Lyric from  Bob Dylan's 'It's Alright Ma (I'm only Bleeding)'.

‘Haruki Murakami: In Search of this Elusive Writer’.

A couple of weeks ago I read Murakami's 'Norwegian wood'  which centers around a young student Toru Watanabe dealing with social isolation in Tokyo, the loss of a close fiend and his connections with two young women.  It's a very beautiful novel. I especially enjoyed all the little humorous, emotional or salacious side stories told by Midori and Reiko that pepper the novel alongside the main plot line. It's easy to see how this novel, which is supposedly unlike his others, captured the imagination of Japanese youth in the 'lost decade'.  Anyways, I found this BBC documentary about the author and I thought I would share it here. 

'The Medium is the Message'

Marshall Mcluhan on an Australian television program discussing the affect of different forms of communication (television, radio and print) on the structure of human awareness.

Discerning Knowers On The Eternal Cloud.

I’ve previously mentioned the existence of my honours thesis (here, here and here) and the possibility that I might place it in the eternal cloud known as the internet. Well I've finally gotten around to doing just that and you can find Discerning Knowers: An Exploratory Study of University Students’ Perceptions of Knowledge Claims: here.  To get an idea of what it's all about, the abstract is as follows:

The thesis is centred on how University students perceive the legitimacy of knowledge claims.  Contemporary sociological theory is often concerned with the transformations associated with the emergent “knowledge economy” and “knowledge society”. In view of this, University students’ perception of knowledge claims is of practical concern due to their future role as knowledge-workers and potential members of the power elite.  To address these issues, elements of Social Realism, Legitimation Code Theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics have been drawn on to conceptualize language, knowledge claims and the organizing principles of their contextual use.  The main conclusion drawn in this research is that University students have a nuanced understanding of the forms knowledge claims that can be legitimately employed in divergent contexts; thereby positioning themselves with respect to the context and negatively evaluating types of knowledge claims inappropriately employed.

The citation for the thesis in a bibliography should look something like this:

Toll, M.,  (2012), Discerning Knowers: An exploratory study of university students’ perceptions of knowledge claims, Honours thesis, Dept of Sociology & Social Policy, University of Sydney, Australia.

French Theory On The Brain.

 

The thought of all dead French theorists weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

Focus Groups: Research Design, Limitations and Potential.

Robert K. Merton

The focus group has been employed extensively in market research since the late 1940s, from the 1990s it has been increasingly readopted in social science research as an important qualitative research method (Wilkinson, 1998).  Hyden and Bulow (2003, p. 306), in a database search of ‘Psychinfo’,  found nine hundred articles using the keyword ‘focus group’ and almost a third of the articles were published after 1998 indicating a rapid growth of research utilizing the method.  The increased use of focus groups has been accompanied by the elaboration of methodological concerns unique to focus groups and the proliferation of focus group designs based on the research objective of a specific project.   Focus groups are a qualitative research method, and therefore subject to methodological issues that affect qualitative methodologies in general, however focus groups entail further issues of project level design, group level design and unit of analysis not encountered by other research methods (Morgan, 1996; Hyden and Bulow, 2003).  The limitations of focus group research has been both derided,  on the basis that the data obtained has little external validity or reproduces normative discourses, and valorised for providing new insight into social interaction and opinion formation amongst groups of individuals, thus redefining apparent methodological limitations as potential strengths   (Folch-Lyon and Trost, 1981; Smithson, 2000).  Discussion of focus group methods benefits from defining its relation to qualitative methodology more broadly, and qualitative methodology counterpoised with quantitative methodology to highlight points of contradistinction that inform focus groups alongside other qualitative methods.   Once this has been outlined, the distinctive features of focus groups can be more adequately dealt with and the questions of project-level design, group-level design and unit of analysis can be evaluated for its impact on data collection through to data analysis.

Mere Atheism; Or, You Can’t Justify Your Teapot.

There is a scene in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 where the Chaplin is being interrogated about the theft of Major Major’s correspondence and is asked by a C.I.D. officer about his religious persuasion.  The Chaplin declares himself an Anabaptist, which the officer finds a little suspicious: “Chaplin, I once studied Latin.  I think it’s only fair to warn you of that before I ask my next question. Doesn’t the word Anabaptist simply mean that you’re not a Baptist?”

The Chaplin protests, but the officer pushes the point “are you a Baptist?”, “no sir”, “than you are not a Baptist, aren’t you?” Defined by an absence of belief, the C.I.D. officer credits the Chaplin with certain malicious actions against the war effort.  Atheists often find themselves in a similar situation to the Chaplin, defined by an absence of belief. Theists and religious apologists infer ex nihlo that atheists hold a series of positive beliefs that have no necessary connection to the position of atheism, often the notion that “something came from nothing” or that in the absence of god “anything is permissible”.