Knowledge and Scholarship (Teaching Aid)

Caught at a divide between fundamentalist Judeo-Christian rhetoric and secular queer discourse, queer Christians face difficult obstacles in enacting/ embodying their identity. Bohache (2003) claims that a queer Christology, or developing a queer view of Christianity, is a potentially beneficial way to reconcile this identity gap. To explore this claim, I demonstrate a need to also examine the way in which a queer Christian body enacts a queer and Christian identity by juxtaposing my own narrative as a queer Christian in a religious setting against queer theory. Using Pelias’ (1999) guidelines for poetic essay, I weave queer theory throughout my own story as a means to explore how a queering of Christianity can be performed or questioned. Though many may be uncomfortable with a dialogue that leaves nothing but questions, I find that those questions are what keep us revisiting these identity intersections that are constantly in flux and encourages continuing conversations.

Dissertation, 2013

My dissertation is a study into the notion of embodied knowledge and is written from my perspective as a Settler-scholar studying and working at the University of British Columbia on unceded Coast Salish territory. In this dissertation I propose and develop a theoretical framework for teaching and learning working from Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism that locates the real bodies of teachers and learners in the real places in which they exist. This framework emerges from my experience of teaching children, youth and adults in public schools, and my dialectical engagement with theory and practice over an extended period of time in this place. The core concept in this framework of the transformative pedagogical encounter considers the material and discursive aspects of the learning context, and attends to the centrality of embodied presence and ethical responsiveness in creating the conditions for transformative learning. To inform my theorization, I engage in Gadamerian hermeneutic analysis of both Aristotelian texts related to the embodied wisdom of the Phronimos, and of texts by Indigenous scholars in BC related to the embodied wisdom of the Elder. I draw on these texts as counter-perspective and challenge to the dominance of Western modernist theories and practices in education, and through coloniality scholarship argue that the lack of attention to the body in educational theorizing is related to historic and contemporary forms of privilege and oppression. I locate this study in teacher education and recognize that it is a place where hegemonic narratives and epistemological orientations might be drawn out and questioned. I explore the complicated conversation, as originally discussed by William Pinar that emerges from bringing Indigenous perspectives into meaningful engagement with mainstream teacher education. I consider the resistance of teacher candidates and educational structures to this conversation, and suggest self-reflexive practices that engage transparently with resistance and draw out the problematic narratives and discourses in a Settler dominated society. I recommend practices of social equity in teacher education that provide opportunity for teacher candidates and instructors to understand themselves in complex ethical relations and as actively participating in material and discursive practices in real places.

" Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is committed to showing how talk and texts serve the interests of those with power in a society. From its initially European linguistic roots, CDA has become an influential international, interdisciplinary tradition. This chapter sketches CDA’s background including its theoretical roots and key scholars. Six areas in current research are illustrated, along with a sampling of CDA work around the world. The focal criticisms that have been directed at CDA scholarship are described. In closing, we suggest CDA’s potential in five areas of Communication (rhetoric, critical/cultural studies, mass communication, organizational communication, and language and social interaction) and provide an appendix of CDA vocabulary."

In R. Schögler (ed.) Circulation of academic thought: Rethinking methods in the study of scientific translation. Bern: Peter Lang., 2019

In the current context of globalization, a pressing problem facing the academic translator (and, the translation studies scholar) is how to deal with texts produced in one paradigm of knowledge that have to be translated into another for the purpose of international dissemination. This is particularly pertinent in the case of humanities and social science scholarship, where knowledge is often construed in a discourse that has little in common with the academic discourse that prevails in the lingua franca. According to Halliday and Martin, there is in English “an essential continuity between humanities and science as far as interpreting the world is concerned” (1993:220), reflecting the dominance of empiricism in the Anglo-Saxon world. Hence, we might expect the process of translating into it from the non-empiricist philosophical discourses that predominate in many European languages to be a highly fraught process, leading in the worst instances to fully-fledged cases of “epistemicide” (Bennett 2007). This paper urges the need for a critical approach to the study of academic translation in order to problematize the very vehicle through which knowledge is construed and transmitted. Most of the methods currently favoured in Translation Studies are themselves grounded in the empiricist paradigm and thus shed little light upon the issue, possibly even contributing to the process of epistemological colonization. The paper therefore describes a method of textual analysis called rhetorical criticism, which has long been used in the USA to explore the unacknowledged or unconscious assumptions underpinning texts of all kinds, offering suggestions for how it could be adapted to enable its application to the study of academic or philosophical texts in translation.

2016

This thesis is a philosophical response to Arthur Zajonc’s (2013:90) statement that “[e]ducation has as its high purpose the eradication of ignorance”, in which I argue why and how contemplative education can offer a comprehensive means to achieve this stated purpose. The research methodology adopts an interpretivist paradigm, drawing on theorists/the theories of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and Max van Manen’s phenomenology of practice. With a hermeneutic phenomenology as my research methodology and the research methods of a phenomenological inquiry (bracketed questioning in wonder and openness) and hermeneutic interpretation (conceptual analysis), I explore the philosophical themes within contemplative education and ask “how” it may comprehensively eradicate ignorance and give meaning and understanding to the Self and the Other. Hence I initially explore the broad praxis of contemplative education in its epistemological dimensions, looking at contemplative practices and the role of the Inner Scholar (Dederer 2007). Conclusively, after an analysis of key concepts (drawn from literature dated from 1989 to 2015 within the scope of contemplative studies), I argue that contemplative education is a comprehensive means toward eradicating ignorance, espousing the potentials in adopting contemplative practices in/for education. Building on this philosophical exploration I propose further research for the pragmatic application of contemplative practices in educational praxis.