The Epistemic Alchemy Podcast

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 

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:

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

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

In this episode of Epistemic Alchemy, Mohammed Raei speaks with neuroscientist Dr. Björn Brembs about the limits of journal prestige, impact factors, and conventional peer review. Brembs explains why high-status publication venues may not reliably signal higher-quality research, how editorial selection can privilege novelty and perceived interest over methodological rigor, and why the growing demand for peer review has created an unsustainable burden across science.

The conversation then turns toward alternatives: selective and post-publication review, transparent version histories, replication as an ongoing trust marker, and open, decentralized infrastructure that captures data, code, methods, and research outputs by default. They also explore how AI could help researchers navigate complexity, detect patterns across distributed knowledge, and create more accessible forms of scholarly communication. At stake is not merely a better publishing system, but a more communal, resilient, and knowledge-generating model of scholarship.

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Episode description

Resources:

* Integration and implementation insights 

https://i2insights.org/

* Substack post on redesigning higher education

https://substack.com/@mohammedraei/p-189037847

What is meta — and why might it matter more than ever?

In this wide-ranging conversation, I speak with Dr. Mark Edwards, meta-theorist and former Associate Professor at Jönköping International Business School, about the science of meta studies, the misunderstandings surrounding metatheory, and the role of big-picture thinking in a world facing systemic crisis.

We explore:

What meta studies actually are — beyond the buzzword

The difference between metatheory, meta-methodology, metadata, and meta-meaning

Why large-scale ideas are performative — and how they shape the world we inhabit

The historical roots of meta thinking, from the Abbasid translation movement to modern systems science

Whether we need more metatheories — or better use of the ones we already have

The concept of the “meta crisis” and why fragmented thinking cannot solve interconnected global problems

Mark argues that science becomes more important — not less — in an age where it is difficult to know what to believe. We discuss planetary boundaries, economic metatheories of growth, trauma and consumption in the 20th century, and why linking social, economic, environmental, and governance systems is no longer optional.

This episode is for listeners interested in metatheory, systems thinking, integral and critical realism debates, and the future of scholarly inquiry in a destabilizing world.

This episode of Epistemic Alchemy features Dr. Celeste Snowber—dancer, poet, scholar, and pioneer in embodied and arts-based inquiry. In conversation with host Dr. Mohammed Raei, Celeste traces the origins of her work to an early, visceral realization that we are bodies, not merely thinkers who happen to have bodies. She reflects on how pregnancy, silence, and enforced stillness led her to write the way she dances—through sensation, intuition, and movement. Together, they explore how embodied inquiry challenges disembodied academic norms by foregrounding somatic wisdom, creativity, and presence. Celeste discusses how dance reveals forms of knowing inaccessible to language alone, including intergenerational memory, trauma, and hidden insight. She emphasizes the power of listening with the whole body, the role of improvisation in cultivating risk, play, and originality, and the necessity of integrating spirit, intuition, and vulnerability into scholarship. The episode addresses methodological rigor, the resistance and expansion of arts-based research within neoliberal universities, and the subversive courage required to sustain such work. Celeste offers guidance to the next generation: pursue your deepest gladness relentlessly, honor your embodied calling, and trust that creative, somatic scholarship ripples far beyond the academy.

Dr. Snowbar's Website:

https://www.celestesnowber.com/

In this episode, Dr. Mohammed Raei welcomes Dr. Dani Chesson, organizational and behavioral scientist, adjunct professor at the University of Denver, and founder of the Design Thinker Institute. Together, they explore how design thinking—a human-centered, experimental approach to problem-solving—extends far beyond process to become a capability and even a way of being. Drawing from her doctoral research, Dani discusses the development and validation of the Design Thinker Profile, a framework identifying six key capabilities that enable effective design thinking: solution optimism, visual expression, ideation, collaboration, experimentation, and empathy.

The conversation moves fluidly between scholarship and practice: from the mixed-methods rigor behind the profile’s creation to Dani’s experience leading large-scale organizational transformations across global enterprises. She shares insights from her research in New Zealand’s public-health sector, where indigenous and decolonizing research approaches reshaped how empathy, co-design, and storytelling can democratize knowledge production.

Dr. Raei and Dr. Chesson also discuss the founding of the Design Thinker Institute, her upcoming book  (on why organizations get stuck and how to move forward), and practical advice for anyone applying design thinking to research, leadership, or everyday life. The episode closes with a reminder that design thinking is not just about thinking—it’s about doing: experimenting boldly, learning continuously, and acting with empathy in the face of complexity.

Resources:

Dr. Chesson's Dissertation 

https://aura.antioch.edu/stuworks/31/

Design Thinker Institute

https://www.designthinkerinstitute.com/

Design Thinker Podcast

https://www.designthinkerpodcast.com/

This podcast episode features Dr. Martin Kilduff, Professor of Organizations and Innovation at UCL School of Management, in conversation with Dr. Mohammed Raei. The dialogue explores Kilduff’s influential work on theory contribution, particularly his framework derived from the philosophy of science. Kilduff traces the origins of this work to his experience teaching a doctoral course in philosophy of science, which led him to grapple with the unintelligibility of much of the field and the absence of a clear framework for theory contribution in organizational studies. The discussion highlights four distinct approaches—empiricism, strong paradigm advocacy, instrumentalism, and realism—mapped across two dimensions: truth claims and the representativeness of theoretical terms. Kilduff illustrates the strengths and limitations of each approach, while underscoring the role of instrumentalism and empiricism in contemporary research, particularly given the rise of big data. The conversation also addresses challenges for early-career scholars, offering practical strategies such as Jay Barney’s three-paragraph rule for articulating contributions. Finally, Raei and Kilduff reflect on the implications of transdisciplinary and boundary-spanning work, warning of both the promise and perils of venturing beyond disciplinary homes. The episode provides conceptual clarity and pragmatic insights into how scholars can frame contributions that resonate across diverse audiences.

Resources:

*FROM BLUE SKY RESEARCH TO PROBLEM SOLVING: A PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE THEORY

* Where's the theory contribution? An answer in four parts

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20413866241233739

In this episode of the Epistemic Alchemy Podcast, host Dr. Mohammed Raei is joined by Dr. Ileya N. Grosman, an artist, scholar, and practitioner whose work bridges leadership, education, and the arts through the lens of relational cultural theory (RCT). Grosman shares her journey from early explorations of cultural connection and photography in Bangladesh to her doctoral research on professors’ lived experiences of positive relationships with undergraduate students. Drawing on RCT, phenomenology, and arts-based methods such as Photovoice, her study illuminates the “space between” teacher and student as a site of mutuality, empathy, and generativity. Together, Drs. Raei and Grosman explore how professors’ relational practices foster not only student growth but also their own renewal and purpose, creating virtuous cycles of connection within higher education. The conversation also highlights the feminist and social justice roots of RCT, its applications in leadership and organizational life, and its intersections with embodiment, neuroscience, and even polyvagal theory. Listeners will gain insights into how humanizing approaches to teaching and leadership can cultivate belonging, mattering, and creativity—while challenging traditional hierarchies. This episode invites educators, leaders, and researchers alike to reimagine scholarship and practice as generative acts of connection.

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