Methodology

Tags: Knowledge programme

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. Participation is our core strategy and demands a (self)-reflexive critical awareness of programme participants.
The starting point is that understanding theories and practices of pluralism should not be approached as a solely academic exercise that can be studied from the outside. Rather this programme is 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. Co-operative inquiry has its roots in humanistic psychology. It departs from the idea that persons can with help choose how to live their lives and that working together in a group with norms of open authentic communication will facilitate this.
In the process, we will promote ’bottom-up’ ways of developing concepts of pluralism and stimulate new ways of theorising, emerging from critical interactions with narratives of the fields. We will invite activists, analysts, opinion leaders and other relevant actors who work in the various regions 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. We will be working 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. 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.