by Neville Buch | Feb 16, 2022 | Article, Blog, Concepts in Educationalist Thought Series
âMany educators and administrators feel that university public service programming will assume an even larger role in the university community due to declining enrollment and public demands for relevance.â Robert Sellers. Methodology for Evaluating University Public Service Outreach to State and Local Government, in State & Local Government Review, May 1979, Vol. 11, No. 2 (May, 1979), pp. 64-69 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/4354649).
So was said in 1979. Community education is a public service, substantially. Â However, the article of the past is very revealing in how we have not progressed in community education as a public service. âFor example, said Robert Sellers, âit might be established that a public service unit with less than two full-time professionals would rank below standard for that characteristic.â
A global conversation needs to open up on the community education, and include the many visions of community education, and which would embrace differences.
More than that the practice in the new community education model(s) need to become formative. My thinking here is informed by the knowledge of how the histories have shaped community education. There are several examples I can give, but here is one.
In the early 20th century community education, across Commonwealth countries, was substantive in the form of Technical Colleges, Schools of Art, Mechanic Institutes, royal societies, and ideological associations â Freethinkers, Rationalists, and Church lecture series. By the mid-century that momentum is eroded, and community education is largely reduced to technical arts at the tech colleges. In Australia there was never a history of the American state community colleges, and the liberal arts colleges which emerged in the mid-West. The early 21st century âglobalâ has changed the dynamics with the emergence of online educative communities. However, it struggles in the 1990s-created neo-liberal economy and institutional constant habits, where the talk is generally innovation but without structural change. An example of innovation with structural change is the University of Melbourneâs Melbourne Model (2005-2015).
Where we need to look to examine the challenges, is in the relationship between the universities and community education. The informal history of community education goes back a long way â catechisms, political meetings in the public square, Sunday schools, and so forth. To different measures, these gatherings were popular movements. The universities ebbed and flowed through these popular movements, and the academy was both influenced popular movements and was influenced by such movements. In the 20th century the universities took a larger leadership role in community education. This was particularly seen in the organisation of the Workers Educational Association. However, the momentum withered in the last quarter of the century. This coincided with the development of universityâs correspondence courses, with community members obtaining degrees through programs in mail packages, radio, and television. This process was replaced, in this century, by the online collaborative university educational programs, such as Open University. In this case the degrees are badged as generic across the university partners. Where does that leave community education?
In a neo-liberal economy, it means that many community members are still left out of the universityâs âopenâ offerings. That means that many communities members look to community education as a free hobby, a plaything with no educative concern. In such an environment, lifelong learning is significantly diminished.
That is the current challenge for community educators and facilitators, as well as for corporate owners of the platforms that operated to run community education programs.
SOURCES
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Buch, Neville (2021). The Intellectual Ethos of Charles Strong in Queensland 1855-1917, in Marion Maddox, Charles Strongâs Australian Church: Christian Social Activism, 1885â1917, University of Melbourne Press.
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University Campus Education Knowledge School Concept
Image: Photo 75687496 / Community Education © Rawpixelimages | Dreamstime.com
by Neville Buch | Aug 9, 2024 | Concepts in Public History for Marketplace Dialogue
A significant slice on the global history of sociology, philosophy, and historiography has been around discussions of Micro and Macro scopings, and Thin and Thick concepts, with the best scholars examining what Randall Collins calls, “interaction ritual” (IR). The sociological concept was first introduced in Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, a 1967 book by Erving Goffman. The concepts are slightly different between Collins and Goffman but the concepts are mutually supportive. In the first essay, “On Face-work”, Goffman discusses the concept of face, which is the positive self-image a person holds when interacting with others, and Goffman believes that face “as a sociological construct of interaction is neither inherent in nor a permanent aspect of the person”. Reinhard Bendix‘s work State and Society (1973) enabled Collins to later combine this theory with Erving Goffman’s microsociology, which resulted in Collins’ publication Conflict Sociology in 1975 and later, Interaction Ritual Chains in 2004. Goffman was also one of Collins’ professors during his time at Berkeley. Collins’ identifies interaction ritual more in terms of cognition links in schools of thought.
