Description: For many the concepts of democracy, citizenship and truth seem inseparably connected with the Galilean rationality. For the Enlightenment thinker, advances in scientific research simply add to the 'tools' with which the liberation by reason must be promoted. However, the character and impact of, say, intelligent machines, distributed knowledge systems, and body invasive nano-technologies far exceed the notion of a 'neutral tool' (e.g. Rabinoff, 1992, Castells, 2000, Peters, 2004). Whereas until recently the human body and its natural functions of seeing, hearing and touching have served almost without exception as a measure of large and small, fast and slow, ugly and beautiful, human and non-human, today there are a number of competing levels of embodiment (molecular, genetic, function-specific) and of embodiment recognition (of scale and ordering, measurement and experimentation, perception and attention). Familiarity with, indeed deeper appreciation of newly opened levels of 'being in the world' is essential for every individual. This shift in the material condition of humans calls for research agendas and methodologies capable of rising to the novel ethical and epistemic challenges. Instead of set pieces of performance prescribed by decades of tradition in academic subjects like physics and history - the answers and applications most of which can be downloaded on the cheapest of computers - the emphasis must shift to seeing the learner as an interrogator of distributed knowledge systems in which she is herself caught as an active agent. How is this to be achieved without sacrificing the 'narratablity' of the Self whose liberation was the driving force in the rise of science and all those 'knowledge systems' it has generated? What are the pathways of inquiry in this regime of high complexity and networking? What research procedures assure such learning processes? I will report on my own attempts to develop and implement over the last decade or so the relevant methods and practices in a degree programme (e.g. Jaros, 2004, 2005, 2006). It would appear that the educational establishment has been slow to reform itself so as to live up to the challenges of the 21st century.