Alternative Epistemologies Research Articles

Decolonising and reimagining social work in Africa: Alternative epistemologies and practice models

Decolonising and reimagining social work in Africa: Alternative epistemologies and practice models

Decolonizing IS through tecnologia social: Fostering epistemic plurality in the design of solidarity cryptocurrency in Latin America

AbstractWesternised paradigms dominate the information systems (IS) field, often overshadowing alternative epistemologies. This study challenges the prevailing hegemonic view and contributes to the decolonization of IS research and practice by proposing a Latin American and decolonial approach to technological development that emphasises community centrality and epistemic justice through recognition of local knowledges and Indigenous traditions. Using design ethnography, we follow the development of a solidarity cryptocurrency in a Brazilian favela. Our paper offers two key contributions. By introducing tecnologia social, an underrepresented perspective in IS, we highlight ecology of knowledges, centrality of the local and decolonial reconfiguration as principles that can enrich the understanding of IS projects from a decolonial perspective. In addition, we propose a new concept—epistemic dialogical tension—as a process wherein different epistemologies coexist and accommodate each other, encouraging a dynamic interplay of distinct human experiences and worldviews. It offers new paths to IS scholars and practitioners in navigating the complexities of epistemic plurality. We argue that tecnologia social and epistemic dialogical tension provide fertile ground for developing reimagined, decolonized approaches where multiple epistemologies can coexist, favouring the often‐silenced communities they are intended to benefit.

Changing the Frame: New Epistemic Frameworks and Social Transformation in African Feminist Theory

Abstract This article discusses African feminist approaches to decolonization and social transformation. In recent years, there has been a significant shift in African feminist scholarship towards African concerns and Africa-centered solutions. Today’s turn to Indigenous knowledge, social structures, and gender relations is no longer just about shedding light on the precolonial past, but about fundamentally changing the epistemic framework in the sense of developing alternative epistemologies beyond the dominant ‘Western’ framework. But what is meant by ‘alternative epistemologies’? How do African feminist thinkers conceptualize social change today? And how do they relate epistemic and social change in their thinking? These questions are explored in this article, focusing on work by Sylvia Tamale (Uganda), Wangari Maathai (Kenya), and Anthonia Kalu (Nigeria) and drawing on the discourse of ecofeminism and Ubuntu as two models of alternative epistemologies.

Beyond Formal Structures: Exploring Bottom-Up Governance Dynamics in the Assyrian Community’s COVID-19 Response in Germany

This article examines pandemic governance towards migrant communities in Germany in the context of mobilisation and demobilisation of state–society relations during the COVID-19 crisis. By studying how informality is reproduced in social practices and community networks as a response to top-down governance practices in the case of Assyrians – a quintessential diaspora community that settled in Germany through various migratory waves starting from the 1960s – this article aims to explore the bottom-up dynamics of governance practices among migrant communities. The study identifies three key themes for studying bottom-up dynamics of governance: informality embedded in everyday practices in response to formal governance, particularly vaccine policies; the existence of alternative epistemologies based on mistrust towards authorities, manifested in dual narratives; and the articulation of migrant agency in navigating top-down structures. Adopting a grounded theory approach, the study utilises theoretical sampling. Data were collected from various sources, including reports, newspaper articles, official statements and press releases from migrant organisations, alongside interviews with key migrant stakeholders.

The Magic of Death

Death awareness can serve as an awakening experience and act as a powerful spark for significant life changes. The central question is, “How could death awareness and its creative examination transform our fear of death, open a path to liberation and self-empowerment, expand our consciousness, and lead us toward more meaningful, creative, and service-oriented lives?” The premise is that, instead of avoiding the reality of death, there is an opportunity to look into it and examine our fixed ideas and preconceptions about it—focusing on the person’s fear of their death and not on their other fears related to the death and dying of significant others. Furthermore, the article examines death as a catalyst for significant life changes and fear of death, further exploring how death anxiety shows up in our lives, why reducing death denial is essential, how to honor death and all the lessons it teaches us, and how to transform our relationship with our mortality. It examines cross-cultural wisdom and alternative epistemologies that support the transformation of our death, such as spirituality, creativity, consciousness, transpersonal psychology, and Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. Future research would expand on the idea that the transformation of the relationship with death could foster personal growth and intensify connections to Earth and all living beings.

Alternative Epistemologies and Experimental Philosophy. Considerations Starting from the Reading of the Doctoral Thesis Socio-epistemological aspects of contemporary Islamic feminism in Romania and Israel. A contribution to the promotion of experimental p

Reading the doctoral thesis Socio-epistemological aspects of contemporary Islamic feminism in Romania and Israel. A contribution to the promotion of the experimental philosophy supported by Mr. Salem Samih at the Western University of Timișoara, under the guidance of Prof. Florin Lobonț, allowed me to reflect on feminist epistemology and how it can be the basis for recovering factual data from sociological research for philosophizing, reinterpreted in a non-objectivist social constructionist manner.

