Methodology

Tags: Promoting Pluralism
Additional tags: Methodology pluralism

The general methodology in the Promoting Pluralism Knowledge Programme is grounded in a concept of critical co-operative inquiry. This method is based on a participative worldview that considers human beings as co-creating their reality through participation: through their experience, their imagination and intuition, their thinking and their action. This participatory worldview is at the heart of our inquiry methodologies that emphasize participation as core strategy and demands a (self)-reflexive critical awareness of programme participants.

The general methodology in the Promoting Pluralism Knowledge Programme is grounded in a concept of critical co-operative inquiry. This method is based on a participative worldview that considers human beings as co-creating their reality through participation: through their experience, their imagination and intuition, their thinking and their action. This participatory worldview is at the heart of our inquiry methodologies that emphasize participation as core strategy and demands a (self)-reflexive critical awareness of programme participants.

The starting point is that understanding, describing and transforming theories and practices of pluralism should not be approached as a solely academic exercise that can be studied from the outside, but rather be designed as a cooperative endeavour in which many experiences, meanings and opinions are explored and considered from both academic as well as from practitioners’ perspectives.

In the process, ‘bottom-up’ ways of developing concepts of pluralism are supported and new ways of theorising stimulated. These emerge from critical interactions with narratives of the fields. Activists, analysts, opinion leaders and other relevant actors who work in the various regions are invited to share their experiences and knowledge.

With regard to the transformatory aim of this programme, we acknowledge that multiple “knowledges” can coexist when people (individuals and groups) disagree in different contexts where social, political, cultural, economic, ethnic and gender factors play a significant role. Here, dialogue and communication are seen as core practices where people are encouraged to critically see through their subjective understandings and how these understandings are bound up in their own socially, politically, religiously and ethnically situated historical contexts and how they are related to practices of co-existence.

The programme thus includes:

• comprehending and mapping existing studies and practices and generate new knowledge on core contemporary issues pertaining pluralism and fundamentalisms;
• intensifying links between development practitioners and academic researchers in ways that enrich both their knowledge bases with new perspectives, insights and skills;
• supporting and empowering civil society organisations to effectively design and advance new strategies, policies and practices of pluralism;
• helping to create international networks of civil society initiatives around issues of pluralism;
• translating acquired knowledge into strategies for promoting pluralism in practice.