Reconstructing Rawls and exposing the implicit social embeddedness of theories of justice

Taylor, Peter J., “Reconstructing Rawls and exposing the implicit social embeddedness of theories of justice” (1995). Working Papers in Critical, Creative and Reflective Practice. 4.
https://scholarworks.umb.edu/cct_ccrp/4
This essay (from 1995) prods moral philosophy towards more explicit attention to the political constructions of injustice. I do not appeal to practical or political relevance, but advance a particular kind of constructivist interpretation of moral argumentation (constructivism+) in which our interpretive horizons are extended to include the implicit views of social action, broadly construed—from the macro- to the micro-social, and from the past to the present and the possible—built into philosophical arguments.

ThinkTank, a day-and-half model (updated)

An update on an earlier blog post, composed to suggest a way that participants’ interests and energies could be engaged over the day and a half of a ThinkTank on topic X. That post was prepared after looking back at what happened (and didn’t) during a “thinktank” that went from evening of one day to lunchtime a day and a half later. This update follows a similar workshop of the same length and qualities (i.e., ample funding, a diverse group of inspiring participants brought together to move ideas into [further] action,…)

Food for thought (if you don’t insist on pure foods)

Have we constituted a group that might effectively promote a new organization of scientists (or inquirers)?

Thought-piece by Peter Taylor circulated by email soon after the “Ecology at the Boundary of Human Systems” workshop, March 2000.
1. Have we constituted a group that might effectively promote a new organization of scientists (or inquirers)? [Referring to proposal for American Federation of Scientists]
2. What would we need to do to assess this likelihood? What inquiry would we need?
3. How would we support each other to pursue that inquiry?

Hope or shift to the other side of one of a series of alternations

Time and again she comes running towards you with a bunch of hopes she has found and picked in the undergrowth of the times we are living. And you remember that hope is not a guarantee for tomorrow, but a detonator of energy for action today.

Let’s imagine the “she” referred to in this quote by John Berger, the late English Marxist art critic and social commentator, is oneself

KAQ(F): pragmatic, interactive, pedagogical, STS

KAQ(F) is a schema in which the following items are considered in relation to each other:
K—What do I Know? (or claim to know)
A—Action: What actions could people pursue on the basis of accepting this knowledge?
Q—Questions for inquiry: What more do I need to Know—in order to clarify what people could do (A) or to revise/refine/support the knowledge claim (K)?
(F)—How to Find this out? (Methods, Steps…)

Close reading, PBL, and tensions

A tension that has arisen often in conversations between my co-instructor and myself as we prepared for an upcoming course in life science, gender, and race, texts… – by tension I don’t mean something that is a disagreement or even something that has to be resolved, indeed perhaps the essence of co-teaching is that there are tensions to be played out in real time. The tension is that she understands that we cannot assign hundreds of pages to be read each week and still follow the project-based learning (PBL) process of the course, yet she knows how much her scholarship and her teaching revolves around very close reading of texts.

Compilation of links distributed to Thinktank on Science and Social Justice education

“…Bringing critical analysis of science to bear on the practice and applications of science has not been well developed or supported institutionally. Given this, I have contributed actively to the development of society-at-a-small-scale, through new collaborations, programs, and other activities, new directions for existing programs, and collegial interactions across disciplines and regions…” (from Intersecting Processes: complexity and change in environment, biomedicine and society)

Learning as if schools did not matter, but gender & racial subordination was always to be challenged

Through a Rapid PBL activity (2 hours) students and instructors in a graduate course created their own ‘briefings’ “to help you and others when you teach learn and get support to move in the direction of more feminist pedagogy, especially around science.” Here is mine (which I now want to rethink so its has a clearer grounding in feminism).

Critical thinking, Creative thinking & Gender

A. Consider this schema that I used to discuss the idea of creativity in context:

It is clearly complex: Many strands, many cross-connections, many things going on in addition to the focal outcome.