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This book uses Viktor Frankl's Existential Psychology (logotherapy) to explore the ways some professors use unusually personal scholarship to discover meaning in personal adversity. A psychiatrist imprisoned for three years in Nazi concentration camps, Frankl believed the search for meaning is a powerful motivator, and that its discovery can be profoundly therapeutic. Part I begins with four stories of professors finding meaning. Using the case studies as a foundation, Part II investigates issues of epistemology and ethics in unusually personal research from an existential perspective. The book offers advice for graduate students and faculty who want to live and work more meaningfully in the academy.
List of contents
1. Introduction to Mesearch.- 2. Mesearch in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.- 3. Mesearch in the Hard Sciences.- 4. Mesearch in the Arts and Humanities.- 5. Autoethnography.- 6. Mesearch in Graduate School.- 7. Mesearch and Motivation.- 8. To Disclose or Not?.- 9. Getting a Job and Getting Tenure.- 10. Mesearch as Therapeutic Practice.- 11. Mesearch and Activism.- 12. The Case for a New Epistemology.- 13. The Future of Mesearch.
About the author
Amber Esping is Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, USA. She is the author of Sympathetic Vibrations: A Guide for Private MusicTeachers (2000), and co-author (with Jonathan Plucker) of Intelligence 101 (2014). Her research focuses on the history of human intelligence theory and testing, and the application of existential psychology to academic contexts and qualitative inquiry.
Summary
This book uses Viktor Frankl’s Existential Psychology (logotherapy) to explore the ways some professors use unusually personal scholarship to discover meaning in personal adversity. A psychiatrist imprisoned for three years in Nazi concentration camps, Frankl believed the search for meaning is a powerful motivator, and that its discovery can be profoundly therapeutic. Part I begins with four stories of professors finding meaning. Using the case studies as a foundation, Part II investigates issues of epistemology and ethics in unusually personal research from an existential perspective. The book offers advice for graduate students and faculty who want to live and work more meaningfully in the academy.
