Epistemic Access Research Articles

Researching students’ epistemic access under Covid-19: Epistemological and methodological challenges

This paper aims at critically examining the main epistemological and methodological trends in the scholarship of ‘student access’ and ‘success’ in South African higher education. This is done with reference to key moments in the process of higher education transformation and the main arguments on the individual, social and institutional factors that impact student achievement. The paper considers three intersecting domains: the knowledge foundational domain, the social domain, and the research discursive domain. It explores how these domains interface with the individual agency of the researcher and the participant with reference to the imagery and imaginary constructed around difference. The paper shows how the analytical discourses of access have largely reflected global theoretical influences which do not always speak to the local context. Thus, the paper calls for de-colonial approaches rooted in epistemic justice that account for the contextual peculiarities of student agency and experience.

Pandemic disruptions to access to higher education in South Africa: A dream deferred?

The COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to emergency remote teaching (ERT) and online learning highlighted issues of social justice, pedagogical inclusion and epistemic access in higher education. The research underlying this article analyses the complexities of access to learning and the effects of the shift to ERT and online learning on the social justice agenda in South Africa, using the case study of the University of Johannesburg. The article uses the conceptual frameworks of epistemic access, equity and inclusive pedagogy from the theories of Fraser (2008), Mbembe (2016) and Mgqwashu (2016). Pedagogic continuity and inclusion (Motala and Menon 2020; Menon and Motala 2021), hard-won by many institutions during the pandemic, will need to be sustained and secured as the world adapts to a “new normal” in higher education and other spheres of life. Czerniewicz et al. (2020, 957) refer to the maxim “Anytime, anyplace, anywhere” characterising ERT as a “brutal underestimation of the complexities and entanglement of different inequalities and structural arrangements”. Fataar (2020), Czerniewicz et al. (2020) and Hodges et al. (2020) advocate an alternative pedagogy that is “trauma-informed” and offers parity with the pedagogies that prevailed pre-pandemic. The article concludes that the pre-existing conditions of deep inequality and inequities, and a highly differentiated higher education system with uneven pedagogical practices, were exacerbated by the pandemic. While we acknowledge the achievement of avoiding the loss of the academic year during the pandemic, we argue that it is important to learn lessons from the initial implementation of ERT and the fractures that it highlights in higher education. Heading into an uncertain future, the sector needs explicit equity-driven approaches to ensure pedagogical inclusion beyond physical and epistemic access.

Translanguaging as a disruptive pedagogy in language education An analysis of metacognitive reflections of second-year undergraduate students

Debate on whether the use of translanguaging is disruptive of monolingual ideologies and practices that predominate global tertiary education seem to be still in its infancy. Contemporary research in the area focuses on what appears conflicting though lucid discourses on eliminating boundaries between codes or languages, resulting in no ‘named’ languages. This study adopted a qualitative case study approach in which second year undergraduate students taking a literacy course were purposively sampled. The data was collected through analysing the participants’ course related interactions on the virtual space, WhatsApp. The efficacy of WhatsApp as an instructional tool in the teaching and learning context has escalated the interest among researchers in exploring its potential benefit in a multilingual setting. The paper reports on the crucial role language plays in the comprehension, participation, motivation, and consequent ameliorated academic performance of multilingual students. The findings attest that translanguaging, where languages of input and output are consciously alternated, proves to be an indispensable pedagogy and recommends its incorporation in daily instructional practices. Keywords: epistemic access, language learning, literacy, multilingualism, translanguaging, monolingualism

