Here are 54 books that Languages of Learning fans have personally recommended if you like
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In 1974, I had the opportunity to establish the first graduate program integrating all forms of artistic expression in therapy, education, and community service, which grew quickly into an international center. Gifted and committed students chose to develop their master’s theses and doctoral dissertations through their art practice and inspired me to write the first book on art-based research in 1998. To my surprise, it attracted a broad audience that understands how art’s historic contributions to knowledge and well-being have to be renewed in this era. Art Is the Evidence makes the case for this renaissance and offers practical guidance for realizing artistic intelligence in research and life.
Pat Allen demonstrates how art interpretation involves reflection on her creations in an ongoing process of responding creatively to their expression, as contrasted with explanation, analysis, and uncovering hidden ‘meaning.’ As authors say, writing helps them understand what they think, and thought keeps moving like a stream.
I am often asked whether art-based research can present the art alone without commentary. Documentary films do this in their combination of film footage and narration, but with painting, dance, music, and other art forms, expository reflection suggests how the personal expression furthers understanding and usefulness to others.
Pat Allen models this process by integrating her written responses to visual images into a convincing work of art that I see as presenting artistic inquiry as a new art genre.
An expert in art therapy offers this “wonderful” guide “for anyone, artistic or not, who is interested in using art to know more about himself or herself” (Library Journal)
Making art—giving form to the images that arise in our mind's eye, our dreams, and our everyday lives—is a form of spiritual practice through which knowledge of ourselves can ripen into wisdom. This book offers encouragement for everyone to explore art-making in this spirit of self-discovery—plus practical instructions on material, methods, and activities, such as ways to:
• Discover a personal myth or story • Recognize patterns and themes in…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
In 1974, I had the opportunity to establish the first graduate program integrating all forms of artistic expression in therapy, education, and community service, which grew quickly into an international center. Gifted and committed students chose to develop their master’s theses and doctoral dissertations through their art practice and inspired me to write the first book on art-based research in 1998. To my surprise, it attracted a broad audience that understands how art’s historic contributions to knowledge and well-being have to be renewed in this era. Art Is the Evidence makes the case for this renaissance and offers practical guidance for realizing artistic intelligence in research and life.
Jung’s Red Book (Liber Novus) is a masterpiece of art-based research.
Although he called his creations ‘nature,’ not ‘art,’ I describe art as a force of nature. In addition to saving his soul during a period of personal crisis, the ‘self-experiment’ perfected the methods, establishing him as a world-renowned figure and arguably the most sustained influence on psychotherapeutic practice to date. His firsthand experimentation exemplifies how personal artistic inquiry can transcend itself to be of use to others.
Where Jung’s heirs kept the manuscript in a vault for almost fifty years after his death, possibly concerned that the intimate expressions might jeopardize his “scientific“ image, the resoundingly positive response to it will set an important precedent for future art-based research.
"The years, of which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which…
In 1974, I had the opportunity to establish the first graduate program integrating all forms of artistic expression in therapy, education, and community service, which grew quickly into an international center. Gifted and committed students chose to develop their master’s theses and doctoral dissertations through their art practice and inspired me to write the first book on art-based research in 1998. To my surprise, it attracted a broad audience that understands how art’s historic contributions to knowledge and well-being have to be renewed in this era. Art Is the Evidence makes the case for this renaissance and offers practical guidance for realizing artistic intelligence in research and life.
Ruth-Mateus-Berr at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and her team of colleagues demonstrate the interface between art-based research and social transformation.
With the support of the Austrian Science Fund, they are conducting an ongoing project furthering social empathy for people living with dementia and improving their lives through art created in community. The research offers what Mateus-Berr calls artistic “portrayals” and “interpretations” of the dementia experience, in various art forms including digital media, with the goal of learning about the condition and changing perceptions of it.
The project catalogue documenting the ongoing research, which has been continuously presented in various art venues including the Venice Biennale, can be viewed at the DEMEDARTS website.
Dementia is a term that encompasses a wide range of symptoms. In Europe alone about 10 million people live with dementia. Where health policy and medical approaches reach their limits, art and design strategies can open up new perspectives for people living with dementia - in terms of their abilities and circumstances and their social environment.
This interdisciplinary handbook is aimed at people working and researching in the field of dementia. It offers insights into the possibilities and limitations of artistic and art-related interventions in relation to dementia. This publication brings together contributions from the disciplines of design, architecture,…
Gifts from a Challenging Childhood
by
Jan Bergstrom,
Learn to understand and work with your childhood wounds. Do you feel like old wounds or trauma from your childhood keep showing up today? Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed with what to do about it and where to start? If so, this book will help you travel down a path…
In 1974, I had the opportunity to establish the first graduate program integrating all forms of artistic expression in therapy, education, and community service, which grew quickly into an international center. Gifted and committed students chose to develop their master’s theses and doctoral dissertations through their art practice and inspired me to write the first book on art-based research in 1998. To my surprise, it attracted a broad audience that understands how art’s historic contributions to knowledge and well-being have to be renewed in this era. Art Is the Evidence makes the case for this renaissance and offers practical guidance for realizing artistic intelligence in research and life.