Randall Collins has always been interested in what he calls a “non-obvious” sociology (1982). A nonobvious sociology is one that reveals the hidden processes behind what is taken for granted and that demonstrates why the obvious questions are not necessarily the most central ones. [page 92]
Sociologies of other disciplines tend to strike readers, especially those in the targeted field, as attempts to expand the jurisdiction of sociology and to fulfill Comte’s dream of making sociology the ultimate explanatory foundation for all intellectual pursuits. Although we see some of this in Collins, his primary goal in this latest work is not to sociologically explain away philosophical truths. Instead Collins intends to use the history of philosophy to test his ideas about the relationship between concrete human interactions and social structures-that is, the relation between what have come to be called the micro and the macro. [page 92]
Whether the details of the work are ultimately convincing is beyond the scope of this article, but no reader can be unimpressed by the geographic breadth and depth of Collins’s attempt. Following the overview of the theory is a discussion both of what I find unconvincing in the micro theory and also of what I feel are Collins’s new contributions to the sociology of knowledge. Finally, I will suggest what sociology of knowledge might say about sociological theory itself [page 93; my emphasis on the author’s thinking]
Collins’s view of the micro-macro relation is inspired by the empirical achievements such microsociological approaches as ethnomethodology and conversational analysis. These microsociologies do not wholly reject macrosociological concepts, but they improve on their explanations by reconstituting macroconcepts on radically empirical foundations. Whether structures change or persist depends entirely upon whether lying microbehaviors change or persist (Collin 1981: 989). Collins often describes structures as simple aggregates of microevents and has suggested a rather dubious sampling strategy that would ignore all traditional macrosociological variables (Collins 1981:988). [page 94]
Collins’s sociology combines a micro theory of emotional solidarity with a macro theory based on conflict. Collins believes that the same processes that produce solidarity on the micro level produce conflict on the macro. The cultural capital, emotional energy, and group solidarities produced in IRs [interaction rituals] allow individuals to dominate hierarchies and encourage groups to engage in concerted conflict. IRs are both a site where domination is practiced and a supplier of the major weapons used in social conflict. [page 95]
[Goodman’s key criticism] his theory lacks the prime advantage that Collins sees in a micro approach, its openness to empirical testing. Increases in emotional energy are no more observable than any of the macrostructures that Collins labels as nonempirical abstractions. In an articles Collins (1990b:50) admits as much. “My argument, that EE [emotional energy] declines over a series of interaction rituals depending upon the ups and experiences of power and status, is inferential. There is little direct evidence for it.” [page 97]
Goodman’s criticism of Collins’ paradigm fails because it is on any reasonable reading a non-acceptance of nonempirical abstractions, and, as such, it is prejudice, a rationally-argued anti-intellectualism among academics. Philosophical principles (including ethics) are generally nonempirical abstractions; even consequentialist theories has to start in the metaphysics to prioritise natural values. A non-acceptance of nonempirical abstractions blanketly rejects all other theory for theoretical pragmaticism; that is, trapped and stuck thinking.
Nevertheless, as cited by Goodman it can be seen what is valuable. So, Collins does “not to sociologically explain away philosophical truths. Instead Collins intends to use the history of philosophy to test his ideas about the relationship between concrete human interactions and social structures-that is, the relation between what have come to be called the micro and the macro.” Amongst the preservation of that methodology of ‘philosophical truths’ are the meta-reflective conceptions of ‘thin concepts’ and ‘thick concepts’. The terms come from the fields of metaphilosophy and ethics, metaethics:
Yet another way of categorizing metaethical theories is to distinguish between centralist and non-centralist moral theories. The debate between centralism and non-centralism revolves around the relationship between the so-called “thin” and “thick” concepts of morality: thin moral concepts are those such as good, bad, right, and wrong; thick moral concepts are those such as courageous, inequitable, just, or dishonest. While both sides agree that the thin concepts are more general and the thick more specific, centralists hold that the thin concepts are antecedent to the thick ones and that the latter are therefore dependent on the former. That is, centralists argue that one must understand words like “right” and “ought” before understanding words like “just” and “unkind.” Non-centralism rejects this view, holding that thin and thick concepts are on par with one another and even that the thick concepts are a sufficient starting point for understanding the thin ones. (
Wikipedia).
