are necessarily fallible, partial and incomplete since all of our efforts take place in open systems. Southern Africa, where most of these book chapters originate, has been identified as one of the regions of the world most at risk of the consequences of environmental degradation and climate change (UNEP, 2006; IPCC, 2014). At the same time, it is still seeking ways to overcome the century-long ravages of colonial and apartheid impositions, structural and epistemic violence (Neocosmos, 2012). Research deliberations and applied research case studies from this region provide an emerging contextualized engagement that is related to a wider internationally articulated quest to achieve social-ecological justice, resilience and sustainability through educational interventions. This book introduces a decade of mainly southern African critical realist environmental education research and thinking that asks the question: ‘How can we facilitate learning processes that will lead to the flourishing of the Earth’s people and ecosystems in more socially just ways?’ Many of the contributions in this book arise from academic work supervised and supported by the Rhodes University Environmental Learning Research Centre where explorations of critical realist scholarship emerged following the work of Price (2007). The environmental education research topics represented in this book are wide-ranging. However, they all exhibit the common theme of social justice and wanting to create change towards a better future. All the authors have used critical realist or critical realistinfluenced research methodologies. They represent a small but growing community of researchers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many southern African researchers decided to use critical realism as a result of similar frustrations to those that originally motivated the founder of critical realism, Roy Bhaskar (1944-2014).2,3 Essentially, Bhaskar wanted to contribute to making the world a better place. However, he was frustrated to discover that he was not allowed to talk about the world, only about theories of the world. Against the flow of contemporary philosophy of science at the time, he countered this prohibition by arguing that to change the world, and to change our beliefs about the world, it is necessary to have a conception of the world. If one says that a belief about the world is inadequate then there must be…
ABSTRACT This article presents a philosophy of science for ecology – deep naturalism – based on R... more ABSTRACT This article presents a philosophy of science for ecology – deep naturalism – based on Roy Bhaskar’s transcendental realism. It includes a model of the emergence of ecosystems, analogous to the Transformational Model of Social Activity, that I call the Emergence Model of Ecosystem Resilience. It also proposes the following definition of ecosystem resilience: the process by which the internal complexity of an ecosystem and its coherence as a whole – stemming from the relative ‘richness’ or ‘modularity’ of emergent structures and behaviours/growth/life-history of species – results in the inter-dependencies of its components or their binding as totalities such that the identity of the ecosystem tends to remain intact, despite intrinsic and/or extrinsic entropic forces. This definition is significantly different from mainstream, empiricist definitions.
Bhaskar's philosophy supports society via a process of homeostasis to resist socioecological syst... more Bhaskar's philosophy supports society via a process of homeostasis to resist socioecological system disintegration by developing its values and ethics in response to endogenous and exogenous change. To the contrary, positivist (first generation) and hermeneuticist (second generation) approaches to systems theory have distorted humanity's mechanism of homeostasis because, amongst other things, they disallow the use of facts to guide values/actions. Since acting on knowledge is, ceteris paribus, a given in Bhaskar's approach, resolving socioecological system problems involves correcting the method of homeostasis (our method of finding knowledge and acting on it) rather than correcting the consequences of the failure of homeostasis (the poorly informed action or inaction). This is reminiscent of Gandhi's approach to social transformation in which we trust the means to arrive at appropriate ends and it releases activists from having to be keepers of the moral high-ground or having to try to change people's behaviour.
