The Wisdom of Waterloo Pat

I threw an invitation onto Facebook for people to challenge me on my iconoclastic (for a left-winger) views. My friend Zach was keen to discuss my belief that we're not ready to ditch capitalism - because he agrees. So here's a PhD student and a political economist talking capitalism.

In this episode Pat talks to his friend Will - an experienced Dungeons & Dragons DM - about the process of creating a campaign and a fantasy world. Also along is experienced player (and Bard) Vyvyan, and new player (like Pat) James, who deliver some ASMR crunching at the same time. How do you plan a campaign? What happens when players push the limits of the world you've built? We talk about past campaigns, splitting the party, planning NPCs and more.

In this episode we discuss the way research paradigms are positioned as ‘battling’ each other, and we look at the particular example of Jordan Peterson’s attacks on the humanities in Universities. Is it true that these particular approaches are just ideologies? No - the picture is a little more complicated than that! This episode is a continuation of the conversation started in 'Research as a Right and a Battle'

In this wide-ranging, wine-fuelled conversation, we talk about Arjun Appadurai's conception of research as a 'right', how our understanding of knowledge and research has been shaped by globalisation, and how local knowledge can help from organising our communities and councils, to combatting violent extremism. We discuss climate change as a case study of 'research produced' knowledge contesting opinion and rumour, and we also briefly talk about Raewyn Connell's Southern Theory, and the idea of Indigenous and traditional knowledge as an alternate epistemology. This conversation will conclude in episode 3.

This episode introduces the idea of research paradigms, giving an overview of five major paradigms: positivism, postpositivism, constructivism, critical theory and postructuralism. We talk about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars and Star Trek. We don't dig into the history of each, or the tensions between them (what you might call the theory or paradigm 'wars'), that's for another episode.