Academic knowing in/through double perspectives

Abstract

This article explores the cultures and learning practices of four academic schools with an expressed wish to bridge the gap between traditional academic and arts or journalistic practices. Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, termed them allodoxic, in that they challenge the traditional academic way of thinking and doing. Results from two research projects, spanning over 5 years, employing a multitude of methods, have been used in this article. The results show that these challenging bridging attempts create conflictual cultures. First, faculties with different backgrounds are employed and they bring with them their respective habitus and doxa (Bourdieu), which is manifested in their different epistemologies, doxas. Despite a strong will towork interdisciplinarily, conflicts (destructive) arise particularly around epistemological and pedagogic issues. Second, I show that students at these schools have had double-perspective learning, through theoretical and practice-based methods, despite little help from their lecturers who have high ideals but little actual knowledge themselves of working in/through a double perspective. In many cases, through trial-and-error processes, students have appropriated embodied knowledge of a double perspective, which has given them surplus value when compared with learning through only traditional academic learning practices. It gives reflexive insights and understandings as well as transferrable skills highly useful in professional life. I finally argue that allodoxic conflictual cultures actually construct new ways of knowing through continuous discussions and meetings between faculties with different competences.