This themed issue of Journal of Critical Realism has a focus on interdisciplinarity, health and w... more This themed issue of Journal of Critical Realism has a focus on interdisciplinarity, health and well-being. Specifically, the articles address topics such as homelessness (Hastings), obesity (Kanagasingam et al.), alcoholism (Edwards and Burton), urban planning (Næss), issues of democracy and accountability in contexts of work safety (Weihe and Smith-Solbakken), the effect of neoliberalism on health (Alderson), and debates about mental health (Pilgrim). However, despite their varied content, each article shares a common engagement with interdisciplinarity. Critical realists will not be surprised that interdisciplinarity features in all the articles submitted to this issue, because, in the words of Bhaskar:
Why critical realism, environmental learning and social- ecological change? Introducing the book ... more Why critical realism, environmental learning and social- ecological change? Introducing the book The contemporary social-ecological condition is characterized by powerful changes in the way that we relate to each other and to the environment. This has led to increased ecological vulnerability, which is also accompanied by ongoing, and increased societal vulnerability. Nevertheless there remain opportunities for developing new social-ecological relations, and for social-ecological learning and change. This would seem to require a strong project of recovering ontology, and a challenging and broadening of dominant ways of knowing (Mignolo, 2000) that also tend to commit what Bhaskar describes as the ‘epistemic fallacy’, or the ‘the analysis or reduction of being to knowledge of being’ (Bhaskar, 2010, p. 1). In response, Bhaskar (ibid.) suggests critical realism as an alternative that embodies a ‘compatibility of ontological realism, epistemological relativism and judgmental rationality’. This includes a ‘re-vindication of ontology’ and the possibility of recognizing and accounting for structure, difference and change in the world in ways that escape ontological actualism and ontological monovalence or ‘the generation of a purely positive account of reality’ (ibid., p. 15). Addressing the social-ecological concerns of our times would seem to require intentional human agency of all ‘planetary subjects’1 (Spivak, 1999, p. 46), to achieve transformation towards sustainability in ways that ensure the flourishing of all current and future generations. Bhaskar (2008 [1993], p. 9) describes agency as: ‘radically transformed transformative praxis, oriented to rationably ground able projects’. This implies a role for education and social learning, as transformative praxis involves knowledge, values, skills, beliefs and motives that are learned in various sociocultural and educational contexts, both formal and informal. Bhaskar (2010), arguing from the standpoint of concrete utopianism, suggests that a key role for intellectuals and educators is be involved in the envisaging of alternative possible futures for humanity. The field of environmental education has been engaging with these ideas and possibilities for the past 40 or more years, but has experienced difficulties which are ascribed to underlying commitments to unten able philosophical positions of either positivism, participation or postmodernism (Price, 2007). In this book we explore how critical realism can offer possibilities that overcome these difficulties. In doing this, we recognize that our efforts are necessarily fallible, partial and incomplete since all of our efforts take place in open systems. Southern Africa, where most of these book chapters originate, has been identified as one of the regions of the world most at risk of the consequences of environmental degradation and climate change (UNEP, 2006; IPCC, 2014). At the same time, it is still seeking ways to overcome the century-long ravages of colonial and apartheid impositions, structural and epistemic violence (Neocosmos, 2012). Research deliberations and applied research case studies from this region provide an emerging contextualized engagement that is related to a wider internationally articulated quest to achieve social-ecological justice, resilience and sustainability through educational interventions. This book introduces a decade of mainly southern African critical realist environmental education research and thinking that asks the question: ‘How can we facilitate learning processes that will lead to the flourishing of the Earth’s people and ecosystems in more socially just ways?’ Many of the contributions in this book arise from academic work supervised and supported by the Rhodes University Environmental Learning Research Centre where explorations of critical realist scholarship emerged following the work of Price (2007). The environmental education research topics represented in this book are wide-ranging. However, they all exhibit the common theme of social justice and wanting to create change towards a better future. All the authors have used critical realist or critical realistinfluenced research methodologies. They represent a small but growing community of researchers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many southern African researchers decided to use critical realism as a result of similar frustrations to those that originally motivated the founder of critical realism, Roy Bhaskar (1944-2014).2,3 Essentially, Bhaskar wanted to contribute to making the world a better place. However, he was frustrated to discover that he was not allowed to talk about the world, only about theories of the world. Against the flow of contemporary philosophy of science at the time, he countered this prohibition by arguing that to change the world, and to change our beliefs about the world, it is necessary to have a conception of the world. If one says that a belief about the world is inadequate then there must be…
ABSTRACT This article presents a philosophy of science for ecology – deep naturalism – based on R... more ABSTRACT This article presents a philosophy of science for ecology – deep naturalism – based on Roy Bhaskar’s transcendental realism. It includes a model of the emergence of ecosystems, analogous to the Transformational Model of Social Activity, that I call the Emergence Model of Ecosystem Resilience. It also proposes the following definition of ecosystem resilience: the process by which the internal complexity of an ecosystem and its coherence as a whole – stemming from the relative ‘richness’ or ‘modularity’ of emergent structures and behaviours/growth/life-history of species – results in the inter-dependencies of its components or their binding as totalities such that the identity of the ecosystem tends to remain intact, despite intrinsic and/or extrinsic entropic forces. This definition is significantly different from mainstream, empiricist definitions.
