Staff

Ricca Edmondson

Senior Lecturer

B.A. (Double first class honours, University of Lancaster) Philosophy / Political Theory Minor
D.Phil. (Oxford University) Social Studies

Office: 310 Aras Moyola
Telephone: 353 (0)91 493077
Email: ricca.edmondsonnuigalway.ie

Member of the Power, Conflict and Ideologies Research Cluster and the Governance and Sustainable Development Research Cluster

Profile

Dr Ricca Edmondson was born in South Africa and brought up in England. After studying philosophy and political thought at Lancaster and the theory of the social sciences at Oxford, where she wrote her D.Phil., she taught philosophy at universities in Berlin, also working as a translator. She then carried out sociological research at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development before coming to Ireland.

Ricca Edmondson is the author of books including Rhetoric in Sociology (Macmillan), Rules and Norms in the Sociology of Organisations (Max Planck Institute for Human Development), and Ireland: Society and Culture (Distance University of Hagen) (see also publications list below). Forthcoming works include Practical Reasoning and Human Engagement: Language, Ethics and Action, edited with Karlheinz Hülser (Lexington, 2012) and Ageing, Insight and the Life Course: Social Practices and Intergenerational Wisdom (Policy Press, 2013). She is now working on the history, philosophy and ethnography of wisdom, as well as issues concerned with culture and interculturality.

She is editor of Collective Action in Context: Power, Argumentation and Democracy (Routledge, 1997) and co-editor of Valuing Older People: Towards a Humanistic Gerontology (with Hans-Joachim von Kondratowitz: Policy Press, 2009), Environmental Argument and Cultural Difference: Locations, Fractures and Deliberations (with Henrike Rau: Peter Lang, 2008) and Health Promotion: Multi-Discipline or New Discipline? (with Cecily Kelleher: Irish Academic Press, 2000). With Anne Byrne and Tony Varley she co-authored the hundred-page introduction to the 2001 edition of Arensberg’s and Kimball’s Family and Community in Ireland.

Ricca Edmondson has recently served as Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, University of Potsdam, Germany (Semester 11, 2011). She is a member of the Executive Committee of the European Sociological Association, where for 12 years she served as Co-Convenor of its Research Network on Ageing. She belongs to the international advisory boards of Ageing and Society, Poroi, Ecopolitics, and the Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies.

She is Convenor of the Galway Wisdom Project and is engaged in active research projects with colleagues in (among others) universities in Salford, Oxford, Helsinki and Wuhan.

A selection of recent and forthcoming articles includes the following: 

• Ricca Edmondson, ’Intergenerational Relations in the West of Ireland: Socio-Cultural Approaches to Wisdom and Resilience’ ( Journal of Family Issues 2012)
  
• Ricca Edmondson, ’The Sociology of Ageing’, in Tom Dening and Alan Thomas, eds, The Oxford Textbook of Old Age Psychiatry (5^th Edition) (Oxford University Press, 2012).
  
• Ricca Edmondson, ’A Social Interpretation of Personal Wisdom’, in Michel Ferrari and  Nic Weststrate, eds, Personal Wisdom (Springer, 2012).
  
• Ricca Edmondson, ’Ageing in Ireland’, in Sheyeng Chen and Jason Powell, eds, Global Aging (Nova Science, 2011).

Teaching

Ageing, the Life Course and the Sociology of Wisdom (SP619)
Understanding Strangers (SP592)
Principles of Political Theory (SP406)
Qualitative Methods for Social and Political Scientists (SP220)
Theory and Practice of Social and Political Research: Concepts, Methods and Applications (PhD course)
Weekly general seminars for first-year students
Weekly general seminars for second-year students

Research Interests

Ricca Edmondson is currently working on

• The history and sociology of wisdom,
• Ageing, the life course and intergenerational relations
• Links between ethnography, rhetoric and interculturality

How do people think and feel about the roles played by wise processes in their life courses, relationships and political ideas? What impacts do their cultural and social surroundings have here? The thread linking questions like these is the topic of informal reasoning: how do human beings in everyday life make the arguments and reach the conclusions they do, especially in relation to what they see as the human condition? Researching this topic throws light on neglected but key aspects of how people make sense of their worlds. It can have important practical implications, and it connects strongly with issues concerning ageing, the life course and intergenerational relations, as well as with questions focusing on how people (mis-)understand those from different cultures.

