Funding, common sense and scientific knowledge

Blogging this week has been a little bit slower than last week. We'll have to see how many interesting entries we can do each week. I think we'll aim for at least two entries each week. One from each. Hopefully more.

This week started out with a meeting Monday morning with Eva. The agenda of the meeting was for us to get a sense of how Eva and Stine managed their Master Thesis “Social empowerment through ICT-education: an empirical analysis of an ICT-educational program in Tanzania". As the title suggest they went to Tanzania last year to collect their empirical data, and we discussed how their trip went and how they applied for funds. We are beginning to see how complicated applying for funds are. Each fund wants it's own kind of documentation, which is rather time consuming. Hopefully our hard work pays off, with our own trip. We also talked with Eva about the positive and negative things in how they developed their master thesis. All in all we had a good meeting, with recommendations and things to look out for.

The rest of the week has gone with reading articles primarily about what development is. Which at first glance might look like an easy answer, but which is isn't. Some will argue that development is all about alleviating poverty and others e.g. that it is gaining freedom. An easy solution would be to make a new meta-synthesis with all these different views on development put together in a new embracing position. The problem is that each view, values different things. If we take China as an example, can they be considered developed in the sense of alleviating poverty? In the sense of freedom? If we must answer no in the sense of freedom, has freedom then anything to do with development? Are the democratic values that Western societies treasure so much irrelevant in the context of development? Of course the terms poverty, freedom and democracy must be examined further, as their meaning is highly overloaded. What do I actually mean by using these words? Now we are entering the field of communication, so I'll stop for now.

Last week I wrote about reading an article discussing the possible differences between the knowledge of indigenous and western science. Some would say using 34 pages on concluding that there are no profound difference and it all comes down to context should be common sense and not least a clear waste of my time. On the basis of the mentioned perspectives on e.g. development it has hopefully been made clearer why writing 34 pages might be necessary to explain ones actual view and also provide some empirical evidence for it. By using a stated methodology to express you view, you actually provide scientific knowledge. By choosing not to state your methodology, you might actually say something which is common sense and useful, but have you created new knowledge? At least not in a scientific way.