Sustainability Science: a Paradigm in Crisis?
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The Philosophical Underpinnings of Educational Research
The Philosophical Underpinnings of Educational Research Lindsay Mack Abstract This article traces the underlying theoretical framework of educational research. It outlines the definitions of epistemology, ontology and paradigm and the origins, main tenets, and key thinkers of the 3 paradigms; positivist, interpetivist and critical. By closely analyzing each paradigm, the literature review focuses on the ontological and epistemological assumptions of each paradigm. Finally the author analyzes not only the paradigm’s weakness but also the author’s own construct of reality and knowledge which align with the critical paradigm. Key terms: Paradigm, Ontology, Epistemology, Positivism, Interpretivism The English Language Teaching (ELT) field has moved from an ad hoc field with amateurish research to a much more serious enterprise of professionalism. More teachers are conducting research to not only inform their teaching in the classroom but also to bridge the gap between the external researcher dictating policy and the teacher negotiating that policy with the practical demands of their classroom. I was a layperson, not an educational researcher. Determined to emancipate myself from my layperson identity, I began to analyze the different philosophical underpinnings of each paradigm, reading about the great thinkers’ theories and the evolution of social science research. Through this process I began to examine how I view the world, thus realizing my own construction of knowledge and social reality, which is actually quite loose and chaotic. Most importantly, I realized that I identify most with the critical paradigm assumptions and that my future desired role as an educational researcher is to affect change and challenge dominant social and political discourses in ELT. -
Thomas Kuhn on Paradigms
Vol. 29, No. 7, July 2020, pp. 1650–1657 DOI 10.1111/poms.13188 ISSN 1059-1478|EISSN 1937-5956|20|2907|1650 © 2020 Production and Operations Management Society Thomas Kuhn on Paradigms Gopesh Anand Department of Business Administration, Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 469 Wohlers Hall, 1206 South Sixth Street, Champaign, Illinois 61820, USA, [email protected] Eric C. Larson Department of Business Administration, Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 8 Wohlers Hall, 1206 S. Sixth, Champaign, Illinois 61820, USA, [email protected] Joseph T. Mahoney* Department of Business Administration, Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 140C Wohlers Hall, 1206 South Sixth Street, Champaign, Illinois 61820, USA, [email protected] his study provides key arguments and contributions of Kuhn (1970) concerning paradigms, paradigm shifts, and sci- T entific revolutions. We provide interpretations of Kuhn’s (1970) key ideas and concepts, especially as they relate to business management research. We conclude by considering the practical implications of paradigms and paradigm shifts for contemporary business management researchers and suggest that ethical rules of conversation are at least as critical for the health of a scientific community as methodological rules (e.g., the rules of logical positivism) derived from the phi- losophy of science. Key words: Paradigms; paradigm shifts; scientific revolutions; normal science History: Received: February 2019; Accepted: March 2020 by Kalyan Singhal, after 3 revisions. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions the rich descriptions of the process of advancing this theory. SSR showed that science primarily advances Thomas S. -
Food Forests: Their Services and Sustainability
Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development ISSN: 2152-0801 online https://foodsystemsjournal.org Food forests: Their services and sustainability Stefanie Albrecht a * Leuphana University Lüneburg Arnim Wiek b Arizona State University Submitted July 29, 2020 / Revised October 22, 2020, and February 8, 2021 / Accepted Febuary 8, 2021 / Published online July 10, 2021 Citation: Albrecht, S., & Wiek, A (2021). Food forests: Their services and sustainability. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 10(3), 91–105. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2021.103.014 Copyright © 2021 by the Authors. Published by the Lyson Center for Civic Agriculture and Food Systems. Open access under CC-BY license. Abstract detailed insights on 14 exemplary food forests in Industrialized food systems use unsustainable Europe, North America, and South America, practices leading to climate change, natural gained through site visits and interviews. We resource depletion, economic disparities across the present and illustrate the main services that food value chain, and detrimental impacts on public forests provide and assess their sustainability. The health. In contrast, alternative food solutions such findings indicate that the majority of food forests as food forests have the potential to provide perform well on social-cultural and environmental healthy food, sufficient livelihoods, environmental criteria by building capacity, providing food, services, and spaces for recreation, education, and enhancing biodiversity, and regenerating soil, community building. This study compiles evidence among others. However, for broader impact, food from more than 200 food forests worldwide, with forests need to go beyond the provision of social- cultural and environmental services and enhance a * Corresponding author: Stefanie Albrecht, Doctoral student, their economic viability. -
