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The Postmodern University and Its New Methodologies

 

With the postmodern turn in the university have come various new methodologies.  These need to be understood as a shift from the dominance of the sciences during Modernity to the dominance of the social sciences during Postmodernity.  The Enlightenment opposed reason to belief and science to faith.  Christians could relate somewhat well to the university in Modernity by affirming the correspondence between truth and fact.  Now, in this postmodern turn, various challenges arise from a belief that truth is locally constructed, relative, and merely functional (political).  Aspects of postmodern presuppositions are evident in the following methodologies.  Research from a Christian tradition finds many points of conflict with these new approaches.

 

Critical Theory uses theories of social Marxism to understand and work to overcome social structures that oppress (or are believed to oppress) vulnerable and disenfranchised groups.  CT is a reaction to traditional theory, which affirms a transcendental epistemology; that is, CT rejected a correspondence between truth and fact (of a thought to a thing), especially in ethics, and theories that were non-historical.  Seeking revolutionary change, not some implementation of truth, CT is epistemologically and morally relativistic and pragmatic, having no place for the objectivism that belief in ‘God’ introduces into one’s worldview.  The ‘critical’ and Marxist element of CT has to do with seeing social institutions as oppressive and people as vulnerable victims in need of emancipation.  It seeks to be pragmatic and relativistic and to understand the world in terms of the power relationships of various groups.  The landscape of CT has been surveyed by key thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas), Antonio Gramsci, and Sigmund Freud.  Various critical theories operating towards the end of liberation are liberation theology, feminism, black theology, critical race theory, post-colonialism (in certain authors), and queer or trans theory.  The Marxist origins of CT prioritise the social sciences in academic study and continue to exert an anti-religious bias, but twentieth century social Marxism is more destructive than constructive as it lacks Marx’s utopianism.  Thus, CT-inspired activists seek to ‘march through the social institutions’ to undermine them, but without any religious, especially any Christian, perspective.  It embraces violent action on behalf of perceived or real victims in society in order to bring about change that is yet to be understood.  While attacking structures of power, it still embraces power and suppression as a means of liberation.  To this end, it favours anarchy followed by socialism in the sense of a powerful state enforcing social change.

 

Posthumanism is a philosophical conceptualisation that not only removes God as the subject but also humans and replaces them with nonhuman agents (animals, environment), or removes persons and replaces them with practices.  It is a rejection of the Jewish-Christian understanding of humanity as bearers of God’s image.

 

Post-qualitative research accepts the existentialist notion that existence precedes essence.  (There is no God-given, human identity.)  It sees identity as a product of entangled existence with others in a constant process of reformation.  The perspective rejects objectivity and binary oppositions.

 

Decoloniality entails replacing the Modernist university’s objective, scientific approach to research with the subjective experiences and thinking of the ‘colonised.’  It deconstructs perceived colonial control, including reason and analytic approaches, any exercise of European power in thinking and doing, and the dominance of Western civilization.  It elevates socioeconomic and political interpretations that oppose the West.  By making colonialism the dominant category in a binary analysis of culture, including academics and religion, it is vulnerable to the charge of being inadequately analytical and critical.

 

Affective methodology highlights, as the name implies, feelings and emotions, such as love, disgust, and desire, in research.  It is intended to be a rejection of objective, dispassionate, value free, and disembodied research.  The researcher is not an objective observer but an active participant in a study.  This is a helpful challenge to modernity’s scientific objectivity, but in its postmodern iteration, it provides no faith-tradition by which to assess feelings and emotions.  To illustrate, in one, recent form of this approach, ‘living in love’ has been used to reject convictions about sexuality, gender, and marriage in the Church of England.  The emotion, love, is self-affirming and indiscriminate.

 

Vulnerable methodology highlights the vulnerability of subjects being researched.  Particular areas of vulnerability are cognitive or communicative, institutional, medical, economic, and social.  Researchers are expected to follow protocols that recognise and protect against their subjects’ vulnerabilities.


See related essay: 

After the Woke University, Then What?: Lessons from the Azanian Project in Southern Africa

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