Catalyzing Outcomes: Using Arendt’s Zwischenraum to Improve the Impact of Research
I had the honor to present at Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Student Research Conference as part of a roundtable discussion. Building upon Hannah Arendt’s framework of locations, common ground, and her concepts of speech and action, along with her definitions of the private and the public, I aimed to shed light on the publicity, relevance, and permanence of effective approaches that allow research to become shareable and result in positive change. I discussed a set of heuristics I am elaborating based on Arendt’s Zwischenraum, the in-between, given that, as Arendt suggests, when a common Zwischenraum isn’t established, research, scholarship and individual lived experiences often end in the dark—ignored, considered irrelevant or worse, sometimes even assailed and actively suppressed.