The Greifswalder Theory of Strong Sustainability and Its Relevance for Policy Advice in Germany and the EU
Sustainability Science – The Greifswalder Theory of Strong Sustainability and its relevance for policy advice in Germany and the EU Ralf Döring* , Barbara Muraca 1 *Johann Heinrich von Thünen - Federal Institute for Rural Areas, Forestry and Fisheries, Germany Abstract The Greifswald approach was developed over many years in the co-operation of environmental philosophers and ecological economists. The theory combines normative arguments on our responsibilities for current and future generations (intra- and intergenerational justice), the conceptual debate on weak vs. strong sustainability, a new concept for natural capital with practical applications in three sectors: fisheries, agriculture and climate change policy. It was developed as an answer to the increasingly vague understanding of the sustainability concept in the political arena, which gives politicians the possibility of subsuming under it all sorts of different programs and strategies. A sharper definition of the concept is needed that offers a non-arbitrary orientation ground for action to end the further loss of essential parts of natural capital without becoming too rigid and exclusive of differences. In this paper we give firstly a short overview about the philosophical background of the theory and about the conceptual debate on weak and strong sustainability. Secondly, we depict our concept of Natural Capital, which draws on Georgescu-Roegen’s systematic framework of fund, stock, services, and flows and focuses on a central characteristic of nature: its (re)productivity. Accordingly, natural capital consists of living funds, non-living funds, and stocks. This differentiation offers a helpful ground for identifying specific preservation goals for the different parts of natural capital and can be successfully employed in the advice for policy makers (as it has been the case with the German Advisory Council for the Environment over a decade). -
The Demarcation Problem
Part I The Demarcation Problem 25 Chapter 1 Popper’s Falsifiability Criterion 1.1 Popper’s Falsifiability Popper’s Problem : To distinguish between science and pseudo-science (astronomy vs astrology) - Important distinction: truth is not the issue – some theories are sci- entific and false, and some may be unscientific but true. - Traditional but unsatisfactory answers: empirical method - Popper’s targets: Marx, Freud, Adler Popper’s thesis : Falsifiability – the theory contains claims which could be proved to be false. Characteristics of Pseudo-Science : unfalsifiable - Any phenomenon can be interpreted in terms of the pseudo-scientific theory “Whatever happened always confirmed it” (5) - Example: man drowning vs saving a child Characteristics of Science : falsifiability - A scientific theory is always takes risks concerning the empirical ob- servations. It contains the possibility of being falsified. There is con- firmation only when there is failure to refute. 27 28 CHAPTER 1. POPPER’S FALSIFIABILITY CRITERION “The theory is incompatible with certain possible results of observation” (6) - Example: Einstein 1919 1.2 Kuhn’s criticism of Popper Kuhn’s Criticism of Popper : Popper’s falsifiability criterion fails to char- acterize science as it is actually practiced. His criticism at best applies to revolutionary periods of the history of science. Another criterion must be given for normal science. Kuhn’s argument : - Kuhn’s distinction between normal science and revolutionary science - A lesson from the history of science: most science is normal science. Accordingly, philosophy of science should focus on normal science. And any satisfactory demarcation criterion must apply to normal science. - Popper’s falsifiability criterion at best only applies to revolutionary science, not to normal science. -
Challenges for Integration of Sustainability Into Engineering Education
AC 2012-4565: CHALLENGES FOR INTEGRATION OF SUSTAINABIL- ITY INTO ENGINEERING EDUCATION Dr. Qiong Zhang, University of South Florida Qiong Zhang is an Assistant Professor in civil and environmental engineering at the University of South Florida (USF). She received a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from Michigan Tech. Prior to joining the faculty at USF in 2009, she served as the Operations Manager of the Sustainable Future Institute at Michigan Tech. Dr. Linda Vanasupa, California Polytechnic State University Dr. James R. Mihelcic, University of South Florida James R. Mihelcic is a professor of civil and environmental engineering and state of Florida 21st Century World Class Scholar at the University of South Florida. He directs the Peace Corps master’s international program in civil and environmental engineering (http://cee.eng.usf.edu/peacecorps). Mihelcic is a Past President of the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP), a member of the EPA Science Advisory Board, and a board-certified member and Board Trustee of the American Academy of Environmental Engineers (AAEE). He is lead author for three textbooks: Fundamentals of Environmental Engineering (John Wiley & Sons, 1999); Field Guide in Environmental Engineering for Development Workers: Water, Sanitation, Indoor Air (ASCE Press, 2009); and, Environmental Engineer- ing: Fundamentals, Sustainability, Design (John Wiley & Sons, 2010). Dr. Julie Beth Zimmerman, Yale University Simona Platukyte, University of South Florida Page 25.294.1 Page c American Society for Engineering Education, 2012 Challenges for Integration of Sustainability into Engineering Education Abstract Due to the relative novelty of the subject of sustainability in the engineering community and its complexity, many challenges remain to successful integration of sustainability education in engineering. -