Alternative Epistemologies as Distinguishing Features of Right-Wing and Left-Wing Media in the United States

This study builds on efforts to understand what alternative media are becoming by examining differences in epistemology among them and as compared with mainstream media. We find that alternative media present fewer sources on average and rely more often on unattributed assertions. The source count is particularly low in right-wing alternative media. Furthermore, alternative media outlets are more distant from the sources they do provide than mainstream media are. Thus, alternative media present both less evidence and less proximate evidence in their news texts, offering audiences a shaky epistemological foundation.

The sonic side of organizing: theorizing acoustemology for blind and visually impaired people's inclusion in the workplace

ABSTRACT Drawing on ethnography, this study investigates the treatment of blind and visually impaired people (BVIP) in the workplace adopting a sociomaterial framework based on acoustemology. This approach concerns the process of knowing with and through sound. In line with interest in multimodality within organization studies, acoustemology recognizes the auditory as a way to access systems of meanings, negotiations, co-constructions, discrimination and culture within organizations. Considering visual impairment as a culture, this research explores the way in which sound and sonic technologies act as relational (both social and material) channels through which BVIP conduct themselves in the workplace, interact with sighted co-workers, gain recognition and produce and reproduce a system of meanings. Through acoustemology, this study contributes to the issue of organizational inclusion of people with disability proposing dis-continuity, a concept that helps explore inclusion as a practice that involves alternative epistemologies and brings about changes in organizational culture.

Difficult Articulacy: Rhetoric, Disability and Early Modern Styling of Bodymind

In early modern theories of ‘proper’ style, ambiguously, difficulty could convey a sense of excellence on one hand (of national belonging, imperial ambition or manly ‘virility’) while also being deployed to denigrate unseemly (too feminine or foreign) speech. Difficulty erupts precisely in the points of friction: when boundaries around ablebodymindedness are drawn or when the available forms of expression are insufficient. Instead of eradicating difficulty altogether, I sift through early modern French, English and Italian writing on rhetoric to make a case for paying closer attention to difficulty, lingering with it, and seeing what these friction points ultimately reveal. The contemporary concept of ‘disability gain’ posits disability not as a defect to be remedied, erased or cured, but rather as a mode of being in the world that allows for innovation, creativity and even added affects, resources or alternative epistemologies. Instead of considering, in the pedagogical domain, how to construct conceptual ‘on-ramps’ for simplifying difficulty, what would we gain by leaning into the unclear, uncertain and potentially joyful ‘other’ forms of communication itself, such as dysfluency, stuttering or Remi Yergeau’s concept of the rhizomatic neuroqueer?

Refugee Worldbuilding in Broken Times: (Re)Creating Self-Location in South(east) Asian Canadian Narratives

This paper is focused on interpreting the way in which twenty-first-century refugee writing in Canada is currently approached critically and theoretically. It proposes new reading strategies that contest the influence of nation-state powers over literary production deployed with an aesthetics of cosmopolitanism. In particular, this article takes up refugee writing by Kim Thúy and Sharon Bala, respectively, in order to show how its search for a “Good Life” leads to the transformation of the characters’ subjectivity. This transformation responds to an epistemological shift which confronts issues of Western complicity in foreign human rights abuses and poses questions about alternative epistemologies to Eurocentric notions of healing and trauma recovery in the aftermath of mass violence.

Alternative epistemologies in indigenous philosophy, and its contextualization in India

Alternative epistemologies in indigenous philosophy, and its contextualization in India

Pós-verdade ou pós-acadêmico: a transformação da ciência e a obsolescência da "realidade"

Abstract Discussions of post-truth typically appeal to a notion of science as objective and therefore non-ideological. Objectivity has been attacked as itself an ideology, and a large literature has developed which claims that there are alternative “epistemologies” which reveal facts which this ideology excludes. The focus on the question what is a fact leads to “post-truth: this question is in turn treated as ideological. But this is misleading in two ways. One is that the kinds of facts that are supposed to be added by these alternative epistemologies have been part of sociology all along. The disagreement is not about facts, but about affirming the validity of viewpoints. Another is that sociology problematizes ideology itself, without affirming any ideology. This approach provides its own discipline: we come to understand what something like “oppression” means, and means for the people involved, in terms of the difference between our assumptions and practices, from our living life, and theirs.