Bhaskar's philosophy supports society via a process of homeostasis to resist socioecological syst... more Bhaskar's philosophy supports society via a process of homeostasis to resist socioecological system disintegration by developing its values and ethics in response to endogenous and exogenous change. To the contrary, positivist (first generation) and hermeneuticist (second generation) approaches to systems theory have distorted humanity's mechanism of homeostasis because, amongst other things, they disallow the use of facts to guide values/actions. Since acting on knowledge is, ceteris paribus, a given in Bhaskar's approach, resolving socioecological system problems involves correcting the method of homeostasis (our method of finding knowledge and acting on it) rather than correcting the consequences of the failure of homeostasis (the poorly informed action or inaction). This is reminiscent of Gandhi's approach to social transformation in which we trust the means to arrive at appropriate ends and it releases activists from having to be keepers of the moral high-ground or having to try to change people's behaviour.
This presentation explains why we need interdisciplinarity, and how we can achieve it. We need in... more This presentation explains why we need interdisciplinarity, and how we can achieve it. We need interdisciplinarity because the world has a deep, structured ontology as the result of the process of emergence. For instance, society is emergent from people, as is summarised by the Transformational Model of Social Activity.The different layers of the world require different disciplines to be understood. We are able to surmise the existence of the deep layers of the world via the logic of retroduction, which provides theories about transfactual (transdisciplinary) structures and mechanisms.Transdisciplinary theories, such as Marx's theory of labour or de Beauvoir's theory of sexism, provide the mechanism by which we can move from multidisciplinarity to the integrated understanding of interdisciplinarity.
This presentation critiques mainstream empircist science, and offers a non-empiricist alternative... more This presentation critiques mainstream empircist science, and offers a non-empiricist alternative. It describes how this alternative version of science better addresses ecological issues than the current mainstream version.
This article presents a philosophy of ecology-deep naturalism-based on Roy Bhaskar's transcendent... more This article presents a philosophy of ecology-deep naturalism-based on Roy Bhaskar's transcendental realism. It includes a model of the emergence of ecosystems, analogous to the Transformational Model of Social Activity, that I call the Emergence Model of Ecosystem Resilience. It also proposes the following definition of ecosystem resilience: the process by which the internal complexity of an ecosystem and its coherence as a whole-stemming from the relative 'richness' or 'modularity' of emergent structures and behaviours/growth/life-history of species-results in the inter-dependencies of its components or their binding as totalities such that the identity of the ecosystem tends to remain intact, despite intrinsic and/or extrinsic entropic forces. This definition is significantly different from mainstream, empiricist definitions. Introduction There is little discussion about the philosophy of ecology. A rare, but useful, exception is provided by DeLaplante, Brown, and Peacock (2011); however, their book is useful not because it resolves the aporiae of contemporary philosophy of ecology, but because it offers a point of reference for them. An example of an aporia from this book is the idea that ecologists do not actually believe that what they are studying is real:
This Editorial provides an introduction to the key aspects of the contributions by imminent criti... more This Editorial provides an introduction to the key aspects of the contributions by imminent critical realists, such as Margaret Archer, Doug Porpora, Andrew Sayer and others, to the special issue on Normativity. It attempts to place these contributions in terms of their relationship to the work of Roy Bhaskar. To achieve this goal, the Editorial provides the readers with an outline of Roy Bhaskar's secular - science-based - approach to discovering the values that society needs in order to develop a version of normativity that will facilitate the flourishing of all. It therefore explains how Bhaskar manages to allow facts to legitimately inform values without falling foul of the problems usually associated with such an approach, namely the tyranny of both absolutism and unreflected prejudices.