Модальный структурализм и проблема интеграции

Modal structuralism attempts to solve the problems of Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics. First, the paper presents the view that modal structuralism emerges out of Benacerraf’s arguments against Pla-tonism and set-theoretic reductionist realism. Putnam’s account is showed to be another source of influ-ence on modal structuralism. Second, the basic ideas of modal structuralism are reviewed, with special at-tention paid to how the translation of mathematical statements into modal sentences helps to avoid the set-theoretic grounding of such statements. However, since possible worlds are conceived as set-theoretic entities, the translation itself faces the problem of potential circular explanation. To solve the problem, Hellman suggests taking modalities as primitives, but his solution faces additional issues. Two of them are an unclear metaphysical status of the possible structures mathematicians make statements about and an obscure epistemic access mathematicians have to these structures. In order to avoid these issues, the paper suggests combining modal structuralism with modal normativism. According to the latter, modal statements are not about objects or facts but about linguistic rules. Since modal normativists interpret the possible structures as non-metaphysical entities, the problem of epistemic access to such structures trans-forms into the problem of the agent’s knowledge of the semantic rules of mathematical language. It is al-so pointed out that modal normativism might solve another set of structuralist problems, not specifically concerned with modalities, e.g., the problem of objects’ dependence on the structures in which they are embedded.

William James, Radical Empiricism, and the Affective Ground of Religious Life

William James, Radical Empiricism, and the Affective Ground of Religious Life

Thoughts on a Changing Landscape for Research Archiving in the Cloud Era: A Critical Perspective from South Africa

This article reflects on humanities research and archival futures in Southern Africa in the Cloud era—those collections that support research on an institutionalised basis, including sound and related collections. Since the 1990s, for comparably smaller, lesser resourced institutions in South Africa, a scramble for digital Africa amid a technological divide piled upon other inequities. This condition has manifested in today’s big technology stacks and stakes. What then, does it mean for archives and their work of helping to produce the conditions for a meaningful engagement with the past and the present, indeed the future? A major challenge for research archives, it seems, may be to do the work of enabling epistemic access, which includes an orientation to ethics from the south, with the new set of vocabularies of digital sovereignty on the other hand. It is also crucial to redefine archival restitution as a social process in which the sovereignty of local communities, digital and otherwise, matters.

Postgraduate pedagogy in pandemic times: Online forums as facilitators of access to dialogic interaction and scholarly voices

In 2020, when the switch to remote teaching and learning required redesigning asynchronous on-line versions of face-to-face courses, we were concerned about whether access to engaged and dialogic learning could be facilitated in this new space. In attempting to address this concern we asked students in a B Ed Honours course to post, in an online forum, their reflective responses to weekly readings and to each other’s posts. This discussion forum became the engine of the course. With their permission, the posts of students in the 2021 cohort, together with their summative reflective reading response assignment, were analysed in order to understand different kinds of dialogic interactions and their affordances for reducing the potential alienation of asynchronous learning. One of the key findings that emerged from this analysis is the role of dialogic interaction in facilitating the development of personal, professional and scholarly voices which contributed to epistemic access. Our analysis was informed by the theoretical work of Bakhtin on the dialogic and by theoretical and empirical work of scholars in the field of critical pedagogies. We use examples from the writing of a ‘stronger’ and a ‘weaker’ student to illustrate how students negotiated roles and positions for themselves by appropriating and using the textual resources available on the forum. We argue for the value of sustained practice in ‘writing about reading’, of reading each other’s writing and of ‘writing back’ to one another on-line, for the gradual acquisition of a range of confident voices and for enhanced understanding of module content.

Conceiving Prime Matter in the Middle Ages: Perception, Abstraction and Analogy

Abstract In its formlessness and potentiality, prime matter is a problematic entity of medieval metaphysics and its ontological limitations drastically affect human possibility of conceiving it. In this article, I analyse three influential strategies elaborated to justify an epistemic access to prime matter. They are incidental perception, negative abstraction, and analogy. Through a systematic and historical analysis of these procedures, the article shows the richness of interpretations and theoretical stakes implied by the conundrum of how prime matter can be known by human beings. In particular, the reasons behind the later medieval acceptance of analogy as the main way to unveil prime matter become clearer by pointing out the correlation between the ontological and epistemological levels of the medieval examination of prime matter.

Elicitation of children's understanding of information in pediatric genetic counseling encounters: A discourse-oriented perspective.

