It confirms Rorty's status as a uniquely subtle theorist, whose writing will prove absorbing to academic and nonacademic readers alike. The book has a characteristically wide range of reference from philosophy through social theory to literary criticism. A truly liberal culture, acutely aware of its own historical contingency, would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. In fact Rorty believes that it is literature not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable on a private level, although it cannot advance the social or political goals of liberalism. In this 1989 book Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. Our study suggests and we recommend that as universities strive to support faculty development, they might consider facilitating access to virtual spaces for dialogue and exchange that can contribute to polyvocal professional learning. Recognising our sources of inspiration through an online dialogic self-study process provoked new insights about the generative potential of understanding and openly communicating the personal and professional impetus for our work. Our self-study offers evidence of how we each grew in our individual understandings because and only because of our collaborative use of digital technologies. Extracts from our emails and letters document how our ideas were brought into dialogue and how we discovered similar sources of inspiration and influence in our work. We enacted a virtual bricolage self-study method using dialogic tools to generate, analyse and represent data for our collaborative, arts-based self-study: (1) emails (2) letter-writing, (3) the co-creation of two online mood boards, (4) photographs, and (5) research poetry.
Digital technologies also allowed us to explore in a virtual space which illuminated and documented developing and iterative sets of data. Digital technologies made available new ways of connecting with each other between the continents in which we live and work, between our diverse personal and professional and interests, and between those we work with in diverse disciplinary and methodological domains. We describe this virtual dialogue as thinking in space. We reflect on an online research conversation in which we dialogued about facilitating transdisciplinary self-study learning communities with university faculty in South Africa and the USA.
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