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Opening technology discourses to difference: A rhizoanalysis
DISSERTATION

, The Ohio State University, United States

The Ohio State University . Awarded

Abstract

This research project was an effort to seek a cultural politics of difference within the two areas of education claiming ‘technology’ as an area of study: technology education and educational technology. This study also troubled the practice of doing research, in particular, the ‘right to know’, ‘collecting and analyzing data’, and the possibility of ethics from within a professional frame of reference.

One segment of the study was with technology education high school students and their teacher in British Columbia, Canada, and another segment was with educational technology graduate students at a university in New Jersey, USA. The co-participants, including a colleague from Kenya, and I examined how technology discourses in education reverberate with the language and practices of the dominant culture, which foreground commodity production, consumption and ‘high’ technologies, silencing and/or ignoring indigenous and other non-western epistemologies and technologies. Paying particular attention to the languaging of gender, culture and environment in technology curricula, we worked to affirm difference. What appeared to be or were identified as contradictions within and between cultures were recognized and validated. We worked toward an intercultural conversation, a flow between and among different knowledge communities, concerned that our work not become another multicultural ‘hybrid,’ an accumulation of indigenous epistemologies for the West.

Methodologically, I explored the possibilities of doing research which was not primarily about ‘knowing’ ‘other’ in order to study, act upon, validate or transform. I thought against myself as researcher in an effort to engage in a more respectful and mutual conversation in the ‘regeneration’ of knowledge, rather than ‘generating’ more and better for the western knowledge project.

Citation

O'Riley, P.A. Opening technology discourses to difference: A rhizoanalysis. Ph.D. thesis, The Ohio State University. Retrieved March 28, 2024 from .

This record was imported from ProQuest on October 23, 2013. [Original Record]

Citation reproduced with permission of ProQuest LLC.

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