John Parkinson
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University mottos, comparison, and the nature of learning
I don’t suppose many academics pay much attention to their university mottos: odd, often-Latin hangovers from an elitist past, quietly being dropped in many cases; or bland nothings written for a marketing committee. We’re focused on other things. But I have been thinking about the nature of knowledge and learning recently, prompted by a very…
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Becoming a foreigner in my own language
I’ve been living and working in the Netherlands for three years now, learning the language because I think it’s important, but slowly because, well, life. I’m a much better ‘passive’ user of the language than active – reading and listening reasonable, speaking and writing something just short of Jip en Janneke taal, simple language named…
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‘Bricking it’ Part 2: the results
Five months ago I wrote about an intrepid group of Honours students taking their first steps into the wonderful world of Lego Serious Play. Well, the work is done and the report is in – and the team has allowed me to share it here. Not only that, but they produced a podcast too! I…
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Bricking it: teaching and researching with Lego
I love my job, but there are times when I really, really love it. And despite corona restrictions forcing us out of classrooms and onto Zoom, I’m having one of those ‘really, really’ times right now. It’s teaching a group of Honours students in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences at Maastricht how to…
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Mapping and Measuring Deliberation is out!
At last, Mapping and Measuring Deliberation, written with my friend and colleague André Bächtiger, is out now with Oxford University Press. It is, I hope, going to prove a little controversial. Essentially, it argues that much empirical social science has been confusing deliberation – the noun – with “deliberative”, an adjectival quality of democracy; and…
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Some learnings from the gifting space
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about language and communication lately, particularly the largely-unexamined assumptions about language that lurk in the background of my particular branch of democratic theory. I’ll write something longer about that shortly, but broadly speaking I think of language in rather anthropological terms as fluid systems of social meaning-making,…
Ruminative Rumblings 