Liberating Knowledge - Research, Feminism and Adult Education (Paperback)

While knowledge can be liberating, what counts as knowledge is contestable. Drawing on her experience in adult education, research and feminist theory and practice, Jean Barr mounts a radical challenge to current orthodoxies in adult learning and continuing education and proposes a programme of research which is geared to articulating urgent problems with people other than academics. Running through the book is the recognition that methodology underpins all theory-making. Questions of whom we hear, whom we address and how, are key methodological, epistemological and political issues. How these questions are answered is crucial to the kind of theory or knowledge which is produced. The guiding metaphor is that of 'healing the breach' between 'words and things' and between forms of knowledge which are usually separated in our culture: cerebral and emotional understanding; literary and scientific knowledge; knowledge developed 'from above' or 'from below'. "Liberating knowledge" will appeal to those interested in a radical and democratising education which reaches beyond the academy. It is particularly relevant to participants and tutors of women's studies who wish to cross the boundaries between arts, social science and natural science, and to those involved in community-based adult education.