A number of other psychological theories may also shed light on behaviour in the political context of avoiding understanding human factors, such as cost-benefit , and free-choice . What strikes me in the debates are several observations:
- People actively avoid situations and information likely to increase cognitive dissonance â the discomfort from holding contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, or dealing with new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or .
- People do not think much about their attitudes, let alone whether they are in conflict. They can come to conclusions as observers without much (or no) emotional or intellectual (cognitive)Â
Nevertheless, in spite of an over-emphasis in rational process or agency, there are basic elements in reasoning and choice which ought not to be ignored. Ideas on action and motivation may also provide some illumination. We continue to make ethical judgements. We can identify a personâs motivation as malice, intellectual laziness, or just plain ignorance. These are what Bernard Williams called thick concepts â the way we, at the same time, combine our valuation and facts of the matter in . We see it in others because we think and feel in the same way. It is an inescapable part of our socialization. It is also a fact about how the brain is âwiredâ. The big mistake of the ancients, and which we continue in modernity, is to emphasize the difference between emotion and reason.
In current discussions today on democracy, the biggest threat is the thin concept of “We the People”, and the solution is the thick concept of “We the Persons”. If you ask the question, who are people it is easy to see it is a thin concept, as the explanation goes not further than a category. If you ask the question, who are the persons it is easy to see it is a thick concept, since the question leads into the scholarship of personalism. What we get today are the thin concepts of the political rhetoric, signs without substance but which infer hidden or undisclosed beliefs. The advantage of thick concepts is that this political rhetoric has greater clarity. Now, as I argued in my past essay, The Level Playing Field:
Every idea, word, term has a fit, in that we can measure some meaningful signal from when a person uses an idea, word, or term to explain their own beliefs. It has become fashionable in all quarters to nastily dismiss a proposition where someone is attempting to explain an idea, word, or term, and this is to deny any meaningful content in the thinking offer. This is absolute cynicism and should not be accepted in society, but provided as the meaning of a moronic thinking, and not to be hypocritical, each must admit that, to some measure, it is performed by each person sometime past. It is an emotional reaction of human development and society agrees it is a stage of immaturity; although most of us keep falling intermittently for this emotional trap.
All of the terms and concepts in this article has a fit to, not one, but to several overlapping schemas. Furthermore, there are many more sociological terms and concepts which can also be identified (many thanks to Neil Peach for the list; Szakolczai 2023):
- Liminality: 1. occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. 2. relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process. (Oxford)
- Trickster: a person who cheats or deceives people. (Oxford)
- Imitation: 1. the action of using someone or something as a model. 2. a thing intended to simulate or copy something else. (Oxford)
- Schismogensis: Schismogenesis is a term in anthropology that describes the formation of social divisions and differentiation. Literally meaning “creation of division”, the term derives from the Greek words ÏÏÎŻÏΌα skhisma “cleft” (borrowed into English as schism, “division into opposing factions”), and ÎłÎΜΔÏÎčÏ genesis “generation, creation” (deriving in turn from gignesthai “be born or produced, creation, a coming into being”). The term was introduced by anthropologist Gregory Bateson and has been applied to various fields. (Wikipedia)
- (Total) Participation: the action of taking part in something. (Oxford)
Taken all together, what this article is arguing, as a summative statement, is that true learning are three metaethical concepts, which align together, and with all other terms and concepts mentioned in the article:
- (true) Open Access: the unrestricted right or opportunity to use or benefit from something, in particular academic writing or research. (Oxford)
- Open Participation: Open Participation. Means that anyone may attend a Committee meeting and have the opportunity to offer an opinion on the subject of the meeting, or otherwise participate as a member of the advisory group. (Law Insider)
- Open and Level Playing Field: A level playing field is simply a fair way to compare or judge two things. (Britannica)
The full argument is a forthcoming essay. But the ‘thisness,’ here (Haecceity), is a start to a critical thinking conversation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Collins, Randall (1998). The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, Harvard Unversity Press.
