The normativity of obligations: trust, blame, and interpersonal agency

This dissertation defends Deontic Pragmatism -- the view that the normativity of obligations is grounded in reasons to engage in interpersonal agency. I defend an account of obligations as correctness standards grounded in specific kinds of reasons. On this view, all obligations are directed from one person to another because these reasons are facts about a specific bipolar relation between people. To be a moral person is, in part, to comply with one's obligations for such reasons, by caring about other people and how they rely on oneself. Such caring attitudes are constitutive of the kinds of relationships people have reasons to have with one another. Indeed, the trusting attitudes such relationships also constitutively involve presuppose that others hold such caring attitudes towards us. In turn, the blaming responses to which trust disposes us presuppose that people fail to respond to such reasons, by failing to hold such caring attitudes. I argue that this nexus between obligations, trust, blame, and relationships is played out across the entire moral domain. I then defend an account of the reasons people have to hold such attitudes. On this view, reasons that ground correctness standards, including obligations, are shared by people in virtue of their engagement in activities. Specifically, it is correct for people to have moral relationships, because they have reasons to intend to engage in interpersonal activities that involve mutual dependence relations. And they have those reasons, I argue, whatever other activities they are engaged in. Since such dependence is presupposed by the attitude of reliance involved in trust, the reasons that ultimately ground our obligations are grounded in a relation that is itself presupposed by the attitude of trust

Cultivating Imagination Across Boundaries:Innovation practice as learning through participatory inquiry

When regarding innovation practice from both a research and a practitioner’s perspective the temptation can be to focus on formal outcomes: technology, concepts, products and services. As a result continuous innovation can be considered a means to streamline the processes necessary to achieve those outcomes. However this understanding of innovation can divert attention from how things and operations are actually achieved. Value may be lost in an innovation process, because the resources of those involved, how they get things done on a day to day basis, are not identified as such. By adopting a perspective that is based on complex processes of relating we argue that innovation can be otherwise seen as the emergence of new meaning that arises from the ongoing gesture and response interactions between those involved through the knowing, doing, making and relating of participatory inquiry and that the practice of doing innovation is inherently learning driven

Cultivating Imagination Across Boundaries:Innovation practice as learning through participatory inquiry

When regarding innovation practice from both a research and a practitioner’s perspective the temptation can be to focus on formal outcomes: technology, concepts, products and services. As a result continuous innovation can be considered a means to streamline the processes necessary to achieve those outcomes. However this understanding of innovation can divert attention from how things and operations are actually achieved. Value may be lost in an innovation process, because the resources of those involved, how they get things done on a day to day basis, are not identified as such. By adopting a perspective that is based on complex processes of relating we argue that innovation can be otherwise seen as the emergence of new meaning that arises from the ongoing gesture and response interactions between those involved through the knowing, doing, making and relating of participatory inquiry and that the practice of doing innovation is inherently learning driven

Co-designing tourism for sustainable development

This paper addresses the need to transform tourism practices with others. Its contribution is a critical conceptualization of how collaborative tourism design can facilitate sustainable transformation. Recognizing SDG #17 to “Revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development” we argue that collaboration–not only partnerships and cooperation–should be a central tenet for intentional change. Collaboration rests on the hypothesis that the sum is more than its individual parts. We introduce how the collaborative design (co-design) of tourism contributes a unique range of processes, methods, tools and notably an attitude of mind that enables its practitioners to, with others, explore, reveal, encompass and address issues and nuances in an overall sustainable tourism co-design process. This understanding deliberately challenges the notion that a sustainable development process can be planned and micro-managed with pre-determined outcomes. Examples from Denmark and Norway illustrate how sustainable tourism co-design intentionally aims to transform human relations, encourage stewardship and demonstrate how such a practice does not reach for quick-fix solutions. Findings indicate that we have yet to realize the power of collaboration, stewardship and “other-regarding” ethics to guide actions underpinning SDG#17 for more sustainable and resourceful futures.</p

Revisiting Ethnic Differences in In-Person Learning During 2021-2022

In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools throughout the United States, forcing a shift to remote learning that lasted the rest of the academic year. In the fall of 2020, schools reopened using combinations of in-person, hybrid, and remote learning models with great geographic variability in access to in-person learning. A growing body of research shows important racial differences in the use of in-person learning during the 2020-2021 school year, with Black and Hispanic students returning to in-person learning at lower rates than white students (Camp and Zamarro, 2021; Kurmann and Lalé, 2022). This in-person learning gap raises serious equity concerns as emerging research illustrates how remote learning was associated with both larger decreases in academic performance during the pandemic and a widening racial achievement gap (Goldhaber et al., 2022)

Engaging the vulnerable encounter:engendering narratives for change in healthcare practice by using participatory theatre methods

This chapter describes how improvised participatory theatre can be used to encourage change in professional healthcare practice. It focuses on chronic pain, with a brief example from another healthcare project. The principal interest is to demonstrate how theatre processes, for the most carried out as participatory workshops, can be used to explore and influence healthcare practice. The chapter shows how health and illness narratives can be considered temporal, improvised, and performative phenomena that are narrated to life through actual practice. The idea is that narratives of practice emerge from the dynamic, moment-to-moment, and reflexive engagement with actual practice rather than as idealized or generalized accounts about practice. The emphasis is therefore on engendering narratives of practice as a narrating-between-people in a situation as opposed to considering narratives as after-the-fact accounts