The itinerary through this MA course is almost complete, and we’re working towards the final phase – the dissemination of your work. As you know, we’ve asked you to pull together key aspects of your work, either from unit 5 or perhaps from all of your work towards the course, and share the outcomes you’ve generated with a wider, relevant audience. To complicate matters, we’ve also asked you to monitor and collect feedback that responds to your work, and use it to reflect on your own journey over the last 15 months, and to consider how you’ll continue that journey beyond the end of the course.
Implicit in the structure of this unit is a theme we’ve stressed throughout the course – the nature of change, its role in practice, and how we react to change. We’ve done action research in which we’ve tried to instigate, work and act with change. We’ve also emphasised in the shorter reflective units, that learning itself is a form of change and transformation. Now it might be useful to think about how exhibiting and disseminating our work might be part of a process of change, both for ourselves and the wider audience we’re interested in reaching.
Traditionally, we think of academic work as striving towards objectively reflecting the world – the disinterested pursuit of truth. Such objectivity suggests impartiality and hence avoidance of partisanship or ‘activism’. This traditional picture suggests that as workers with knowledge, we should distance ourselves from anything which might be seen as coercion or campaigning. We can see this sort of thing quite clearly from debates around tobacco or fast food companies funding university chairs, or questions about how ‘regular’ a part of scientific practice it might be to have email discussions about how to ‘normalise’ climate data.
Yet at the same time there is another implicit shared understanding about the production of knowledge that it should somehow be progressive or useful. New scientific knowledge leads to technological development and affordance for social behaviour. “Evidence-based policies” announce governments’ intentions to tackle crime and punishment, or economic growth and stability, or education and employment. Indeed, Western civilisation recognises itself as a progressive endeavour based on ration and Enlightenment.
This tension between between objectivity and influence is likely to make itself visible in your work for this unit. When presenting your work to interested parties, are you seeking validation from them? What would validation mean? That they recognise what you say as true because it fits the world picture or cultural horizon they already inhabit? Or that you have persuaded them that their previously-held convictions were wrong or simplistic? If your feedback is negative or contradictory, how will you interpret it? Is what you have to say wrong or misguided? Or has your audience failed to recognise the important new insights you have because of their reactionary conservatism and resistance to change?
Obviously these questions are extremely complex and we aren’t likely to find satisfactory answers to any of them. They speak to abstruse debates in philosophy between positivism and pragmatism, between theories of Enlightenment and the hermeneutic circle. They speak to political impasses such as the science of climate change and the course nations should take. But perhaps on a smaller scale you can usefully frame the analysis of the kinds of change you have encountered and experienced, the relevance of your work to your audience, the way you disseminate your work, and the impact you hope it may have.