Functionalists Write, Too: Frazer/Malinowski and the Semiotics of the Monograph1
1 Functionalists Write, Too: Frazer/Malinowski and the Semiotics of the Monograph1 James A. Boon What does the ethnographer do? – he writes (Geertz 1973:19). art of the business of anthropology is to make superficially exotic practices appear familiar and superficially familiar practices exotic. PRegardless of how such practices are experienced by observers, they are interpreted by observers in writing: notes, articles, books. That ethnographic description and ethnological comparison occur as writing suggests the fundamental symbolic remove from whatever immediacy or presence anthropological discourse presumes to embody. All varieties of writing are semiotic systems – shifting signs and symbols that stand for (replace, substitute, differ from) what they are conventionally understood to ‘represent’. Moreover, any writing of ethnographic detail and ethnologi- cal generalization in whatever style or format is constrained by sets of rules and values that at their fullest extent we call cultures. Fieldwork – ‘being there’ – offers no exception to these semiotic facts. Fieldwork is not only a way of doing; it is also a device for writing, a format for organizing description, a conceit around which ethnographic discourse revolves. (It was not always so.) At this level fieldwork, despite the fact that it happens, is a ‘fiction’. Cross-cultural interpretation requires outside help, even when fieldwork works. Cultures cannot be penetrated simply with passports, survey sheets, statistics, genealogies, dictionaries; Source: Semiotica, vol. 46, nos. 2/4, 1983, pp. 131–149. 2 CONTEXTS AND CONTROVErsiES or intuition, benign tolerance, indomitable self-confidence, or studious self-effacement (although each of these may occasionally help!). Rather, cross-cultural interpretation must be made to happen; and it is made to happen by means of semiotic operations derived from sources beyond the conditions of fieldwork proper, as narrowly construed in the functio- nalist school. -
The Sustainability of Waste Management Models in Circular Economies
sustainability Article The Sustainability of Waste Management Models in Circular Economies Carmen Avilés-Palacios 1 and Ana Rodríguez-Olalla 2,* 1 Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería de Montes, Forestal y del Medio Natural, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, c/José Antonio Novais 10, 28040 Madrid, Spain; [email protected] 2 Departamento Economía de la Empresa (ADO), Economía Aplicada II y Fundamentos Análisis Económico, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Paseo de los Artilleros s/n, Vicálvaro, 28032 Madrid, Spain * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +34-910671632 Abstract: The circular economy (CE) is considered a key economic model to meet the challenge of sustainable development. Strenous efforts are focused on the transformation of waste into resources that can be reintroduced into the economic system through proper management. In this way, the linear and waste-producing value chain problems are solved, making them circular, and more sustainable solutions are proposed in those chains already benefiting from circular processes, so that waste generation and waste are reduced on the one hand, and on the other, the non-efficient consumption of resources decreases. In the face of this current tide, there is another option that proposes a certain nuance, based on the premise that, although circular systems promote sustainability, it does not mean that they are in themselves sustainable, given that, in the first place, the effects of CE on sustainable development are not fully known and, on the other hand, the CE model includes the flow of materials, with only scant consideration of the flow of non-material resources (water, soil and energy). -
Sacred Rhetorical Invention in the String Theory Movement
University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Communication Studies Theses, Dissertations, and Student Research Communication Studies, Department of Spring 4-12-2011 Secular Salvation: Sacred Rhetorical Invention in the String Theory Movement Brent Yergensen University of Nebraska-Lincoln, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/commstuddiss Part of the Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons Yergensen, Brent, "Secular Salvation: Sacred Rhetorical Invention in the String Theory Movement" (2011). Communication Studies Theses, Dissertations, and Student Research. 6. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/commstuddiss/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Communication Studies, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication Studies Theses, Dissertations, and Student Research by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. SECULAR SALVATION: SACRED RHETORICAL INVENTION IN THE STRING THEORY MOVEMENT by Brent Yergensen A DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Major: Communication Studies Under the Supervision of Dr. Ronald Lee Lincoln, Nebraska April, 2011 ii SECULAR SALVATION: SACRED RHETORICAL INVENTION IN THE STRING THEORY MOVEMENT Brent Yergensen, Ph.D. University of Nebraska, 2011 Advisor: Ronald Lee String theory is argued by its proponents to be the Theory of Everything. It achieves this status in physics because it provides unification for contradictory laws of physics, namely quantum mechanics and general relativity. While based on advanced theoretical mathematics, its public discourse is growing in prevalence and its rhetorical power is leading to a scientific revolution, even among the public. -