Selected Publications

Ricca Edmondson, Ageing, Insight and the Life Course: Social Practices and Intergenerational Wisdom. Bristol: Policy Press, 2013.

Ricca Edmondson, ’Cultural Gerontology in Europe’, in Katrin Komp and Marja Aartsen, eds, Growing Old in Europe: A Textbook of Gerontology. New York, Springer (2012).

Ricca Edmondson and Karlheinz Hülser, eds, Politics of Practical Reasoning: Integrating Action, Discourse, and Argument (Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).

Ricca Edmondson and Hans-Joachim von Kondratowitz, eds, Valuing Older People: A Humanist Approach to Ageing (Bristol, Policy Press, 2009).

How can we understand older people as human beings, value their wisdom, and appreciate that their norms and purposes matter in themselves as well as responding to those of others? Using a life-course approach, this book claims that the complexity and potential creativity of later life demands a humanistic vision of older people and ageing, one which denies that older people are ’other’ than ourselves and emphasises instead the ’ties of recognition and concern’ that bind human beings together. At the same time, it acknowledges the specificities of different experiences of older age and the diversities of meanings connected with them. It presents a range of contexts and methodologies through which such meanings can be understood. The book interprets ageing as a process ofcreating meaning, carried out by older people but significant for those around them, and influenced by the norms and values of their societies as well as their political and economic structures. It then considers the impact of social norms on older people’s capacities to age in creative ways. What obstacles are their to older people’s construction of meaningful lives? What is going on when they feel they are ageing well? In former times, the idea of a meaningful later life was associated with the idea of wisdom; some of its contemporary dimensions are explored here. Contributors include internationally renowned writers such Peter Coleman, Michele Dillon and Haim Hazan. Chapters explore norms and values associated with ageing from the US to the UK, Germany, Ireland, Finland, Israel and Singapore.

Ricca Edmondson, ’Wisdom: A Humanist Approach to Valuing Older People’, pp.201-216 in Ricca Edmondson and Hans-Joachim von Kondratowitz, eds, Valuing Older People: A Humanist Approach to Ageing (Bristol, Policy Press, 2009).

Ricca Edmondson, Jane Pearce and Markus Woerner (2009), ’When Wisdom is Called for in Clinical Reasoning’, in William Stempsey, ed., Theoretical Medicine and Bioethicss 30: 231-247

Exploring informal components of clinical reasoning, we argue that they need to be understood via the analysis of professional wisdom. Wise decisions are needed where action or insight is vital, but neither everyday nor expert knowledge provides solutions. Wisdom combines experiential, intellectual, ethical, emotional and practical capacities; we contend that it is also more strongly social than is usually appreciated. But many accounts of reasoning specifically rule out such features as irrational. Seeking to illuminate how wisdom operates, we build on Aristotle’s work on informal reasoning. His account of rhetorical communication shows how non-formal components can play active parts in reasoning, retaining or even enhancing its reasonableness. We extend this account, applying it to forms of healthcare-related reasoning which are characterised by the need for wise decision-making. We then go on to explore some of what clinical wise reasoning may mean, concluding with a case taken from psychotherapeutic practice.

Markus Woerner and Ricca Edmondson (2009), ’Towards a Taxonomy of Types of Wisdom’, Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Societyy: 148-163.

Wisdom is no longer a central topic of Philosophy, ’the love of wisdom’. However, current empirical research in psychology highlights its vital importance for the human life-course. An attempt to unearth the history of wisdom in Western philosophical, theological and rhetorical traditions shows that it is an intrinsically dramatic concept, in need of a taxonomy of diverse accounts. Such a taxonomy would help to formulate criteria for a theoretical framework in terms of which a working definition of wisdom could be philosophically justified, a project fruitful for empirical research and useful for public policy.

Ricca Edmondson (2008), ’Wisdom and Older People in Ireland’, Senior People Education Studies (Wuhan, China) 2(36): 73-76.

Ricca Edmondson and Henrike Rau, eds, Environmental Argument and Cultural Difference: Locations, Fractures and Deliberations. Oxford, Peter Lang Publications, 2008.

