Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

Caliifornia State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest Update: August 23, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Community and Non-Academic
Theory Construction

Review and Teaching Essay by Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata
Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors: August 2001. "Fair use" encouraged.

This essay focuses on the importance of citing sources, verifying the evidence used in argument, recognizing and expanding voices to be included in the evidence, and the ambiguity essential to conclusions. As a Journal Entry, it is not a polished teaching essay. It is set out in the Journal to encourage us all to discuss it and contribute to its final form as an essay on community and non-academic theory construction.

Notes on the Index of Poverty:

The Human Poverty Index from the Centre for Social Justice Site. The United States has the worst index. One of our weekly discussions will involve tracing this report to its origin. Disciplined discourse requires that we be able to report our sources, so they can be verified. The Center for Social Justice Site doesn't pamper us by giving us all the information, but they do identify their sources well enough that we can trace them. See if you can figure out how. jeanne, August 23, 2001.

Judge Lillie has announded in Appellate Court that she doesn't care what the lawyers think; what does the law say? That sounds unfeeling, but it's not. And you'll hear jeanne and Susan echo Judge Lillie from time to time.

It's not that we don't care what you think. We care very much what you think. But it's not what you think that identifies the factors that are controlling the structural context. What you think is the creative part you bring to the solution, and that the lawyer brings to the legal question. The controlling structural context provides the parameters of the problem seeking solution.

It's a lot like the Presidential election in 2000 in the US. It's not that your vote didn't count. It's that the overall pattern or structural context of the conglomerate of votes that utimately determined the solution upon which we had to agree. Your vote was an integral part of that pattern. If you, who were objecting to the election results, had not voted, then the overall structural context might have awarded George W. Bush the election without the world-wide attention-getting to the legitimacy of all elections, including those of the US. Your vote did count. It just wasn't the tie-breaking vote that put GWB into the White House. That went to the US Supreme Court. But that was the first US Presidential election in which the US Supreme Court got to vote. What do you mean, your vote didn't count? It changed the face of elections in the US, maybe in the world.

We care what you think about the index of poverty. We want very much for you to include such knowledge in your worldview. But what you think does not define the index of poverty, or give us much factual evidence of that index's meaning for us in our daily lifeworld. In order to have a valid opinion on poverty, you need to include along with your own qualitative experiences, information that lets you situate poverty in the structural context of our own society and that of the broader global picture. In order to determine how much weight you want to give in what you think of poverty to the Index of Poverty, you need information about that index, how it was made up, what data went into it, and whether the index included the perspectives of all those who have validity claims about poverty.

We'll do this in a theory lab. . .

More soon. . .

Relevant Sources:

Table of Contents of
United Nations Development Programme 1999 Report.

Human Development Index The United Nations Development Programme, 1999 Report.