More and More Curious

Critical Thinking and Beyond


an evolving series of short videos and podcasts, which may form the basis of a book (table of contents)

The word [curiosity] pleases me..: it evokes "concern"; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential.
I dream of a new age of curiosity.
Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words `EAT ME' were beautifully marked in currants. `Well, I'll eat it,' said Alice, `and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!'

She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, `Which way? Which way?', holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size... Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.

So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.
`Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); `now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was!...
Why "more and more curious" for a series of podcasts and youtubes?

Start with an all-encompassing picture of "unruly complexity," then acknowledge simple accounts that contrast with that picture, and insert simple scenarios and themes that point or open out to greater complexity. In this vein, the rightness or truth of some knowledge about a situation studied becomes a simple account and it is possible to open out to the complexity of knowledge making also being situated in some social context and so modifying knowledge always requires engaging with other knowledge makers.

A series of impulses in addressing complexity in ecological science, opening up and out from a picture of simple, well-bounded systems to problematizing boundaries. At the very end, social processes are brought in, including the sociality of science and knowledge-making.

Science and Technology Studies is the field of inquiry into the sociality of science and knowledge-making, of science in relation to its social context. Its origins in the 70s and its prehistory include writers and thinkers who wanted to influence the directions of science so it could serve "the people," that is, be less directed by the demands of corporate profit and military domination at the expense of people and the environment.

in development, drawing on the following

Models of complexity in ecology, environment, and life-course or social epidemiology
Simulation of development of gender identity (2013) (8m)
Three new puzzles about nature-nurture debates and why we should care about them (2009) (79m)
Nature-Nurture No! in relation to feminism (2014) (69m)
His nature, her nurture-or what good are conceptual critiques for tackling practical concerns about the development of gendered individuals (2015) (23m)
When a field gets to a challenging place, then stops (2018). (55m)

Interpreting the complexity of social influences shaping knowledge
"Race: A Social Construct or a Scientific Reality?" (28m)

Self-consciously applying social interpretation of research to the research
Shifting positions for knowing and intervening in the cultural politics of the life sciences (1997)
No longer possible to simply continue along previous lines': Cultivating flexible, transversal engagement in intersecting processes of social and scientific change (2012) (59m) (Alternative: View slides along with audio)
Political ecology and social theorizing (2016) (21m)
Troubled by Heterogeneity? Questions for public health, heritability studies, and personal genomics (2012)
Making visible a collage of radical scientists and critics (2014) (17m)
Being more self-conscious about participatory processes: a reflection on Science for the People, the 1970s and today, then and now (2014) (18m)
What to do if we think that researchers have overlooked a significant issue for 100 years? (2016) (43m)

Cultivating collaborators and refractive practice
Problem-based learning & other innovations in teaching & group process (2012) (46m)
Teaching Critical Thinking in the Age of Digital Credulity (2014) (15m)
Critical thinking as a journey (44m)
Critical Thinking, the stories in a new course (2015) (53m)
What is a "platform"? (18m)
Making Space for Taking Initiative In and Through Relationships (3m)
On writing support (17m)
Constituency building (2016) (18m)
Exposing lines of questioning but not following some of them: KAQ framework (2015) (13m)
What is "something" for the Critical & Creative Thinking graduate program? (2015) (22m)
Modes and focus in Critical & Creative Thinking graduate program? (2015) (3m)
Moving and motivating given the gaps (2014) (18m)
Creativity, Curiosity, Reflection, Engaging with distributed complexity (2014) (34m)
Manifesto for Creative Thinking (2013) (19m)
Step-by-step presentation of the Cycles and Epicycles framework of Action Research (2009) (click through the steps while reading this text).
On giving feedback [interview by A. Jaarsma] (2017) (38m)

Allied cases
Foundations of philosophy--not (2014) (54m)
Who cooked Adam Smith's dinner?: feminism and economics (2016) (10m)

Not yet fitted into the above categories

Visual aids to be translated into youtubes

in development
Models of ecological complexity: The relationship between complexity and stability