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Peach, Neil (2019). Individualised learning approach (the three âpâs) for a small to medium enterprise through work based learning, Academia.edu .
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Featured Image: Get off the public path. Choose an alternative way. Thinking outside the box. Atypical leadership thinking qualities. Conformism denial. Detachment. Search for new opportunities. Over the border. Photo 247705837 | Public Thinking © Andrii Yalanskyi | Dreamstime.com
by Neville Buch | Dec 10, 2023 | 2023 Sydney-Auckland Tour, Article, Concepts in Educationalist Thought Series, The History Of Ruth
I am alone, not like this blank page to which I start to write. We are thrown into a world (Heidegger).
I woke up slowly this morning. I slept in. Each morning since 17 December 2016, I awake with a sense of disorientation, and in loss and grief. I am alone.
Isolation is different from person to person, and what is common is the experience is only to a smaller group of persons. I am a widower who lost the love of his life at her young age of 55 years. The context immediately places the loss and grief in a certain way. My wife was âsickâ with a brain cancer and I was her carer for seven years. It has been seven years since Ruth died. While Ruth lived with the âdeath sentenceâ, she was determined to live life as best she could on her own terms. Her work career had just started after many years of study and parttime work, and then it was turned around. She took on a retired life in those seven years, that meant that I did not, or could not, engage as much as, in retrospect I wish I had. Worse, being close to her elderly mother it seemed to me that she became an elderly companion to her mother, well-aged beyond her actual years. It seemed I suddenly became married to a much older woman who I was caring for. It created something of a barrier for myself and my two daughters who were frustrated that their mother had prematurely loss her vigour. We had just hit on a solution to which Ruth agreed â that she would return to her social work studies â when the tumour returned, and her hope for an M.A. in social work was abandoned. Then the laborious and dark year of 2016, of initial vain hope, heartbreak, and isolation. Ruth died alone. Ruth did not die alone. It is a paradox. No one could really be there for Ruth as she was in the dying stages of six months. She was alone, slipping away from us. Nevertheless, we â I, family, friends â were in her presence to the end. I felt the distancing from the love of my heart. The love remained, but it became distant, as Ruth slipped into long periods of sleep, and there was less engagement to express love: too few hugs, too few words. The barrier was also self-preservation in the shock of losing not only a loved one, but my life, my life with Ruth. Ruth was alone. I was alone.
Writing these words on the remaining blank page, tears are running down my face after seven years.
Being alone, however, in the last seven years has another dimension.
I have just completed four conferences in two weeks, as I write these words on a Sunday morning and afternoon from Room 603 at the Marriot in Auckland. It is a sign of an achievement in my new life, and yet I feel very much alone, a different kind of aloneness. In my life with Ruth, we had compromised much in our work careers, mutually. Both of us lost those opportunities of advancing in our career. Both of us had hopes for advancement, but I was particularly ambitious to be the teacher and researcher at the head podium of the conference. Â But to achieve such ambitious status, I would have to have had the paid position in the university, but much more, I would have had to put in the required hours away from the family. This was not possible in life with Ruth, and it was part of our mutual compromise.
Now in the absence of Ruth, the opportunities have come too late. For the whole of my life, with or without Ruth, it was always too late: too late to make my own mark in the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, being too young. Too late as an undergraduate student, moving on into my late 20s. Too late as a doctoral student in my early 30s, which meant too late in my initial career as a higher education researcher in my late 30s. Very few excelling scholars can get ahead of the crowd and stake the direction of the mass culture. Working in a university office, you are in the midst of the madness with temporary and insignificant tasks. It was only in the years after I left the Office of Vice-Chancellor, University of Melbourne, that it made any sense what was happening. It is the concept of historical distancing. Hegelâs ancient owl. Now, I can write the exceptionally important papers for the intellectual histories of higher learning, but, tragically, my colleagues have moved onto other important and critical matters; so, who cares what a 62-year-old has to say, âisnât he retired.â I am alone.
