Recognition,inclusion and democracy: learning from action research with young people

ABSTRACT

This paper draws upon learning from three action research projects conducted as part of a Europe-wide project exploring young people’s social and political participation. Challenging dominant discourses about what ‘counts’ as participation and what does not, the paper explores how, through the action research projects, young people engaged in knowledge democracy in ‘new democratic arenas’. Building upon experiential knowing and creating knowledge and learning through practice, the young people explored their own democratic knowledge production, communication and engagement within a context of shifting discourses of participation, democratic engagement and active citizenship. The increasing preference of young people for more informal forms of participation as lived practice reflects a shift to young people constructing their own modes of participation and ‘remaking democracy’ in their own vision and according to their own needs. By working outside of the confines of normative assumptions of democratic practice and participation, young people exercised their own ‘political’ agency in response to their own priorities, interests and concerns and, in doing so, illustrated that new forms, understandings and practices of knowledge democracy can emerge that reflect the promise of inclusive democratic societies more meaningfully.     

Education,Enlightenment and Positivism: The Vienna Circle's Scientific World-Conception Revisited

The scientific world-conception is properly understood as an enlightenmentphilosophy only if the current reassessment of the historical Vienna Circle(as opposed to the caricature still prevalent in the popular philosophicalimagination) is once more extended to comprehend not only its thorough-goingepistemological anti-foundationalism, but also the voluntarist point of its ethical`non-cognitivism'. That is to say, the scientific world-conception is properlyunderstood as the opposite of village positivism only if it is recognized that it hasan `other' and that the scientific world-conception was meant by its proponentsto perform its enlightenment work only in conjunction with that other of scientificreason – ethical will and willing. Scientific reason cannot determine all there is to determine, it cannot determine the will. In this sense, there was, pace villagepositivism, more than scientific reason dreamt of. Scientific reason was not madeabsolute: rather, its (self-) clarification was required if a satisfactory view of its placein `life' was to be attained.