Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

Talking about knowledge and education. Mathew Toll  is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney.  He completed his BA (hons) in 2012.  His current research is in digital sociology and the sociology of knowledge, looking at the deficit model of public understanding of science, political deliberation and knowledge formation online.  Title:   Discerning Knowers: Exploring University Students’ Perceptions of Knowledge Claims. Abstract:   Sociologists often view the authority of knowledge as a reflection of social power. Educational research mirrors with theories that treat knowledge as primarily “knowledge of the powerful” (Young 2009:13).  This study employed conceptual tools from Legitimation Code Theory (Maton 2014) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Eggins 1994; Martin 1993) to explore university student’s perceptions of knowledge claims and if knowledge is deemed to be shaped both by social relations and epistemic relations...

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 d...

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

Yesterday I submitted an honours thesis entitled:   " Discerning Knowers: An Exploratory Study of University Students’ Perceptions of Knowledge Claims ”.  On the final count it was 110 pages long, with twenty two thousand words in total. It changed several times from the initial conception to the final product. I have a lot more respect for people who conduct research,  it is very hard to get at what is happening in the world. Also, now I know the process isn't impossible. Even when I started the thesis there was a large part of me that thought that I couldn't write twenty thousand words; but as it turns out I wrote a lot more that didn't end up in the finished thesis. Perhaps one day, after the comments from the markers and final revisions,  I might put it online or let people read it. For now I'd like to thank my supervisor Dr Karl Maton   and present the thesis abstract bellow for anyone who might be interested. Abstract The main problem thi...

 In the social sciences, the selection of research design and its constituent elements is an important phase of the research process.  The choice of research design is subject to a number of theoretical and methodological considerations.  Within the discipline of sociology, there exists a high level of theoretical and methodological pluralism with competing approaches to the study of society being pursued simultaneously which often gives rise to contention and contestation over the relative value of approaches. While quantitative research has relatively well-established principles of evaluation, appraisal of qualitative research is highly contentious. Carter and Little (2007) have suggested that consistency of research design is an important criterion via which to evaluate qualitative research:  epistemology, methodology and methods have to be internally consistent in order to form a solid research design. Adoption of a particular epistemological stance can affec...

The above picture is an outline of a thesis, or at least how a thesis could be structured: literature review, research design, results, discussion and conclusion. The planed thesis is on the relationship between language and authority, or more specifically how language is used to confer legitimacy of knowledge-claims. I’m still working through the specific metrics and research methods, but the theoretical matrix is drawn from Basil Bernstein , Pierre Bourdieu and Legitimation Code Theory .

“[A]nd each day hundreds of new orphans, Arabs and French, awakened in every corner of Algeria, sons and daughters without fathers who would now have to learn to live without guidance and without heritage” – Albert Camus, ‘ The First Man ’. In the early months of 1958, Hneri Alleg’s La Question was published in France and caused an immediate scandal for its first-hand description of torture by the French military in Algeria. For Alleg, the scourge of institutionalized torture not only afflicted the native Algerians, but functioned as “a school of perversion for young Frenchman”. In the long course of the war (1954-1962), dehumanization of the enemy led to increasingly brutal manifestations of violence. Albert Camus bemoaned the war for its extreme tactics and for severing two interconnected communities. However, these two communities, the indigenous and the European, had never constituted an organic whole. Part of the strategic logic of Nationalist terrorism was to provoke a...

Western Marxism has often laid considerable stress upon the ideology of modern capitalist societies. This focus upon ideology stems from the failure of proletarian revolution to have either occurred, or establish socialism within Western Europe. The exact nature and function of ideology became paramount in Marxian explanations of the continued stability of Western capitalism after the Great War and Great Depression. Marxian conceptualizations of symbolic domination (under the notion of ideology) remain in the realm of consciousness and intellectual frameworks. Pierre Bourdieu developed a paradigm for understanding symbolic power and domination through his theory of dispositional practices that breaks with the concept of ideology and it basis in the tradition of ‘Kantian intellectualism’. This theoretical model both deepens and broadens the sociological understanding of symbolic power and domination, through the acknowledgment of non-intellectual and bodily elements in the dynamics o...