Furthermore, Â what I have to say is incredibly discomforting to my university colleagues who remain in the madness. I am saying, for the communities I work for, is that academics across the fields, are only âshifting the deckchairsâ of higher learning, and higher learning still remains as aloof to the lebenphilosophie of public space communities. There are too few scholars, who are actually inside the public space communities, translating the vast literature of higher learning, and we are the ones with the crushed university ambitions. And we are also the ones without payment for our work since voluntary work is so undervalued in our society. Academics talk about doing voluntary work for the scholarly societies but they forget that they do so from a wage that is paid by the university. I am alone.
Ambition is thawed away, not merely in the closed-off opportunity. One is self-aware of the shortfall of living oneâs life. For me, it was always languages. It was something in my childhood disposition, that growing up I could never distinguish well, audiologically, in pronunciation and tone. Tone also meant that I could express anger without understanding the tone heard as aggression. If I felt the aggression in myself, I had translate it as frustration at the lack of attention I felt I was receiving. Life had meant I knew humility, but the lack of attention was interpreted in my historianâs frame: I was continually misunderstood due to wilful historical forgetfulness. Academics caught up in rabbit holes of specialisation just did not want to know, and why should they care? I was alone.
I must admit to the marginality of attending and participating in the four conferences, and that I was not alone. It is a similar paradox of the life with Ruth, mentioned above. Academics feel that their position is at the margins. Everyone in public space communities feel at the margins. It is a strange life-experience of being alone, and very much not alone. So, to get academic attention, what does the literature says on being alone?
Most the literature relates dispassionate and clinical studies, as expected, but there were nine works directly related to my argument on being alone (Hughes and Gove 1981; Ranta, Rita, Lindstrom 1993; Stack 1998; Coleman 2009; Gaymu, Springer, and Stringer 2012; Demey, Berrington, Evandrou, and Falkingham 2014; Holt-Lunstad, Smith, Baker, Harris, and Stephenson 2015; Frank, Froese, Hof, Scheffold, Schreyer, Zeller, and Rödder, 2017; Wilkinson, Tomlinson, and Gardiner 2017).
As to the dispassionate and clinical studies, the literature mostly focuses on the conditions of older persons in Asian cultures and philosophies (Raymo 2015; Kim 2015; Min-Ah Lee 2016), with two European or western paralleled concern (Kemp and Acheson 1989; de Jong, Dykstra, Schenk 2012). Another area of clinical concern was young persons living alone in one-person households (Cheung and Yeung 2015, 2021);
- Raymo (2015) uses Japanese census data to evaluate how much of the growth in one-person households at ages 20â39 between 1985 and 2010 is explained by change in marital behaviour and how much is explained by other factors. The analyses indicate that marital behaviour had correlated with certain increase in one-person households for men and three-fourths of the increase for women. That is interesting but that does not go anywhere in understanding the film, Lost in Translation. Surprise, surprise, the second set of analyses indicated that those living alone are significantly less happy than those living with others.
