Warm welcome to the monthly research seminar of our Learning, Culture and Interventions (LECI) expert group on Wednesday 15th of January 2020, at 10-12 AM. The seminar will be held at Siltavuorenpenger 5.A, room K108 (Minerva building).
Associate Professor Beth Ferholt from the Department of Early Childhood and Art Education at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, USA, will give a presentation.
The discussant will be Postdoctoral Researcher Riikka Hohti, University of Helsinki.
Title of the presentation: THE CONSTANT or Person-as-Place, and Research-Life: Sustaining Collaboration between University-Based and Field-Based Co-Researchers
Abstract: The effort to have one’s research shaped in part by people whose lives and livelihoods reside in settings very different from the university is, at those moments when suggestions “from the field” fundamentally challenge conventional social scientific inquiry and concurrent ways of thinking and being, nearly impossible. This presentation addresses this dilemma by presenting and discussing the research-life process. The research-life process consists of a mutual dependence of life and research questions that is bidirectional, ongoing and evolving. One continues generating questions through the research to solve questions in one’s life and one’s life becomes a process of generating questions so one can study these questions through research. Research-life, thus, maintains its access to a phenomenon’s full, dynamic, complexity and, by bringing attention to the frame between research and life, simultaneously includes its researchers in the research process. It is for these reasons that research-life may be useful to many researchers who are designing studies in which they hope to sustain collaboration between university-based and field-based co-researchers throughout the research process. These new studies could, perhaps, develop and apply new, hybrid methods that would make phenomena previously considered inaccessible to science, visible to researchers. The presentation is based on a chapter forthcoming in “Doing CHAT in the Wild: From-the-field Challenges of a Non-Dualist Methodology”, Edited by Patricia Dionne and Alfredo Jornet.
Biography: Dr. Ferholt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Early Childhood and Art Education at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and affiliated faculty at the Program in Urban Education of the CUNY Graduate Center and at the School of Education and Communication of Jönköping University. Beth Ferholt's areas of research broadly stated are development, learning and imagination. Her work builds upon the tradition of cultural-historical activity theories. Consistent foci of her publications include playworlds, a relatively new form of adult-child joint play in which adults actively enter into the fantasy play of young children as a means of promoting the development and quality of life of both adults and children; perezhivanie, an important psychological concept in efforts to overcome the separation of cognition and emotion in the social scientific study of learning and development; early childhood education in which children are understood as culture and knowledge creators; and methods for the study of play, perezhivanie and early childhood education.
Everyone interested is very welcome to join the seminar!