Knowledge%20Structures:%20Module%20I

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Knowledge Structures Module I

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Module I Knowledge Structures and Moral Order

• Knowledge and Experience
• Knowledge and Practice
• Multicultural Perspectives Deconstructing
  Orientalism
• Historical Perspectives Deconstructing the
  Enlightenment
• multiple perspectives of the processes that shape
  the production of knowledge (and
  representations), and its circulation how
  knowledge creates epistemes (schemas for
  processing of information) and how epistemes can
  be critiqued experience and practical engagement
  as basis for critique of established perspectives.

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Module I Knowledge Structures and Moral Order

• experience knowledge built through community
  memory and immediate reality, localization of
  experience in contrast to hyperreality of
  mediated experience communities seek autonomy
  and self-reflection
• practice formal knowledge systems (education)
  vs. informal knowledge (situational)
  legitimation of knowledge through traditional
  modernist science regulates what can be said
  under the flag of scientific authority practical
  knowledge is excluded from this discourse yet it
  is the practical knowledge accumulated through
  work / practice that may influence the creation
  of knowledge and innovation practitioner
  research vs. expert research (practitioners
  closer to purposes, cares, everyday concerns, and
  interests of work) need to acknowledge the
  progressive impact of practical knowledge

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Module I Knowledge Structures and Moral Order

• multiculturalism the position of the knower that
  is related to institutional authority, reflects
  power relations and ruptures of East / West,
  South / North knowledge is a system shaping
  reality but it is perspectival knowing styles
  are localized but in the postmodern condition the
  perception of the world is fragmented
• historical epistemes are shaped by communities
  of practice and institutional discourse
  knowledge trails knowledge is cumulative and
  shaped by antecedents institutions maintain
  privileged knowledge systems

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Knowledge and Experience deCerteau

• The grand narratives from television and
• advertising stamp out or atomize the small
• narratives of streets or neighborhoods
• (deCerteau, pp. 142-3)

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Knowledge and Practice Lave

• JPF mathematics in action vs. story problems and
  the classroom context
• Cases bowling, Weight Watchers, abandoning
  problems (supermarket calculations of prices)

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The Theory of Practice Social Practice Approach

• Cognition is socially situated activity
• Comprises of person-acting, activity and setting
• Person experiences the self
• As in control of activities interacting with
  the setting
• As generating problems in relation to the setting
• As controlling the problem-solving process
• Investigation for cognition should be located in
  everyday activities of the lived-in world

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Case Studies

• Adult Math Project
• Shoppers correctly computed to decide best-buy
  items 93 of the time but did poorly on
  arithmetic test 59 of the time
• Weight Watchers Study
• Dieters substituted equivalence for measuring
  activities
• Money Management Study
• Creation of different stashes of money
  demonstrated the assembly of quantitative
  relations in situationally specific ways

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Conclusions

• People learn most effectively in the lived-in
  world when using all their physical senses
  through hands-on experience
• Knowledge transfer is not effective when done out
  of context
• Problem solving activities are not always a quest
  for the right answer
• Problems may be redefined in the course of
  solving them, leading to different problems and
  resulting in new or changed knowledge
• Need? / caution regarding the predictive value of
  school testing for success in the workplace

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Implications (for Information Work)

• Knowledge is not a compendium of facts but a
  process of knowing (librarians need to grow
  already acquired knowledge to evolve that base)
• Knowledge does not have to come from a think tank
  to be of value / knowledge created by just plain
  folks in everyday activities has value
• Be on guard for pre-conceptions since the self is
  socially constituted
• Examples of knowledge acquired in everyday
  activities?

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Source (for Lave)

• Edith Beckett and Margaret Eng presentation
  slides (Spring 2004)

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Multicultural Perspectives Said

• Is knowledge self-replicating, fatalistic, a text
  that does not have the ability of reflecting
  experiences or perspectives of the Other?

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Historical Perspectives Said, Foucault

• Texts create realities and these realities become
  the models for creating new texts and establish
  the constraints for what can be knowable. Said
  explores this cumulative effect of authoritative
  texts and discourses of scholarship. Foucault
  develops his idea of post-Enlightenment
  rationality by focusing on the historical
  construction of madness.

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Origins of Knowledge Systems

• knowledge systems
• related to post-Enlightenment epistemology
• critical analysis of knowledge practices in
  particular time periods (discursive formations
  supported by institutions)
• concepts ideology, hegemony
• assumption knowledge systems are not neutral,
  they promote the interests of the ruling class
• situated knowledge
• personal experience
• communities of practice and information
  infrastructures supporting information flow

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Origins of Knowledge Systems

• history of knowledge
• by subject? by period? as succession of
  epistemes?
• history or archaeology of human sciences
  (Michel Foucault) avoids producing the
  traditional unity of subject, spirit,or period

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Origins of Knowledge Systems

• history of knowledge
• history of knowledge represented as a dynamic,
  constantly changing totality
• shift from a traditional historical inquiry into
  what was known at a given moment to discursive
  practices that rendered something knowable
• discursive practices are first hand evidence to
  understand what was knowable

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Origins of Knowledge Systems

• analysis of an episteme theorization of the
  grounds of knowledge by analyzing the
  representational paradigms which organize the
  theorization
• what could be knowable? boundary objects?
  anomalies? displaced categories?
• episteme historically specific, dynamic field
  of representations of knowledge

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Origins of Knowledge Systems

• episteme
• defined in Michel Foucaults Archaeology of
  Knowledge as the total set of relations that
  unite, at a given period, the discursive
  practices that give rise to epistemological
  figures, sciences, and possibly formalized
  systems
• Foucaults Order of Things (17th / 18th century
  shift) the idea of order as organizing episteme
• episteme is multiplied by communication among
  different disciplines
• language technology of transmission totality
  of peoples interactions ...

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• Instead of a search for the perfectly
  proportioned image containing the 'soul' of the
  knowledge to be remembered, the emphasis was on
  the discovery of the right logical category. The
  memory of this system of logical categories and
  scientific causes would exempt the individual
  from the necessity of remembering everything in
  detail ... The problem of memorizing the world,
  characteristic of the sixteenth century, evolved
  into the problem of classifying it
  scientifically.
• (James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory,
  1992, 13)

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Origins of Knowledge Systems

• constraints
• a range of fields in a given historical moment
  demonstrates a set of discursive practices common
  to all the fields
• constraints and limitations imposed on a range of
  discourses in the human sciences and other
  knowledge practices

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• In the late 18th century, science becomes
  established as cultural apparatus, in the form of
  materialized semiotic fields.
• (Haraway, Modest Witness_at_Second_Millennium)

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Origins of Knowledge Systems

• post-Enlightenment epistemology
• modernity ideas of progress, science, nature
  (as logical and ordered), reason
• reflected in the discourse of science and
  technology (technocriticism Haraway)

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Origins of Knowledge Systems

• studies of science and technology
• focus on nature / culture / discourse /
  infrastructure (bureaucracy, institutional
  contexts for the circulation of knowledge)
• dichotomy of nature / culture (cf. Haraways
  natureTM or nature as not nature and cultureTM
  )

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The Laboratory, or, The Passion of
OncoMouse(Lynn Randolph 1994)
From Donna Haraways, Modest_Witness_at_Second_Mille
nnium.FemaleMan _Meets_OncoMouseTM), 46.