- Kim (2015) has a more honest appraisal from the data, concluding it is not clear whether public transfers for the elderly will increase or decrease their independent living. Furthermore, as is supported in much intergenerational studies of the last 60 years, multigenerational co-residence is prevalent and norms and preferences for that form of living arrangement remain strong. I do love my daughters living at home when they do;
- Min-Ah Lee (2016) used data from the four waves of the Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing (KLoSA) over a period of six years, discrete time event history analyses were conducted to analyse the determinants of the transition to living alone for older Koreans. What was found was that home ownership and higher household income at a previous wave were negatively associated with the transition to living alone in general, whereas prior depressive symptoms were positively associated with the transition to living alone for older Koreans. It is certainly counter-intuitive. To say, physical health conditions did not have significant effects on the transition to living alone is aggressively opposite of the lebenphilosophie, as the global population finds it. Although Min-Ah Lee does conclude that the transition to living alone in disadvantaged older adults may amplify the harmful effects of living alone on their well-being in the long run, his approach to the data is problematic. Statistics is always subject to false reading from what the expectations of the participants have in what should be reported;
- In 1989 Kemp and Acheson did better work in tying the experience of being alone to the care of community. They sampled 2,000 elderly people from 20 general practitioner practices in the East Anglia area. Those living alone exhibit a higher level of independence than those living with others, but nearly a quarter of those aged 75 and over living alone did rely on someone else entirely for specific tasks;
- de Jong et al (2012) used data from the Generations and Gender Surveys of three countries in Eastern Europe and two countries in Western Europe. Latent Class Analyses was applied to develop intergenerational support types for (a) co-residing respondents in Eastern Europe, (b) respondents in independent households in Eastern Europe, and (c) respondents in independent households in Western Europe, respectively. On this basis, a six-way typology was produced. It is fascinating reading, but, again, the lebenphilosophie is simply not there;
- In Cheung and Yeungâs (2015, 2021) major paper, they drew data (from previous studies to the meta-data) from a subsample of young adults (aged between 20 and 35) from China 1% Population Sample Survey 2005 (ni = 582,139; nj = 345). They concluded that young adults living in one-person households (OPHs) had increased remarkably worldwide. This analysis is informative to both living alone and having to migrate to live alone. A second paper was published, but it appears almost the same as the earlier study.
There is an academic game-playing which distorts the intelligence in the academic research and findings, and particularly, missed lebenphilosophie.
As to the actually academic articles writing on the being alone:
- In 1981 Hughes and Gove immediately went to the much better research, and providing an examination of the effects of living alone on mental health, mental well-being, and maladaptive behaviours. Their work reflects the general ethos of the 1980s, in that there was much more concern among academics for compatibilist philosophy and horizon worldviews. The work in academy, in later decades, trended the statistical analysis without the quality consideration of the philosophic concepts in the works. Hughes and Gove showed there is no evidence that persons who live alone are selected into supported living arrangement because of preexisting psychological problems, noxious personality characteristics, or incompetent socioeconomic behaviour, and that, contrary to structural functionalism or symbolic interactionism, unmarried persons who live alone are in no worse, and on some indicators are in better, mental health than unmarried persons who live with others. The big gap in their work is the absence of references to widows and widowers. Most academics cannot deal with loss and grief until it becomes their own lebenphilosophie;
- In 1993 Ranta et al produced a very bland paper, which reported to speak to âCompetition Versus Cooperationâ, Admittedly it was an anthropological paper about food foraging alone and in groups. They argued that the option of foraging alone may easily be a better strategy than that of a low-ranking individual foraging in a group. However, as a generic argument, it is bullshit. As interdisciplinary scholars are aware, the competitive and Darwinian social models does not work for the benefit of the individual nor the group. The argument of Ranta et al is so obviously agenda-ed, as all academic works are. There is no evidence that the lebenphilosophie of a low-ranking individual is better without the deep group interaction and worldview;
- In 1998 Stack pointed out that previous research on loneliness had often neglected the role of marriage and family ties, comparative analysis, and cohabitation. Using the data from 17 nations in the World Values Survey, they concluded (1) marriage is associated with substantially less loneliness, but parenthood is not, (2) being married was considerably more predictive of loneliness than cohabitation, indicating that companionship alone does not account for the protective nature of marriage, (3) both marriage and parental status were associated with lower levels of loneliness among men than women, (4) marriage is associated with decreased loneliness independent of two intervening processes: marriage’s association with both health and financial satisfaction, (5) the strength of the marriage-loneliness relationship is constant across 16 of the 17 nations. Again, there is not the consideration of the end of marriage through experience of âpre-matureâ death;
