Paradigms, worldviews, lifeworlds, and the Cartesian divide

 

Laininen, E. (2019). Transforming our worldview towards a sustainable future. 

In my previous post, I mention a discovery I want to explore further: that of realizing that changing my writing style by learning how to write research manuscripts for academic publication was not simply a change of writing voice but a transformation that had to first occur in my way of thinking. Indigenous scholar Rauna Kuokkanen (2007) would say I was undergoing the first hand experience of socialization by the academy, specifically that institution of higher education - the university. Kuokkanen, in particular, has written poignantly about this process albeit from her perspective as a feminist Saami scholar (2000, 2017, 2022).

Now of course I speak in retrospect - hindsight is always guaranteed to be 20:20 regardless of our own trifocals. At the time I was practicing my academese - circa March 2021 - I certainly wasn't thinking about changing my writing style as a form of paradigm change nor acculturation. But then again, unlike the vast majority of the scholarship I have reviewed over the past four years in particular I did not spent the bulk of my career inside the epistemological infrastructure of the academy. Thus I was not as suffocated by its normative pressures.

I had the blog. And it is the blog to which I return as to decompress - ironically, given that I've spent most of the past 6 months in fulltime writing; yet perhaps, not ironically, given that I had to curb every spark of thought and narrowly focus only on the structured presentation of a set of research questions. This is my liberation from that imposed structure and need to cut off every creative idea or train of thought. Sometimes excising entire pages, paragraphs, or simply sentences from my manuscript. I think this is why I came seeking out a place where I could think and write once more as I used to do, informally, once upon a time when Perspective first began. 

An interesting thing I discovered which I'd never understood from the outside was how we go silent in public, not daring to write, when we're in the midst of manuscripts for journals and construction of the thesis. I was terrified I'd say something as my fingers ran away with me so I just stopped. Now I want to come back and its a whole new world out here full of artificially generated content attempting to masquerade as a human. 

So how do we prove we are human?