Ross Prior is the creator of a world community committed to advancing the practice of art-based research that has grown from his founding of the Journal of Applied Arts & Health.
A primary goal of the journal, and this collection written by contributors to it, is Prior’s effort to build confidence in artistic practice as research that generates “authentic artistic knowledge” and helps artists deepen their insights into “what they do.”
In response to the current demand for evidence-based research, he consistently asks—how is the evidence defined? Isn’t the outcome of artistic inquiry the art itself, with social impact determined by its rigor, quality, and persuasiveness? Can we confidently make the case for art’s inclusion in research furthering learning, human understanding, public health, and global well-being?
Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching explores various multidisciplinary visual and performing art forms, including creative writing, as ways to provide a rich contribution and understanding to research, learning and teaching. Key figures in the field share their art-based research, arts practice and philosophy, bringing the arts to life within their taught and learnt contexts across a variety of art forms and levels of post-compulsory education. In what is an invaluable collection, this book is directly beneficial to arts researchers and educators, addressing the key challenges and possibilities in a rapidly changing higher education environment.
My name is Daniel Robert McClure, and I am an Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas. I teach U.S., African diaspora, and world history, and I specialize in cultural and economic history. I was originally drawn to “information” and “knowledge” because they form the ties between culture and economics, and I have been teaching history through “information” for about a decade. In 2024, I was finally able to teach a graduate course, “The Origins of the Knowledge Society,” out of which came the “5 books.”
This is an anchor book for my course on the “Knowledge Society.” I jokingly refer to this book as “the history of everything,” as it covers everything from art to astronomy to linguistics to science and mathematics.
It is both dense as well as exhilarating to read, as you work through the essence of patterns and principles humans have mobilized to shape and store information and knowledge for thousands of years.
A comprehensive account of the methods of knowledge production throughout human history and across the globe.
The idea that the world can be understood through patterns and the principles that govern them is one of the most important human insights-it may also be our greatest survival strategy. Our search for patterns and principles began 40,000 years ago, when striped patterns were engraved on mammoths' bones to keep track of the moon's phases. What routes did human knowledge take to grow from these humble beginnings through many detours and dead ends into modern understandings of nature and culture? In this work…
My interest in ignorance and uncertainty was sparked when I was an undergraduate mathematics student. I was taking my first courses in probability and then reading about Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, realizing that even mathematics contains untamed unknowns. Later, as a PhD student in sociology I read theories about how knowledge is socially constructed, the foundation of the “sociology of knowledge”. I wondered why there wasn’t also a “sociology of ignorance”. That ignited my interest, and the social construction of ignorance became my life-long research topic. I have since seen it grow from my solo efforts in the 1980s to a flourishing multidisciplinary topic of research and public debate.
If you’d like to take a relatively straightforward but sophisticated tour through ignorance, this book is for you.
Frankly, it’s a book I would like to have written. The author is a philosopher and I’m not, so his viewpoint and voice differ from mine, but his book echoes, parallels, and expands my own work and a host of others’ writings on ignorance. DeNicola uses four engaging metaphors as vehicles for his tour: ignorance as a place, a boundary, a limit, and a horizon.
His treatment of ignorance nicely avoids the usual negative bias against it. Like me, he recognizes that ignorance has its uses and even can be beneficial or virtuous. And his footnotes and bibliography provide plenty of material if you want to find out more.
An exploration of what we can know about what we don't know: why ignorance is more than simply a lack of knowledge.
Ignorance is trending. Politicians boast, “I'm not a scientist.” Angry citizens object to a proposed state motto because it is in Latin, and “This is America, not Mexico or Latin America.” Lack of experience, not expertise, becomes a credential. Fake news and repeated falsehoods are accepted and shape firm belief. Ignorance about American government and history is so alarming that the ideal of an informed citizenry now seems quaint. Conspiracy theories and false knowledge thrive. This may be…
Disappointed with life and his faltering relationship, forty-nine-year-old Stan is charmed when he meets a younger man named Asher—in his dreams. Asher grants Stan an irresistible gift: the chance to be five years younger every time they meet. As their connection deepens, Stan knows he can’t live in Asher’s dreamworld,…
Timothy Williamson is a professor of philosophy at Oxford University and a visiting professor at Yale. He writes on metaphysics and epistemology because he doesn’t know how not to care about them. Metaphysics asks fundamental questions about what reality is and how it is structured; epistemology asks fundamental questions about what and how we can know about reality.
This is my favourite introduction to epistemology. It relates questions about knowledge and scepticism to human psychology, human knowledge to other animals’ knowledge, and the development of Western epistemology to epistemology elsewhere, such as ancient India. Amongst leading epistemologists today, Jennifer Nagel probably has the deepest understanding of relevant work in psychology.