- In the new century Coleman (2009) went to the characteristic urban experience of solitude and its challenges to traditional anthropological theories of urban life. It challenged theoretical perspectives with ethnographic cases of gay identities and âbeing alone together,â drawn from fieldwork in New Delhi, India. Personally, in the different context of heterosexuality, I found Colmanâs heuristic concept of âsocial solitudeâ, in contrast to âsolidarityâ, and his examination of the political and philosophical consequences of focusing on solitude as an urban way of life and an expression of sexuality, an epistemic fit. Coleman drew his informative model from a reading of Deleuze;
- Gaymu et al (2012), finally, lands on the lebenphilosophie directly. They looked at the influence of living conditions on the life satisfaction of men and women over 60 years of age in ten European countries using data from the European survey SHARE 2004 (wave 1). The features that they examine are the same of my lebenphilosophie argument: income levels, homeownership, and the relationship between family roles and economic status;
- Demey et al (2014) examined studies which found that the duration since a union dissolution and the number of union dissolutions are associated with psychological well-being. Again, the lebenphilosophie of widows and widowers are not relevant â not a matter of âunion dissolutionâ in the full semantics of the experience;
- Holt-Lunstad et al (2015) comes closer with an examination of actual and perceived social isolation in that both are associated with increased risk for early mortality. They conducted a literature search of studies (January 1980 to February 2014) using MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Social Work Abstracts, and Google Scholar. Again, the interdisciplinary scholarship shows that there is something is wrong, when concluding no differences between measures of objective and subjective social isolation. Their approach was admittedly, marginally, to the compatibilism side, and they did say, âthe influence of both objective and subjective social isolation on risk for mortality is comparable with well-established risk factors for mortalityâ, but that overlooks many object-subject lessons in the interdisciplinary knowledge;
- Frank et al (2017) go directly to my main point here: âThe ability to conduct interdisciplinary research is crucial to address complex real-world problems that require the collaboration of different scientific fields, with global warming being a case in point.â Their classroom experiment reminds me of David Kayrouzâs presentation at the PESA conference on knowing and knowledge (images of Kayrouzâs models in the photo album);
- Wilkinson et al (2017), finally, goes to my sorrowful-happy reflections of my life with Ruth, with their examination of the dominant understanding of workâlife balance or conflict as primarily a âworkâfamilyâ issue by exploring the experiences of managers and professionals who live alone and do not have children â a group of employees traditionally overlooked in workâlife policy and research but, significantly, a group on the rise within the working age population. Of course, Ruth and I had two wonderful children, but Wilkinson et al’s analysis does not go to lebenphilosophie of widows and widowers, with or without children.
The always continuing conclusions
I have spent this Sunday writing this âacademic articleâ, without family close-by, and without a loving partner, has provided the insight to what being alone is about. As an interdisciplinary scholar, outside the university, and for the public square community, I am alone. So much for academic collegialism! Still, I am supported in kindness by individual academics and former academics. And I thank them dearly, for when I do not feel alone.
REFERENCES
Cheung, A. K.-L., & Yeung, W.-J. J. (2021). Socioeconomic development and young adultsâ propensity of living in one-person households: Compositional and contextual effects. Demographic Research, 44, 277â306. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27032913
Coleman, L. (2009). Being Alone Together: From Solidarity to Solitude in Urban Anthropology. Anthropological Quarterly, 82(3), 755â777. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20638659
de Jong Gierveld, J., Dykstra, P. A., & Schenk, N. (2012). Living arrangements, intergenerational support types and older adult loneliness in Eastern and Western Europe. Demographic Research, 27, 167â200. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26349921
Demey, D., Berrington, A., Evandrou, M., & Falkingham, J. (2014). Living alone and psychological well-being in mid-life: does partnership history matter? Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (1979-), 68(5), 403â410. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43281754
Frank, A. M., Froese, R., Hof, B. C., Scheffold, M. I. E., Schreyer, F., Zeller, M., & Rödder, S. (2017). Riding alone on the elevator: A class experiment in interdisciplinary education. Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences, 10(3), 1â19. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48561574
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