Protest and Resistance: Conceptualizing a Blackamerican Institutional Schema and the Contemporary Relevance of Pre-Brown Educators

In the century following emancipation, Blackamericans developed robust and effective schools despite limited resources. Unfortunately, their successes and contributions to the education system are often overlooked. This interdisciplinary theoretical paper draws on historiographies of segregated school systems, examining the struggles of Blackamerican educators within segregated education systems through the lenses of coloniality and institutional work. This examination reveals a distinct Blackamerican institutional schema rooted in community, guiding educators in navigating structural and systemic dynamics that shape educational opportunities and successfully challenge dominant white education standards. We discuss the coloniality of schooling, a structural framework, and a mindset that continues to undergird our contemporary education system and then draw attention to an alternative perspective. Our goal is to work toward more inclusive and equitable education systems by recognizing and acknowledging the protest and resistance of Blackamerican educators, their contributions to alternative epistemologies, and the mindsets that guided their actions.

Evaluating the role of psychedelic psychotherapy in addressing societal alienation: Imaginaries of liberation

AbstractQuestions are currently being posed concerning the implications of the clinical uptake of psychedelics. While enthusiasm surrounds the potential therapeutic benefits of psychedelics and critique surrounds their appropriation to commercial ends, limited attention has been given to the role of psychedelics in generating social transformation. Herbert Marcuse contended radical change requires ‘new imaginaries of liberation’. We consider whether clinical uptake of psychedelics may produce the perceptual shifts necessary to generate social transformation surrounding contemporary alienating conditions. Economic structures contributing to these alienating conditions are highly resistant to change and may neuter psychedelics' revolutionary potential. We illustrate how psychedelics may be instrumentalised: regulating individuals into unjust systems; redirecting psychedelic usage away from therapeutic ends towards productivity; distracting or diverting attention from systemic forms of control; usurping non-ordinary states into the domain of self-care; and fetishistically commodifying psychedelic experience as a consumable. There are, however, reasons to believe that psychedelics, in raising consciousnesses, may prove resistant to co-option. In particular, psychedelics induce perceptual experiences that: challenge the paradigmatic assumptions of industrial society by provoking alternative epistemologies and metaphysics; generate expanded or ecological constructions of selfhood, thereby offering resignifications of meanings, desires, and life potentials; and offer the enriched phenomenological insight into self, other, and world called for in combating ubiquitous social alienation. In this way, psychedelics may induce the revolution in perception necessary to imagine liberatory potentials and spark the desire for collective emancipation.

Placemaking Eichstätt: Perspectives and Intersections

This is a short essay on the conference “Taking Place and Making Place: Celebrating 25 Years of Space and Culture” at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (June 23–25, 2022). Based on a handful of notes and personal impressions, this is an unqualified research note and a descriptive overview of this conference from the perspective of a literary scholar. This perspective includes some brief reflections on Nietzsche’s perspectivism and Genevieve Lloyd’s reading of Spinoza as an alternative epistemology to Cartesian mind–body dualism, which approach critical engagement through a set of perspectives arising from the intersections between different fields.

Theoretical and political implications of agonistic peace for decolonising peace education

ABSTRACT Discussions on the importance of decolonising peace education have become prevalent in recent years with continuing presence of coloniality and Eurocentrism in peace education coming under sustained critiqued. In this article, we contribute to discussions on decolonising peace education by bringing it together with the notion of agonistic politics, and specifically the concepts of agonistic peace and agonistic decolonisation. Through drawing on two common peace education programmes in the South African context, namely Facing History Facing Ourselves and Peace Clubs, we explore the potential that the concepts of agonistic peace and agonistic decolonisation offer to enrich debates on decolonising peace education. We argue that the analysis of these programmes through the lens of these concepts holds important theoretical and political implications for conceptualising peace and peace education as it enables one to understand these as open-ended and dynamic, alluding to the presence of alternative epistemologies and ontologies of peace that are entangled with politics that challenge Eurocentrism’s (supposed) universalism. This, we suggest, is vital for understanding the decolonisation of peace education as a long and complex process, rather than a one-off event.

Colonizability and Hermeneutical Injustice in Applied Linguistics Research: (Im)possibilities for Epistemological Delinking

Abstract The field of applied linguistics is a remarkable case of deep intersection of the skewed geopolitics of knowledge (epistemic inequalities) and language (the ascendency of English as both a topic of research and academic lingua franca). The dominance of the Anglo-sphere through epistemology and language in applied linguistics renders the process of decolonization even more problematic than in other fields, for the only available tools to decolonize are those of coloniality. We argue that despite the end of formal decolonization and the incessant decolonial impulses, the Global South(s) may be still colonizable. Through ages of epistemic dominance, the Global South(s) may have encountered some tensions and challenges to exercise and legitimize ways of theorizing and doing applied linguistics research otherwise. That is, these alternative visions and praxis may again be underpinned by western traditions of thought that have shaped their foundational understandings of what language, linguistics, and practicality are. Epistemological delinking may be impossible as long as decoloniality itself is enunciated through the dominant voices and channels and according to the rationalities against which decoloniality in applied linguistics has been made to be understood. We go beyond the usual question of whether decolonization is possible, to ask: What decolonialities are possible to account for the Global South(s) and their varying degrees of colonizability? We employ what we term ‘collective introspection-retrospection’ as an epistemological journey of re-knowing, re-feeling, re-sensing, and re-imagining alternative epistemologies in applied linguistics.

