Doing Philosophy at the Boundaries: Researching the Design of Health Multimedia with Doctors and Indigenous Australians

What is the role of philosophy in researching epistemic boundaries and knowledge work in cross-cultural contexts? This paper presents one answer through an account of philosophical research done within a project investigating the use of multimedia Digital Learning Objects for generating understandings of healthy respiration and circulation among first language speaking Indigenous Australians. Developing this method of philosophy requires a novel account of knowers, knowledge and reality which can tell a story of difference that goes further than one of ‘social’ positionings, and that credits the potential of the research practice itself to generate novel ways of working within and across boundaries. This account has philosophy proceeding through three moves: locating the researcher in the embodied collective situation of the investigation; crediting multiple knowledges through adopting the figure of an outsider; and valuing the vagueness and multiplicity that characterize boundaries through understanding reality as emergent. It is argued that this account does not supersede others, but rather adds to them within a logic of transdisciplinarity.