Performing traditional knowledge using a game engine: Communicating and sharing Australian Aboriginal knowledge practices

This paper challenges current practices in the use of digital media to communicate Australian Aboriginal knowledge practices in a learning context. It proposes that any digital representation of Aboriginal knowledge practices needs to examine the epistemology and ontology of these practices in order to design digital environments that effectively support and enable existing Aboriginal knowledge practices in the real world. Central to this is the essential task of any new digital representation of Aboriginal knowledge to resolve the conflict between database and narrative views of knowledge (L. Manovich, 2001). This is in order to provide a tool that complements rather than supplants direct experience of traditional knowledge practices (V. Hart, 2001). This paper concludes by reporting on the recent development of an advanced learning technology that addresses this.

New descriptions and understandings of internationalisation: A tale of knowledge-intensive SMEs

This research seeks to generate and foster new descriptions and understandings of processes underlying the internationalisation experienced by small- and medium-sized, knowledge-intensive enterprises. The longitudinal study centres on the growth and internationalisation of a cluster of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the most southern state of Australia, of which a number were 'bom global.' It draws on both retrospective data such as corporate archives, as well as observations and interviews as events unfolded over a period of eighteen months to garner insights into processes underlying the SMEs' internationalisation. The approach to inquiry is influenced by an epistemology of social constructionism, interpretive narrative, sensemaking and dramaturgical theoretical perspectives, and elements of cultural anthropology. Exploratory in the early stages, a funnel approach characteristic of ethnographic enquiry was used whereby the study became progressively focused over time. The extended period of fieldwork led to observations and interpretations that cast the retrospective data in new light, and the use of the construct 'legitimacy' as a lens through which to view activities and events infusing the firms' internationalisation. A generic narrative scheme that offers a temporal ordering of actions, context and meaning attributions in relation to legitimation behaviours and internationalisation processes is developed. This narrative scheme is then used to garner a deeper understanding of three activities that were central to the firms' internationalisation over time: the choice of geographic export markets, strategic participation in international standard-setting committees, and portfolio entrepreneurship. In addition, the study offers a rich story of the growth and internationalisation of the cluster of knowledge-intensive SMEs. The tale of growth and internationalisation pursued by the cluster of knowledgeintensive SMEs spans the period from 1975 to mid 1997, and may prove a useful resource for the theorising of others.

A room with a view:window images and 'open immanence' in the writings of adolphe retté and G.K. chesterton

Adolphe Retté and G.K. Chesterton often use the image of a window, a paradox given the widespread view that Catholic writers are usually closed minded. This article asks whether Charles Taylor's philosophy of the individual could explain this paradox more satisfactorily. Chesterton's windows express a realist epistemology, while Retté's windows express the illumination of faith. The themacity of the subject in their writings, however, shows that their windows give expression to Taylor's 'open immanence', rather than Taylorian 'porosity'. Their reactionary character can be interpreted as a kind of Taylorian 'buffering' which is necessary for believing writers resisting secularity. © 2011 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press 2011; all rights reserved.

The effects of varying forms and degrees of government intervention upon the effective competitiveness of UK small businesses

This doctoral thesis responds to the need for greater understanding of small businesses and their inherent unique problem-types. Integral to the investigation is the theme that for governments to effectively influence small business, a sound understanding of the factors they are seeking to influence is essential. Moreover, the study, in its recognition of the many shortcomings in management research and, in particular that the research methods and approaches adopted often fail to give adequate understanding of issues under study, attempts to develop an innovative and creative research approach. The aim thus being to produce, not only advances in small business management knowledge from the standpoints of government policy makers and `lq recipient small business, but also insights into future potential research method for the continued development of that knowledge. The origins of the methodology lay in the non-acceptance of traditional philosophical positions in epistemology and ontology, with a philosophical standpoint of internal realism underpinning the research. Internal realism presents the basis for the potential co-existence of qualitative and quantitative research strategy and underlines the crucial contributory role of research method in provision of ultimate factual status of the assertions of research findings. The concept of epistemological bootstrapping is thus used to develop a `lq partial research framework to foothold case study research, thereby avoiding limitations of objectivism and brute inductivism. The major insights and issues highlighted by the `lq bootstrap, guide the researcher around the participant case studies. A novel attempt at contextualist (linked multi-level and processual) analysis was attempted in the major in-depth case study, with two further cases playing a support role and contributing to a balanced emphasis of empirical research within the context of time constraints inherent within part-time research.

