truth-finding and soul-searching: a series
my intellectual framework this fall.
Hey all! Writing from Philly this morning, feeling like a breath of fresh air. I wanted to introduce a semester-long series I’m planning on publishing on this platform.
Here’s a quick rundown:
There are lots of professions that are politics-adjacent that claim to wield truth as a tool, to hold up against the powerful, or to hold up for the common person.
A lot of framing theory in the social sciences rubs against this declaration, however. The premise of framing theory is that framing is omnipotent and oftentimes unnoticed, but it can be simultaneously persuasive. Our society cannot be expected to know everything about everything, so the necessity to frame and simplify is often used as a justification to make truth accessible — but at the expense of a chunk of that truth, a portion of the complete nuance.
This semester, I’ll be talking to practitioners representing industries and fields about this tension. These systems must make decisions on their standards of truth and evidence. What is legitimate knowledge? How much can we afford to frame away? What is the relationship between these standards and what is seen as persuasive?
This sounds philosophical — I’m hoping to bridge that infinite gap between philosophy and practice, by talking to practitioners about their philosophies.
A few systems I’m hoping to engage with through this framework:
law
journalism / fact-checking
politicians / speechwriters
activism
academia
I have some thoughts from Philly already in the works, and I’m hoping to engage in Durham, Chapel Hill, Chicago, DC, and more this semester.
There are lots of reasons I’m doing this. I am still infected with the travel bug and need an intellectual framework to travel to feel good about myself (and to help with funding). I don’t know what I want to do with my life and need an excuse to talk to people in different fields I might be interested in. I miss Chinatown too much. I miss my friends from across the country and want to visit them and hear about their lives.
But probably most at its core: as you have seen in previous posts, I have been forced to reckon with lived experience as a real and powerful form of truth this fall. I am struggling to negotiate this truth with other methodologies I know to be “true.”
Traveling is my purest and healthiest accessible form of lived experience, with conversation at its core. I’m excited to situate this new reality of who I am with conversations about what it means.
Come along!