Research as encounter between the researcher and his or her subject inevitably brings the researcher to partake in differing contexts and realities, in which different perceptions and notions apply. This panel looks at cultural analyses of differing ontological, epistemological, and ethical contexts and realities, where finding adequate tools for analysis poses challenges. The research data, for example, tends to be translated into existing fields of science, with their their own language, discourse, and paradigms, but in order to make appropriate analysis of cultural experience, assemblages, actor-networks, or different onto-ethico-epistemologies (Barad 2007) requires sensitivity to shifting contexts.
Previous studies have already addressed questions related to these issues, such as what in fact are the contexts to be compared. Shifting contexts of knowledge-production include broader and narrower formations, between which the scientific analysis draws comparisons and moves during the research process (Strathern 1995, 2014). Yet, collaborative, engaged, and experimental research has altered the ‘sites’ where research is being carried out, and the boundaries of difference are constantly on the move. These shifting frameworks often overlap and encompass each other. Research collaborators may have divergent perspectives and positions for constructing both cognitive and social contexts for interaction, and they may emerge differently in individual’s everyday lives. Diverse non-human entities, such as objects, animals, and plants, and other life forms exercise their social power in ways that are challenging for a scientific analysis wishing not to explain away these kinds of phenomena in a reductive manner. Meanwhile, the contemporary ‘west’ has been labeled by some as living a post-secularist era characterized by a search for re-enchantment.
In these new shifting contexts of research, the notions related to subjectivity and agency are tightly connected to places and territories, to time and space, and to how social relations are produced and interpreted. In the process, the purpose remains to enhance understanding and not reduce difference. This workshop invites papers to discuss, but is not restricted to, the following topics:
- How can we make productive analysis of different onto-ethico-epistemologies?
- How can shifting contexts of research be experienced by researcher and research collaborators?
- How are (non)human agencies included in the making of the research process?
- How to do justice to differently conceived ontologies and contexts in a scientific analysis?
- How to gain, find, and produce appropriate relations, categories and concepts during the analysis?
Convenors:
Dr. Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen, University of Helsinki, Department of World Cultures and University of Turku, Finland (pirjo.virtanen@helsinki.fi)
Postgraduate Eleonora Lundell, University of Helsinki, Department of World Cultures, Finland
Postgraduate Inkeri Aula, University of Eastern Finland, Finland
Please download the abstracts of the papers that will be presented in this workshop here.
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