Affirmation of children's understanding of information provided in genetic counseling encounters is crucial to obtaining children's informed consent/assent in pediatric genetic counseling encounters. It is also important for the proper management of a genetic condition. Currently, there is a relative scarcity of research on how understanding of complex genetic information by children is elicited in the process of pediatric genetic counseling. In this study, we apply theme-oriented discourse analysis to examine 23 video/audio-recorded genetic counseling encounters in Hong Kong. The encounters involve children aged between 3 and 17years old who are suspected to have or diagnosed with Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome (SADS). Specifically, we examine a range of communicative strategies that genetic professionals employ to elicit children's understanding of information in this genetic counseling setting. We also examine how children's epistemic status is negotiated between genetic professionals, parents, and children. The study reveals that genetic professionals typically use direct questioning (e.g., "do you understand?" or "do you have any questions?"). Less typical are examples where genetic professionals explore children's epistemic access and invite children to recall information after they deliver it. The study reveals two discourse strategies that genetic professionals and parents employ to justify a child's low epistemic status: (1) construction of "current ignorance" and "future competence" in children and (2) association with a child's character. In the examined counseling encounters, genetic professionals and parents tend to construct a low epistemic status in younger children and allocate the responsibility for understanding relevant information to the parents and the "future" competent children. The study highlights the impact of genetic professionals' and parents' assumptions on children's knowledge and comprehensibility at different ages, and the role that children themselves play in conforming or contesting these assumptions.

Phubbing and Social Intelligence: Role-Playing Experiment on Bystander Inaccessibility

Smartphone use has changed patterns of online and offline interaction. Phubbing (i.e., looking at one’s phone instead of paying attention to others) is an increasingly recognized phenomenon in offline interaction. We examined whether people who phub are more likely to have lower social intelligence, whether phubbing is considered more annoying than being ignored due to reading a magazine, and if people describe smartphones and magazines differently as sources of social distraction. We collected two survey samples (N = 112, N = 108) for a cartoon-based role-playing experiment (the Bystander Inaccessibility Experiment) in which a smartphone user and a person reading a magazine ignored the respondents’ conversational initiatives. Annoyance in each scenario was measured, and written accounts were collected on why the respondents rated the scenarios the way they did. Other measures used included the Generic Scale of Phubbing, Generic Scale of Being Phubbed, and Tromsø Social Intelligence Scale. The results showed that participants in both samples were more annoyed by phubbing than by being ignored due to reading a magazine. Linear regression analyses showed that phubbing was associated with lower social intelligence, even after adjusting for confounding factors. The annoyingness of phubbing was explained with negative attitudes toward smartphones, which were assumed to be used for useless endeavors, while magazines were more appreciated and seen as more cultivating. The role of bystanders’ epistemic access to the smartphone user’s activities is discussed.

Anyone might but everyone won’t

This paper investigates the interaction between quantifiers and epistemic modals, focusing on the contrast between every and any . It builds on observations made in von Fintel & Iatridou 2003, who noted that quantifiers seem unable to take wide scope across an epistemic modal. The proposal at the heart of the paper is that modes of epistemic access to domains of quantification play a role in accounting for apparent restrictions on scope. The paper takes the characterization of conceptual covers in Aloni 2001 as a starting point to argue that in the context of epistemic modals, constraints on epistemic access to the domain of quantification can give rise to scope illusions. EARLY ACCESS

Making the invisible visible: Sociolinguistics meets medical communication in a travelling exhibition

AbstractVisual art is increasingly used to mediate scientific findings, engage and educate the public and as a part of the research process itself. However, work connecting sociolinguistics and art in this way is only just emerging. This paper presents a project at the intersection of sociolinguistics, art and Graphic Medicine. It discusses how art can be used for public engagement and how the process of creating art feeds into the research process: Drawings can ground the analysis in the big picture and show how themes that need to be analytically separated relate to each other. Identifying motifs highlights what does and does not get talked about. Trans‐mediating narratives into comics raises questions about the definition and structure of narratives, about tellability, shared knowledge and epistemic access. Overall, I suggest that sociolinguistics stands to gain from collaborating with artists in terms of public engagement and as an inspiration in the research process.

