Knowledge and Experience

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Knowledge and Experience
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Knowledge and Experienceeveryday thought vs.
scientific thought

• What thinking is like in the pervasive contexts
  of peoples lives?
• What kind of knowledge underlies lived-in
  experience?
• What people do in weekly, monthly, ordinary
  cycles of activity?
• relation of social (cultural system) and
  individual
• experience

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Knowledge and Experienceeveryday thought vs.
scientific thought

• methods / models (functionalist vs. practice
  theory)
• cognitive science (1970s) (focuses on
  problem-solving practice/knowledge emanates from
  scientific thought informs education, research)
  learning transfer / knowledge domains
• anthropologists (detailed knowledge of real
  life activities situations now also informs
  education) activity of persons-acting in setting
  / located nature of activity

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Knowledge and Experienceeveryday thought vs.
scientific thought

• Problem-solving
• individual, rational, cognitive, experiment,
  information processing
• life skills disembodied from contexts of use
  extraction of knowledge from particular
  experience, activity, context, in order to make
  it generally applicable in all situations

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Knowledge and Experienceeveryday thought vs.
scientific thought

• Lived-in, in situ action
• socially contextualized experience in ways that
  require theorizing
• empirical description, or analysis
• ethnographic study of that process

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Knowledge and Experienceeveryday thought vs.
scientific thought

• Why important? power relation of whose thought /
  knowledge worlds are expressed in education,
  institutions, social processes
• Lave, Cognition in Practice
• deCerteau, The Practice of Everyday Life

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Knowledge and Power
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Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge
and society

• constraints and limitations inherent in knowledge
  systems (Foucault)
• hegemony (Gramsci)
• critiques of ideology and culture (Marx-Engels
  Marxist critics Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci,
  Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc.)

9
Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge
and society

• constraints and limitations inherent in knowledge
  systems (Foucault)

10
Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge
and society

• hegemony (Gramsci 1930s)
• ability in certain historical periods of the
  dominant classes to exercise social and cultural
  leadership and by these means, rather than direct
  coercion of subordinate classes, to maintain
  their power over the economic, political, and
  cultural direction of the nation

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Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge
and society

• hegemony does not operate by having people
  concede power against their common sense, but we
  bear complicity in our own subordination
• winning of consent to unequal class relations
  (peasants-workers strike in Italy)

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• Gramsci and Hegemony
• _____________________________________

ilkustration credit Introducing Cultural
Studies (Icon Books, 1999)
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Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge
and society

• hegemony binds a society together without the use
  of force, under the leadership of the dominant
  classes
• how achieved? manipulations of images and
  meanings institutions as producers of sense,
  knowledge, and meaning

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Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge
and society

• realm of consciousness and representations when
  totality of social, cultural and individual
  experience is capable of being made sense of in
  terms that are defined, established and put into
  circulation by the power bloc

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Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge
and society

• realm of cultural agency of institutions (the
  state, the law, the educational system, the
  media, the family) prolific producers of sense,
  knowledge, and meanings organizers and producers
  of individual consciousness yet institutions are
  taken as impartial or neutral, representative of
  everybody (no apparent reference to class, race
  or gender)

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Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge
and society

• institutions (cont) site on which hegemony can
  be established and exercised if captured or
  colonized by a power bloc which finds allies in
  professionals and managers and intellectuals of
  various kinds (subaltern classes) who perceive
  their interest as congruent to or identical with
  those of the dominant group

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Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge
and society

• Results? Hegemony naturalizes what is
  historically a class ideology, and renders it
  into the form of common sense
• Power is exercised not as force but as authority
  cultural aspects of life are depoliticised
  ideology is naturalized
• Culture seen as mode of domination and liberation
  (cultural studies)

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illustration credit Introducing Cultural
Studies (Icon Books, 1999)
Gramsci and Hegemony _____________________________
_______ consent compromise culture as site of
struggle of competing interests intellectuals
forge consent in the interest of the ruling class
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Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge
and society

• critiques of ideology and culture (Marx-Engels
  Marxist critics Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci,
  Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc.)
• analysis of culture in terms of its relationships
  to a mode of production and its specific social
  formation

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Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge
and society

• culture is a form of superstructure which
  articulates the interests and ideologies of those
  who control the economic base of society
  (reductionism, economic determinism)
• recognition that institutions are involved in
  distribution of power in society

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Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge
and society

• capitalist mode of production structure
  political, legal and cultural institutions of
  their time
• contribution analysis of art, literary form and
  ideology, reading of cultural texts as
  expressions of social experience and ideology