Although I agree with Elder-Vass’s desire to achieve an anti-positivist, anti-relativist axiology... more Although I agree with Elder-Vass’s desire to achieve an anti-positivist, anti-relativist axiology, and his political commitment to equality, his paper raised some questions. First, Elder-Vass’s critique of ‘moral realism’ is not a critique of Bhaskarian moral realism, but rather a critique of a misrepresented form of it, typically, but not uniquely, associated with a morally conservative sub-set of the critical realist community. Second, Elder-Vass’s choice of an alternative axiology – based on Habermas’s discourse principle – is unfortunate given his objectives. This is because Habermas’s discourse principle is, ironically, positivist, relativist and likely to uphold the ideology that maintains the status quo of social inequality. Third, Elder-Vass is demonstrably a moral realist, despite his protestations otherwise. In the process of critiquing the axiology suggested by Elder-Vass, I explain why the mistakes highlighted are necessary in the context in which they are found, that is, in a socially-conservative/religious context. Specifically, the mistakes prevent challenges to religious morality and provide a method of hiding contradictions that might threaten the status quo. At the end of the paper, I suggest an alternative axiology to that of Habermas’s discourse principle, based on Bhaskar’s dialectic. I call it the values-to-facts and facts-to-values (VFFV) discourse principle.
This presentation offered a way to achieve ethical practice via depth explanations, reflexivity a... more This presentation offered a way to achieve ethical practice via depth explanations, reflexivity and praxis
Integral Theory Conference, San FranPrice, L. (2013, July). Re-enchanting research: transdisciplinarity as prIntegral Theory Conference July 2013, San Francisco., 2013
In this paper I define enchanting as "providing a feeling of great liking for something wonderful... more In this paper I define enchanting as "providing a feeling of great liking for something wonderful and fascinating". Research would be wonderful and fascinating if it potentially contributed towards creating a society of flourishing humans. Furthermore, because research is about discovery and the creative development of new knowledge (the delightful aha! moment) it should also be accompanied by enchanting feelings of awe and wonder, such as are usually attendant at moments of joyous first experiences. Behind these hopeful claims for research is the related suspicion that most contemporary social research produces ambivalent feelings about the possibility of achieving well-being and tends to be comparatively uncreative and therefore lack-lustre, lending itself to nihilism, oppression and slavery, despite its claims otherwise. To illustrate my argument, I describe how I struggled to reconcile mainstream actualist (including positivist and empiricist) research and mainstream postmodern research in such a way as to justify and achieve my desire to ensure that my PhD research into environmental education in business and industry contributed in some small way to world change for the better. In the end, I found a solution in the work of critical realist Roy Bhaskar. I then discuss Bhaskar's practical mysticism which is consistent with a thisworldly mysticism. Practical mysticism is also based on an understanding of being as essentially nondual. Therefore the transdisciplinary researcheras practical mysticwill understand how the creative research process includes 'no mind' or achieving transcendental identification with the bliss-consciousness of non-dual being, also known as 'sat-chit-anand'. Furthermore, if one has an objective to improve some state of affairs, since we are essentially nondual, this necessarily involves a commitment to self as well as universal realisation. Much (but not all) of my methodological journey is reminiscent of the path taken by Ken Wilber and his followers. Amongst other things, our similarities include that: we are motivated by the objective of achieving real transformation towards healthy people and societies; we acknowledge that to accomplish this goal it is necessary to integrate the different academic disciplines (from natural science to theology); we realise that transformation involves personal transformation as well as changes to the world; and we agree that mysticism or spirituality (as it is called by some) is not only necessary but unavoidable in research contexts.
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