In this episode of Epistemic Alchemy, Dr. Mohammed Raei speaks with Cynthia Kurtz, an independent consultant, researcher, author, coach, and software developer who has worked on more than 150 participatory narrative projects across government, corporate, and nonprofit settings.

Cynthia introduces Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI): an approach that gathers people’s stories, helps communities make sense of them together, and returns what is learned to those who shared their experiences. She explains its three essential phases: collection, sense-making, and return, alongside the optional phases of planning, catalysis, and intervention.

The conversation explores why PNI does not seek to impose a single authoritative interpretation on people’s experiences. Instead, it uses patterns in qualitative and quantitative material to generate productive questions, competing interpretations, and deeper collective inquiry.

We also discuss PNI’s epistemological foundations, power-sharing in organizations, the tensions between action research and academic gatekeeping, online versus in-person facilitation, uncertainty, risk, and the enduring difficulty of understanding other people’s worlds.

This episode will be especially relevant to researchers, facilitators, organizational-development practitioners, community leaders, and anyone interested in participatory methods, complexity, narrative, and social change.

Resources

• Cynthia's website: https://www.cfkurtz.com/
• Working with Stories in Your Community or Organization: Participatory Narrative Inquiry
• Working with Stories Simplified: A Brief Introduction to Participatory Narrative Inquiry
• The Working with Stories Sourcebook: Questions and Cases for Participatory Narrative Inquiry
• The Working with Stories Miscellany: Essays and Other Writings on Participatory Narrative Inquiry

How do we move from vast, fragmented bodies of information to wiser collective action? In this episode, geoscientist and author Brian Gregory introduces information ecology: a way of understanding information not simply as data or a technical resource, but as a living process shaped by perception, interpretation, values, and context.

We discuss entropy and coherence in public knowledge, his AMIE framework for adaptive environmental management, and why an intermediate integrative layer is essential between specialist research and real-world decisions. Brian also reflects on holons, transdisciplinarity, AI’s emerging role in synthesis, and the ethical importance of making assumptions and information pathways explicit.

The conversation then turns to his book, Down to Earth: A Way of Being, written in the wake of a lung transplant and triple-bypass surgery. Drawing on Earth history, evolution, and philosophy, Brian offers an accessible account of how uncertainty, interconnection, and our own life narratives can become sources of meaning.

Resources:

• Nardi, B. A., & O'Day, V. (2000). Information ecologies: Using technology with heart. Mit Press.
• Eddy, B. G., Hearn, B., Luther, J. E., van Zyll de Jong, M., Bowers, W., Parsons, R., ... & Wheeler, B. (2014). An information ecology approach to science–policy integration in adaptive management of social-ecological systems. Ecology and society, 19(3).

• Gregory, B. (2025). Down to Earth: A way of being.

• Koestler, A. (1968). The ghost in the machine.
• Raei, M. (2026). The Five Dimensions (5D) Metatheory: An Uncommitted Analytical Framework Introduction. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22934728

What would it take for educational research to serve both truth and welfare? In this episode, Jean-Luc Patry (professor emeritus of educational research, University of Salzburg) traces a lifelong project organized around a single hierarchy: good theories require good metatheories, theories must be studied with adequate methods, and no amount of statistical sophistication can rescue a weak theory or a poor assessment. He introduces VaKE (Values and Knowledge Education), a constructivist, collaborative method that pairs inquiry-based knowledge acquisition with dilemma-driven moral argumentation — targeting not which values learners hold but how they justify preferring one over another. Patry describes VaKE's implementation across more than a dozen countries, its viability from roughly age ten upward, and its extension into business education, where students are often surprised that values bear on business at all. The conversation then turns to situation specificity and its consequences for replication, to critical multiplism as a response to the deficits of any single method, and to the frequently collapsed distinction between superordinate object theories and genuine metatheories. Patry closes with MaaKE (Moral Action and Knowledge Education), the group's move from moral cognition toward moral behavior.

Resources

• Patry, J. L. (2025). Walking the Talk: Is-Ought as Transdisciplinarity and as a Trans-Domain Approach for Researchers, Teachers, and Students. Journal for the Philosophical Study of Education, 5, 59-83.
• Patry, J. L., Weyringer, S., & Weinberger, A. (2007). Combining values and knowledge education. In Values education and lifelong learning: Principles, policies, programmes (pp. 160-179). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.
• Patry, J. L. (2011). Methodological consequences of situation specificity: Biases in assessments. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 18.
• Patry, J. L. (2013). Beyond multiple methods: Critical multiplism on all levels. International Journal of Multiple Research Approaches, 7(1), 50-65.