Zarathustra's evolutionary epistemology

Friedrich Nietzsche was the first great philosopher to be influenced at the core by Darwinian ideas. He regarded Also Sprach Zarathustra as his masterpiece and most subsequent commentators have agreed. There have been many interpretations of the Zarathustra, and like all great works it has many levels of meaning. An exposition in terms of evolutionary epistemology, however, has not yet been attempted. This article rectifies this omission and shows how Nietzsche's work carries Darwinian ideas into the domain of philosophical anthropology. It shows through the prism of Nietzsche's mature thought some of the consequences of an evolutionary epistemology both in opening up alternative visions of the world and in permitting a profound criticism of our commonsense metaphysics and ontology. © 1992.

Engineering education for the 21st century:scholarship, synergy and student success

Starting with the question “How can University level Engineering Education be developed in such a way so as to enhance the quality of the student learning experience?”, this discussion paper proposes an approach to engineering education developed by a senior engineering educator working alongside a pedagogical researcher in an attempt to engage colleagues in contemporary debates about the issues currently faced across the Sector. Such issues include difficulties with recruiting students onto programmes as well as high levels of student attrition and failure. Underpinned by three distinctive concepts: Synergy, Variety & Relationships (S+V+R), the approach brings together pedagogic and engineering epistemologies in an empirically grounded framework in such a way so as to provide an accessible and relevant learning approach that, if followed, engenders student success [S2]. Specifically developed with the intention of increasing retention and positively impacting student success [S2], the S+V+R=S2 approach provides a scholarly and Synergetic (S) approach to engineering education that is both innovative and exciting. Building on the argument that Variety (V) in education is pivotal to promoting originality and creativity in learning and teaching, this paper shows how, by purposefully developing a range of learning and teaching approaches, student engagement and thus success can be increased. It also considers the importance of Relationships (R) in higher education, arguing that belonging and relationships are crucial factors impacting student experiences. When taken together (Synergy, Variety and Relationships) and applied within an Engineering Education context, students are provided with a unique learning environment – one that both promotes individual success and improves organisational effectiveness. The uniqueness of the approach is in the synthesis of these three concepts within an Engineering Education epistemology.

"Suffragettes of the Harem": The Evolution of Sympathy and the Afterlives of Sentimentality in American Feminist Orientalism, 1865-1920

This project examines narrative encounters in space identified as “harem,” produced by authors with biographical ties to the vanguard of the American Suffrage Movement. I regard these feminists’ circulations East, to the domestic space of the Other, as a hitherto unstudied, yet critical component of transnationalism in the history of U.S. Suffrage. This literary record also crucially reveals the extent to which sentimentality was plotted as a potential force for the reform of other cultures. An urge to sympathize denied in the space of the harem illustrates the colonial anxieties that subtended sentimentality’s prospective deployment beyond national borders. In five chapters on the work of Anna Leonowens, Susan Elston Wallace, Demetra Vaka Brown, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Wharton, I examine how Suffrage-minded authors writing the harem strategically abandon an activist praxis of fellow feeling. Such a reluctance to transform sentimental literature into a colonial literature consequently informs that genre’s postbellum decline. The sentiments that run dry for American feminists in the harem additionally foreground the costly failures of Wilsonian Idealism, a doctrine that appropriated a discourse of sentimentality in order to script the United States’ expanded involvement in global affairs.

Restoring phronesis and practice: marketing's forgotten p's

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolution of marketing’s philosophical conversation over the past 120 years, focusing on the emergent meaning of the notion that marketing should become more “scientific”. Design/methodology/approach – This paper focuses on the US academic marketing literature, primarily journal articles and books published in the first half of the 20th century. Findings – The Aristotelian distinction between techné, epistemé and phronesis provides a rich basis for framing philosophical discussion in marketing, and should supplant the art-science debate and Anderson’s distinction between science1 and science2. Prior to 1959, the marketing journals provided a forum for phronesis, though this diminished as the academic marketing community largely abandoned the inductive, contextual approach in favour of a deductive, “scientific” methodology. The Ford Foundation played an important role in effecting this change. Practical implications – The paper highlights the importance of forums where practitioners can reflect on the ethical and social implications of their practices and then work to enhance these practices for the greater social good. Social implications – Questions the value of distinctions between marketing theorists and practitioners and the consequential focus of marketing journals. Originality/value – Advances the concept of phronesis in the marketing literature and distinguishes it from epistemé, which has dominated academic marketing discourse over the past 60 years.

Ocularcentrism and its others: A framework for metatheoretical analysis

There is a contemporary scepticism towards vision-based metaphors in management and organization studies that reflects a more general pattern across the social sciences. In short, there has been a shift away from ocularcentrism. This shift provides a useful basis for metatheoretical analysis of the philosophical discourse that informs organizational analysis. The article begins by briefly discussing the vision-generated, vision-centred interpretation of knowledge, truth, and reality that has characterized the western philosophical tradition. Taking late 18th-century rationalism as the high-point of ocularcentrism, the article then presents a metatheoretical framework based on three trajectories that critiques of ocularcentrism have subsequently taken. The first exposes the limits of the metaphor by, paradoxically, taking it to its limits. The second trajectory seeks to displace the primordial position of the ocular metaphor and replace it with an alternative lexicon based on other human senses. Last, the third trajectory describes how the Enlightenment ocular characterization of the visual and mental worlds has effectively been inverted in the postmodern moment.

