If I Said We Need to Recenter Truth and Validity, Would You Hate Me?

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Philosophical Considerations in Qualitative Research (Table 7)

Abstract

This theoretical paper explores what a truth reconstruction project might look like. If we have made truth more robust by letting a thousand flowers bloom it is all the more reason why it falls to us to defend it, in all its glorious fertility. Lather (1993) fruitfully offered up “a range of counter-practices of authority” (p. 687), might it be time to once again incite a kindred counter narrative? What if we were to map a path forward for scholarship; to adopt truth as a reconstruction project– in itself a counter-practice to the abused and co-opted post-truth version we are currently mired in. No longer a hegemonic Truth, put perhaps a 1000 tiny footings upon which to base action?

Author

• Marc T. Spooner, University of Regina