What is knowledge? How does it differ from mere belief? Do you need to be able to justify a claim in order to count as knowing it? How can we know that the outer world is real and not a dream?
Questions like these are ancient ones, and the branch of philosophy dedicated to answering them - epistemology - has been active for thousands of years. In this thought-provoking Very Short Introduction, Jennifer Nagel considers these classic questions alongside new puzzles arising from recent discoveries about humanity, language, and the mind. Nagel explains the formation of major historical theories of…
Thanks to developing interests in both psychoanalysis and German idealism during my time as a student, I came across Slavoj Žižek’s writings in the mid-1990s. Žižek immediately became a significant source of inspiration for my own efforts at interfacing philosophies with psychoanalysis. By the time I began writing my dissertation – which became my first book, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive – I had the great fortune to meet Žižek. He soon agreed to serve as co-director of my dissertation and we have remained close ever since. I decided to write a book demonstrating that Žižek is not dismissible as a gadfly preoccupied with using popular culture and current events merely for cheap provocations.
In Žižek’s view, philosophy as we know it today does not well and truly begin until the late-eighteenth century, with Kant’s critical-transcendental “Copernican revolution.” The Critique of Pure Reason inaugurates this revolution. It insists on the ineliminable centrality of the structures and dynamics of minded subjectivity for the constitution of what we experience as objective reality. Moreover, on Žižek’s psychoanalytic rereading of Kant’s epoch-making 1781/1787 masterpiece, Kant anticipates, among many other things, Lacan’s idea of an internally divided subject as the ultimate unconscious condition of possibility for how we humans register and understand ourselves and our world. Moreover, the Kant of the first Critiqueis crucial for Žižek as the inspiration for the entire tradition of post-Kantian German idealism so central to Žižek’s own philosophical program.
This entirely new translation of Critique of Pure Reason is the most accurate and informative English translation ever produced of this epochal philosophical text. Though its simple and direct style will make it suitable for all new readers of Kant, the translation displays an unprecedented philosophical and textual sophistication that will enlighten Kant scholars as well. This translation recreates as far as possible a text with the same interpretative nuances and richness as the original. The extensive editorial apparatus includes informative annotation, detailed glossaries, an index, and a large-scale general introduction in which two of the world's preeminent Kant scholars…
I’m a Harvard professor of psychology and a cognitive scientist who’s interested in all aspects of language, mind, and human nature. I grew up in Montreal, but have lived most of my adult life in the Boston area, bouncing back and forth between Harvard and MIT except for stints in California as a professor at Stanford and sabbatical visitor in Santa Barbara and now, Berkeley. I alternate between books on language (how it works, what it reveals about human nature, what makes for clear and stylish writing) and books on the human mind and human condition (how the mind works, why violence has declined, how progress can take place).
When I wrote Rationality, I mentioned Hume 32 times. He didn’t think of everything, but he explained an astonishing range of topics related to rationality, including causation versus correlation, is versus ought, and individual versus collective self-interest.
His follow-up, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, explained why we shouldn’t believe in miracles. He explored all of these topics with clarity and wit, putting modern academic writing to shame.
"One of the greatest of all philosophical works, covering knowledge, imagination, emotion, morality, and justice." — Baroness Warnock, The List Published in the mid-18th century and received with indifference (it "fell dead-born from the press," noted the author), David Hume's comprehensive three-volume A Treatise of Human Nature has withstood the test of time and has had enormous impact on subsequent philosophical thought. Hume — whom Kant famously credited with having "interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction" — intended this work as an observationally grounded study of human nature.…
The Parent's Guide to Birdnesting
by
Dr. Ann Gold Buscho,
Based on research about how divorce can affect children, you will learn how to best support your children's resilience, as well as your own. For parents who are separating and want to put their children first, birdnesting could be the interim or long-term shared parenting solution you’ve been looking for.…
I’m fascinated by systems of thought and very interested in understanding how we can improve our ability to create a better society for all. I think the past makes a good laboratory for investigating these kinds of questions. I got interested in early modern economic theory while researching the English East India Company for my dissertation in the sociology department of Columbia University, which was a great place for historical and computational sociology. I now teach economic sociology and theory as a professor at Yale University, another institution with amazing strengths in history, data science, and computational methods.
Tribe is a master of his subject, and this book has the feel of a magnum opus. It is densely packed and full of interesting tidbits, and you will be amazed at just how recent economics really is. The added bonus is all the insight into the development of the modern research university. I am in the middle of this book as it just came out, but the scale of the contribution (large) is already clear.
An accessible account of the role of the modern university in the creation of economics
During the late nineteenth century concerns about international commercial rivalry were often expressed in terms of national provision for training and education, and the role of universities in such provision. It was in this context that the modern university discipline of economics emerged. The first undergraduate economics program was inaugurated in Cambridge in 1903; but this was merely a starting point.
Constructing Economic Science charts the path through commercial education to the discipline of economics and the creation of an economics curriculum that could then…
