Practices and habits of citizenship and learning

Abstract

This chapter discusses the volume’s theoretical underpinnings, which are derived from philosophical pragmatism. One of the key ideas of this research project has been to bring philosophical and empirical research into dialogue by following the principles of pragmatism. Pragmatism sees the relationship between theory and practice as bidirectional: all theories must be subjected to revision in light of practice but, at the same time, a crucial role of theories is to critique current practices. At the level of methodology this implies that theorizing must be tied to what people do. The second central feature of pragmatism is that human experience is a crucial starting point of inquiry; pragmatism is suspicious about universal solutions: theorizing should start from real-life contexts, which vary for cultural, historical and geographical reasons.