The Provincialization of Epistemology: Knowledge and Education in the Age of the Postcolony

Abstract

Education is a prime terrain for the transmission, facilitation, development and production of knowledge. This is a truism bordering on platitude. Universities, in particular, are literally defined in terms of the generation of knowledge. Given the intimate relationship between education and educational institutions, on the one hand, and epistemology and knowledge, on the other, it should come as no surprise that the decolonization discourses around provincialization of (Western) education should have come to include talk of provincialization of (Western) epistemology. My aim in this short contribution is to interrogate assertions regarding the “(de)provincialization” and/or “(de)colonization” of knowledge and epistemology in education and educational research and to investigate whether the postcolonial ideas of diverse and local epistemologies do not involve a mistaken sense of ‘epistemology’. I argue for an applied epistemology for the real world: that there are good reasons for an unequivocal and context-sensitive (albeit not context-relative) understanding of knowledge and epistemology in education and educational research – and for being able to distinguish between knowledge and non-knowledge. Geographic, ethnic, racial and gender-based differences do not constitute relevant criteria for any such demarcation. Instances in which they are cited as criteria raise questions not of epistemological relevance but rather of social justice.