Environmental argument is ’about’ far more than meets the eye. How people (mis-)understand each other during environmental debates is affected by conflicts between values and ways of life which may not be directly connected with the environment at all. This book offers sociological evidence from three contrasting societies – Ireland, Germany and China – to explore how diversity of cultural context affects deliberation about the physical world. What can we discover by examining environmental debates through the lens of interculturality? When people disagree about flood management, building motorways or extracting gas, what difference does it make if they have diverse experiences of neighbourly relations, how to use time or how to imagine a good life? What is going on at intersections between cultures to influence the trajectories of environmental debates? The book disinters taken-for-granted practices, feelings and social relationships which affect environmental arrangements, in scientific and artistic debates as well as in politics and policy-making.

Ricca Edmondson, ’Intercultural Rhetoric, Environmental Reasoning and Wise Argument’, pp.337-364 in Ricca Edmondson and Henrike Rau, eds, Environmental Argument and Cultural Difference: Locations, Fractures and Deliberationss. Oxford, Peter Lang, 2008

Ricca Edmondson (2007), ’Življenjski potek in modrost kot vodilna idea’ (’The Life Course and Wisdom as a Guiding Idea’); in Kakovostna Starost (Towards Good Quality of Life in Older Age), 10(2): 28-42.

Ricca Edmondson and Jane Pearce, ’The Practice of Health Care: Wisdom as a Model’, in Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 10(3) (2007: pp.233-244).

Ricca Edmondson, ’Rhetorics of Social Science: Sociality in Writing and Inquiry’, pp.479-498 in William Outhwaite and Stephen Turner, eds, The Handbook of Social Science Methodology (London, Sage 2007)

Ricca Edmondson (2005), ’Wisdom in Later Life: Ethnographic Approaches’ in Ageing and Society 25 (2005: pp. 339-356)

Ricca Edmondson (2003), ’Social Capital: A Strategy for Advancing Health?’ Social Science and Medicine 57(9): 1723-1733.

Supervision of Research

PhD students

Anna King, Interactions between successful community leaders and others in their social and political settings and their relations to identifiable forms of wisdom (current)

Michael Simonton, Age and Change: Personal and Socio-Cultural Transformaton in Northwestern Ireland. A Longitudinal Study (graduated 2010)

Carmel Gallagher, The Participation of Older People in their Communities (2006).

Henrike Rau, Time Perspectives and Temporal Practices: A Cross-Cultural, Comparative Study of Time Cultures in Ireland and Germany (2005).

Mark Garavan, Patterns of Irish Environmental Activism (2004).

Ricca Edmondson is also external adviser to PhDs in Edinburgh, Lisbon and the Dublin Institute of Technology.

MA Students include

Patrick McDonagh, Care and Repair, Older People, and the Politics of Social Exclusion (2009).

Guillaume Ratier, Le Traitement mediatique de la Campagne (du 12 mai au 2 juin 2008) pour le Referendum ratifiant le Traite de Lisbonne a travers deux quotidiens nationaux (The Irish Times et The Irish Independent) (2009).

Claire McTiernan, Rest and Respite Care: A Study of the Demand for this Service in a Community Setting (1999).

Barbara Walshe, “Risky Business”: HIV/AIDS Education and Prevention Strategies in Galway (1997).

Paul Gillen, A Tender Plant in a Harsh Setting: The Emerging Concept of Parental Participation in Irish Education (1997).

Mark O’Higgins, The Dynamics of Ecologism: From Evolutionary Theory to Cyber-Punk Technology and the Bio-Ethical Jihad (1996).

Sue Targett, School Leavers’Attitudes to Employment in Tourism – A Rural Perpective (1995).

Corey Naughton, The Best Possible Caring Service: State-Voluntary Partmerships: An Alternative Strategy for the Provision of Home Health Care within the Community in the West of Ireland (1994).

James Mullarkey, From Alcohol to Alcoholism to Alcoholics Anonymous: An Ethnographic Study of Alcoholics Anonymous in Ireland (1994).

Denise Hickey, The Development of the Irish Film Industry: Dilemmas and Preoccupations (1994).

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