In the midst of a crisis like the climate crisis and calls for ‘all hands on deck’, what do academics, as a microcosm of humanity, see? In Hannah Arendt’s terms, an ‘abyss of freedom’ to act or a paralysing ‘abyss of nothingness’? Some from the academy themselves, including Tamboukou, Apple and Bourdieu, make judgements more akin to the latter and mount arguments to urge action. This paper joins their call and theorises ethical and demonstrably plausible resources as a potentially generative (...) heuristic for political action by academics in the face of ‘dark times’. I develop these resources by initially drawing on Arendt’s ethical, but limited, action process. Then, through interpreting and expanding her unfinished theory of judging and echoing Karl Jaspers' concept The Encompassing, I propose the notion of an ‘encompassing ethic’. This ethic, synthesised with Arendt’s action process, ameliorates action’s limitations and suggests the idea of ‘encompassing action’. The paper concludes by bringing these conceptual resources to life through two inspiring historical examples of such action involving academics. (shrink)

Though concerned with knowledge, this article begins with unknown political events that are ignored by the culture and educational practices of the societies in whose name the events took place. The questions that these events raise indicate a relation of epistemology with ethics and education that complicates some theoretical and managerial attitudes to knowledge. This relation, along with Richard Smith’s notion of knowingness, will frame an exploration of virtue-epistemologies that contests epistemic exaggerations of the knower as accomplished virtuous character. The (...) article emphasizes the need for a normative epistemology that critically invigorates the educational aim of transmitting knowledge and submits it to ethico-political considerations. (shrink)

Occupational science is undergoing dynamic development and claims have been articulated that human occupation must be understood from multiple ontological standpoints. Hannah Arendt is known for her work The Human Condition in which she explored human occupation from a philosophical and political standpoint. She distinguished the modalities labor, work and action, and labelled them vita activa. The aim of this paper is to present Arendt and her vita activa, in order to provide examples of its relevance for occupational science, showing (...) how vita activa can assist occupational scientists to take a deeper perspective on human occupation. According to Arendt, human occupation is always conditioned. The condition for labor is necessity, which reflects human biological needs and represents the basics of life. The condition for work is utility, as something persistent and durable is produced. Action is the activity that takes place between people without the intermediary of things. Similar to occupational science, vita activa is concerned with human doing but their origins differ. Arendt also emphasized the public sphere as an arena for human occupation, a viewpoint that is shared with recent occupational science literature. The need to expand the scope of occupational science to encompass all aspects of human occupations, including the deleterious, has been expressed and vita activa can contribute to broadening this perspective. Examples of the need for sustainability in working life are also presented in this paper. (shrink)