Barbara Thayer-Bacon – författare

Relational «(e)pistemologies» redefines epistemology in a non-transcendent manner and reclaims the traditional epistemological concerns of standards and criteria for warranting arguments and determining truth and falsity. These concerns must be reclaimed in order to make them visible and accountable as well as pragmatically useful on socially constructed grounds – not transcendental grounds. Thayer-Bacon’s book offers analysis and critique as well as redescription. She presents a pragmatist social feminist view, a relational perspective of knowing embedded within a discussion of many other relational views – personal, social and holistic, ecological, and scientific – which emphasize connections. Thayer-Bacon describes each of these forms of relationality, and she points to key scholars whose work highlights a certain relational form. She concludes with a discussion of the educational implications relational (e)pistemological theories have for education.

Relational Ontologies uses the metaphor of a fishing net to represent the epistemological and ontological beliefs that we weave together for our children, to give meaning to their experiences and to help sustain them in their lives. The book describes the epistemological threads we use to help determine what we catch up in our net as the warp threads, and our ontological threads as the weft threads. It asks: what kind of fishing nets are we weaving for our children to help them make sense of their experiences? What weft threads are we including and working to strengthen, and what threads are we removing or leaving out? It is important to carefully re/examine these most basic ways of catching up what sustains us in our ocean of infinite experiences, as the threads we weave for our children will determine what they catch up in their nets, until they are old enough to re/weave their own. Relational Ontologies reweaves America’s epistemological and ontological fishing net on a larger scale, turning to indigenous cultures and diverse spiritual beliefs for assistance in reforming American schools.