ANGELICA CAREY Focus: Urban Sustainability a Native from Lynn
Meet Our Students! PATRICK KELLEY JEREMY PRICE Focus: Environmental Quality Focus: Renewable Energy and Efficient Design I completed my undergraduate degree at Hampshire College with a concentration in environmental After completing his undergraduate studies at UMass,(B.S. Sustainable Community Development), and wildlife science. My thesis explored the usage of bird feathers as bioindicators of environmental Jeremy sought to strengthen his ability to effectively facilitate change, and enrolled in the Department ANGELICA CAREY contamination using mass spectrometry in the Cape Cod area. I love the environment and everything of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning’s (LARP) Master of Regional Planning Program. Jeremy Focus: Urban Sustainability that comes with it- wildlife, sunshine, hiking, swimming, and most of all, the beautiful, encouraging is the Peer Undergraduate Advisor/Mentor within LARP and also holds a Graduate Certificate in Climate A native from Lynn, Massachusetts, I attended UMass Amherst for my undergraduate degree in feeling of curiosity that it bestows. I like to think of the environment as the canvas to humankind’s Change and Green infrastructure Planning. Anthropology and Civic Environmentalism, a self-designed major from the BDIC program. After epic masterpiece. To put it simply, there’s really no way to paint without it, and that’s sort of where Looking to further explore the intersection between the environment, planning, and energy, he was graduating in 2012, I was accepted to teach K-5 General Music and 6-8 Choir with Teach for America, sustainability and environmental quality interests me. admitted to the MS3 program where he will concentrate in Renewable Energy and Efficient Design; in the small town of Palestine, Arkansas. -
Overturning the Paradigm of Identity with Gilles Deleuze's Differential
A Thesis entitled Difference Over Identity: Overturning the Paradigm of Identity With Gilles Deleuze’s Differential Ontology by Matthew G. Eckel Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy Dr. Ammon Allred, Committee Chair Dr. Benjamin Grazzini, Committee Member Dr. Benjamin Pryor, Committee Member Dr. Patricia R. Komuniecki, Dean College of Graduate Studies The University of Toledo May 2014 An Abstract of Difference Over Identity: Overturning the Paradigm of Identity With Gilles Deleuze’s Differential Ontology by Matthew G. Eckel Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy The University of Toledo May 2014 Taking Gilles Deleuze to be a philosopher who is most concerned with articulating a ‘philosophy of difference’, Deleuze’s thought represents a fundamental shift in the history of philosophy, a shift which asserts ontological difference as independent of any prior ontological identity, even going as far as suggesting that identity is only possible when grounded by difference. Deleuze reconstructs a ‘minor’ history of philosophy, mobilizing thinkers from Spinoza and Nietzsche to Duns Scotus and Bergson, in his attempt to assert that philosophy has always been, underneath its canonical manifestations, a project concerned with ontology, and that ontological difference deserves the kind of philosophical attention, and privilege, which ontological identity has been given since Aristotle. -
Biosphere Reserves' Management Effectiveness—A Systematic
sustainability Review Biosphere Reserves’ Management Effectiveness—A Systematic Literature Review and a Research Agenda Ana Filipa Ferreira 1,2,* , Heike Zimmermann 3, Rui Santos 1 and Henrik von Wehrden 2 1 CENSE—Center for Environmental and Sustainability Research, NOVA College of Science and Technology, NOVA University Lisbon, 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal; [email protected] 2 Institute of Ecology, Faculty of Sustainability and Center for Methods, Leuphana University, 21335 Lüneburg, Germany; [email protected] 3 Institute for Ethics and Transdisciplinary Sustainability Research, Faculty of Sustainability, Leuphana University, 21335 Lüneburg, Germany; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +351-21-294-8397 Received: 10 June 2020; Accepted: 2 July 2020; Published: 8 July 2020 Abstract: Research about biosphere reserves’ management effectiveness can contribute to better understanding of the existing gap between the biosphere reserve concept and its implementation. However, there is a limited understanding about where and how research about biosphere reserves’ management effectiveness has been conducted, what topics are investigated, and which are the main findings. This study addresses these gaps in the field, building on a systematic literature review of scientific papers. To this end, we investigated characteristics of publications, scope, status and location of biosphere reserves, research methods and management effectiveness. The results indicate that research is conceptually and methodologically diverse, but unevenly distributed. Three groups of papers associated with different goals of biosphere reserves were identified: capacity building, biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. In general, each group is associated with different methodological approaches and different regions of the world. The results indicate the importance of scale dynamics and trade-offs between goals, which are advanced as important leverage points for the success of biosphere reserves.