Description

Talking Circles offer an opportunity to meet other delegates with similar interests and concerns. Delegates self-select into groups based on broad thematic areas and then engage in extended discussion about the issues and concerns they feel are of utmost importance to that segment of the Research Network. Participation is open, encouraged, and supported.

How Do They Work?

The Talking Circles are grouped around each of the conference themes so discussions can focus on the specific areas of interest represented by each theme. 

How to Begin:

Allow members of the group to briefly introduce themselves. 

The facilitator should encourage open dialogue and ensure a collegial and respectful conversation. 

Starting Questions to Assist Discussion

Talking Circle: Who are we?

What is the territory, or scope, or landscape of this thematic area?

What are the burning issues, the key questions for this theme?

What are the forces or drivers that will affect us as professionals, thinkers, citizens, and aware and concerned people whose focus is this particular theme?

What are the future directions (in research, in theory-building, in practice) for this thematic area?

Theme 3. Cultural Studies

• Of human lifeways: anthropology in its contexts
• Of human lifecourses: family, childhood, youth, parenting and aging
• Of human origins: paleontology, primate evolution, physical anthropology
• Ethnographic methods
• Social meanings: language, linguistics, discourse, text
• Cultural studies as a constitutive field
• Social science stances: modernism and postmodernism; structuralism and poststructuralism
• Where humanities and social sciences meet
• Social structure and human culture: the sociological and the anthropological
• Interdisciplinary perspectives on human differences
• Identities in social science: generational, gender, sexuality, ethnic, diasporic
• Perspectives on, and voices of, difference: multiculturalism and feminism
• Religion and the human sciences
• Health, wellbeing and culture

Theme 7. Educational Studies

• Education as a social science
• The learning sciences as an interdisciplinary endeavor
• Action research: the logistics and ethics of interventionary social science
• Teaching and learning the social studies
• History teaching and learning
• Economics teaching and learning
• Geography teaching and learning
• Technology in learning and learning about technology