Towards an Alternative Epistemology of Resistance: A Reading of Pulayathara by Paul Chirakkarode Against the Backdrop of Dalit Christian Liberation Movements in Kerala, India

Religious conversion in Kerala was an immediate solution for the lower caste people who sought to break free from the slavery and structural inequalities of caste. Though proselytization was accelerated by egalitarian and emancipatory ideologies, it became a shift from one oppressive, exploitative social fabric to another hegemonic structure composed of institutionalized religion underlined by casteist ideologies. Christianity in Kerala turned out to be Brahminical and catered to the interest of upper-caste Christians. Despite its egalitarian claims, discrimination unabashedly pervaded the churches of Kerala. Dalit liberation movements in the twentieth century heralded by both the Dalit and Dalit Christian leaders profoundly influenced the public life of Kerala and brought a new paradigm to the slave castes. Such changes were reflected in the literary articulations of the period also. This article examines how the Dalit Christian discourse is inaugurated in Malayalam novels as the result of the Dalit Christian liberation movements in the twentieth century. By employing textual analysis as the research methodology and intersectionality as a theoretical lens, this article analyses Paul Chirakkarode’s Pulayathara (1962) and examines how the Dalit Christian liberation movement in the twentieth century is instrumental in shaping an alternative epistemology and Dalit Christian identity.

Alternative Epistemology in Far-Right Anti-Publics: A Qualitative Study of Australian Activists

Beliefs in hostile conspiracies against ‘Western civilisation’ or ‘white people’ play a key role in tying divergent far-right tropes together under an internally coherent meta-narrative. Claims of having discovered this conspiratorial truth offer personal pride, create a sense of righteousness and urgency to stand up against these alleged secretive, malevolent forces, and help build a parallel counter-hegemonic community with its own distinct epistemology. Using qualitative interviews and a focus group, this study examines how actors engaged in ‘ordinary’ dissent in Australia developed an antagonistic fringe belief system, and the extent to which this alternative epistemology constitutes a manifestation of ‘anti-publics’ (Davis, 2021). The study found how participants’ ideological mindset has grown from rather benign manifestations of dissent into a hostile, counter-hegemonic, conspiratorial meta-narrative through processes of ‘doing their own research’, sharing their learnings with significant others, and incorporating each other’s ideological convictions. Their ideological radicalisation was characterised by personal feelings of pride and epistemic superiority, which created a sense of meaning, urgency, and purpose, as well as social recognition within their group. These psychological and social processes drew them further into a far-right ‘anti-public’ milieu and away from democratic expressions of dissent. The findings shed new light on how the complex and mutually reinforcing interplay between ideological and socio-psychological factors cements an alternative, oppositional epistemology. The study offers close-up insights into what drives radicalisation processes, creating or reinforcing a parallel ‘anti-public’ in hostile opposition to democratic processes and norms.

(In)visibility, Mediated, and Sporting Perceptions: Bollywood, Biopics, and the Epistemic Turn in Mary Kom

In recent years several Hindi films have been produced that delineate the difficulties and challenges faced by Indian athletes and boxers, and highlight their sociocultural struggles in asserting their pursuit of and passion for their sport. Mary Kom (2014) is one such Hindi-language biographical sports film based on the life of the eponymous boxer Mary Kom, a film that brings to the foreground the ingrained social prejudices, gender biases and marginalization that affect the personal lives of sportswomen and play decisive roles in shaping their career trajectories. Here we contend that biopics like Mary Kom are immensely significant in delinking the dominant epistemologies, ideologies and interpretations, undermining the controlling vision and visibility, and broadening the horizons of understanding through visual representations. Biopics on sportswomen, in uncovering stories of their astounding achievements, generate alternative epistemologies and disentangle the epistemologies of sportswomen from the exclusive epistemic domain of men. The article examines Mary Kom from the standpoint of “aesthetic epistemology,” a way of producing knowledge in which visualizations are intended to convey something invisible to the spectator and heighten their epistemic awareness. Finally, the article argues that biopics like Mary Kom emphasize plural modes of knowing and recognizing the hegemonized epistemologies and ontologies of Indian sportswomen, and thereby interrogate the logocentrism of power and the governmentality of male-centered Hindi sports films.