"On our way": identities and representations of African women seeking asylum in Ireland

This thesis provides the first explicit Postcolonial study of asylum in the Irish context that integrates Black Feminist analyses of intersectional identity with Postcolonial Feminist theories of representation. African women seeking asylum in the Republic of Ireland were key political instruments used by the state to re-draw racial lines. The study examines how, for a group of African women “On their Way” through asylum, identity and representation work hand in hand to force identities, subaltern spaces and bodies to occupy them. Rich biographical data is gathered through mixed art and drama methods over two intensive participatory research projects conducted in a small Irish city. Data analysis critically examines the poetics (practices that signify) and politics (the powers that govern these practices) and affective economies of global and local NGO visual representations, exposing how they consume, fragment, and appropriate African women’s identities and bodies. Though hypervisible, the women themselves “cannot speak”. The women in the study reported feeling “tired” and “used”. Asking “What work are they doing as they do asylum?” the study finds that black female identities and bodies are forced to perform political, cultural, emotional and material labour on their way through this context of Irish asylum. The author argues that Postcolonial Asylum is a performative encounter that re-scripts colonial race/class/gender discourse through a humanitarian alibi to naturalize European/white supremacy, reinscribe patriarchal power and justify racialised incarceration of bodies seeking asylum in the North. This study takes an interdisciplinary approach that centralizes Black and Postcolonial Feminist theory and innovates Participatory Art-Based Action methodology. Black and Postcolonial feminisms can recognize, theorize and replenish black female political and intellectual agency. Participatory Action research, if grounded in Black feminist epistemology and ethics, can allow participants to “speak back” to what is already said about them in spaces of convivial self-representation.

Bipartite Assertion: A New Account of Assertion, Defined in Terms of Responsibility and Explicit Presentation

Assertion is a speech act that stands at the intersection of the philosophy of language and social epistemology. It is a phenomenon that bears on such wide-ranging topics as testimony, truth, meaning, knowledge and trust. It is thus no surprise that analytic philosophers have devoted innumerable pages to assertion, trying to give the norms that govern it, its role in the transmission of knowledge, and most importantly, what assertion is, or how assertion is to be defined. In this thesis I attempt to show that all previous answers to the question “What is assertion?” are flawed. There are four major traditions in the literature: constitutive norm theories of assertion, accounts that treat assertion as the expression of speaker attitudes, accounts that treat assertion as a proposal to add some proposition to the common ground, and accounts that treat assertion as the taking of responsibility for some claim. Each tradition is explored here, the leading theories within the tradition developed, and then placed under scrutiny to demonstrate flaws within the positions surveyed. I follow the work of G.E. Moore and William P. Alston, whilst drawing on the work of Robert Brandom in order to give a new bipartite theory of assertion. I argue that assertion consists in the explicit presentation of a proposition, along with a taking of responsibility for that proposition. Taking Alston's explicit presentation condition and repairing it in order to deal with problems it faces, whilst combining it with Brandom's responsibility condition, provides, I believe, the best account of assertion.

RE-MEANING THE SACRED: COLONIAL DAMAGE AND INDIGENOUS COSMOLOGIES

Indigenous ways of knowing are dependent on an inheriting process both amongst humans and between human and non-human being. These multi-relationships cross material and immaterial borders as sites of knowledge production. This manuscript will interrogate how three particular Indigenous cosmological relationships have been purposefully re-meaninged by colonial institutions: 1) How Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee origin stories have been abstracted into a distinctive epistemological versus ontological site; 2) How Anishnaabe spirit worlds are impacted by colonial relations, and how state institutions benefit from the re-meaning of these worlds; and 3) How Indigenous sovereignty in Canada is imagined from a statist perspective, and how these polices have re-meaninged the sacred relationships within a cosmological understanding of Haudenosaunee governance. The re-meaning of sacredly-held Indigenous relationships is both accelerated by, and contributes to, a practice of reducing upon Indigenous and non-human societies. Throughout expressions of colonialism on Indigenous territories (the academy, the state, Indian policy), Indigenous knowledge is consistently either dismissed or appropriated. This reduction of Indigenous knowledge continues to bolster functions of the state as related to the elimination of the “Indian Problem” via reducing the “Indian” to an adaptive subject.