Curriculum contexts, recontextualisation and attention for higher-order thinking

Tasks are crucial for gaining access to powerful knowledge in geography and for fostering higher-order thinking in lessons; therefore, they are key to subject-specific pedagogy. After analysing tasks in geography textbooks for upper secondary education, it was revealed that higher-order thinking barely occurs in textbooks in the Netherlands and is more frequent in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Subsequently, both curriculum contexts were systematically compared to determine factors that influence the use of tasks. The results show that evaluative rules play a crucial role. The assessment in North Rhine-Westphalia focuses on higher-order thinking and how this becomes visible in students’ work. Dutch assessment concentrates on students handling an outlined body of knowledge in defined settings. This raises questions of epistemic access, as students are less prepared for the skills expected at university level. Finally, we observed the importance of alignment between official institutions, the discipline of subject-specific pedagogy and support for teachers when it comes to fostering higher-order thinking in geography education.

Collaborative construction of turn constructional units in responsive positions of question-answer sequences in Mandarin conversation

AbstractThis paper explores the features and interactional functions of collaboratively constructed TCUs (CCTs) in responsive positions of question-answer sequences in Mandarin daily conversations. Adopting the methodologies of Conversation Analysis, Interactional Linguistics and Multimodal Analysis, the study explores the sequential features of the CCTs and bodily-visual resources co-occurring with the CCTs, such as gaze orientations and gestures. Two categories have been identified based on the participants’ roles in the question-answer sequences. First, the answerer initiates the response to the question, and the questioner collaboratively completes the response. The analysis shows that the questioners are not conveying the action of answering the question but assuming the answer to the question. Second, one answerer initiates the response to the question, and another one collaboratively completes the response. The data demonstrates that this type of CCTs usually involves the two question-recipients with more or less equal epistemic access to the referent.

Opacity thought through: on the intransparency of computer simulations

Computer simulations are often claimed to be opaque and thus to lack transparency. But what exactly is the opacity of simulations? This paper aims to answer that question by proposing an explication of opacity. Such an explication is needed, I argue, because the pioneering definition of opacity by P. Humphreys and a recent elaboration by Durán and Formanek are too narrow. While it is true that simulations are opaque in that they include too many computations and thus cannot be checked by hand, this doesn’t exhaust what we might want to call the opacity of simulations. I thus make a fresh start with the natural idea that the opacity of a method is its disposition to resist knowledge and understanding. I draw on recent work on understanding and elaborate the idea by a systematic investigation into what type of knowledge and what type of understanding are required if opacity is to be avoided and why the required sort of understanding, in particular, is difficult to achieve. My proposal is that a method is opaque to the degree that it’s difficult for humans to know and to understand why its outcomes arise. This proposal allows for a comparison between different methods regarding opacity. It further refers to a kind of epistemic access that is important in scientific work with simulations.

Epistemic decolonisation in reconstituting higher education pedagogy in South Africa: the student perspective

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to understand how the curriculum is experienced across two higher education institutions to probe students’ understandings of epistemic access in the context of decolonisation debates. Three particular aspects of student experience of the decolonised curriculum and pedagogy are scrutinised. First, we look at the kind of sociality encouraged in the pedagogic encounter. Since a core function of education is social and cultural formation, a question arises as to what kind of sociality is possible between students and lecturers in a decolonised education space, including in the context of COVID-19. Second, we explore patterns of participation including, academic activities and support provided. Third, we investigate the knowledge forms and canon to which students are exposed in their respective programmes, with consideration of language issues. Finally, we examine the decolonisation of the curriculum in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The virtual field trip: conditions of access/ibility and configurations of care in teaching ethnography (during Covid-19)

Online learning as an emergency response to the Covid-19 pandemic provides a set of challenges that all educators had to navigate in their approach to teaching. This article details our experiences, as young educators, with developing a remote version of the anthropology field trip. The initial hard lockdown in South Africa determined the minimal conditions of emergency remote teaching (ERT). First, a necessary condition for the field trip was that teaching and learning had to take place asynchronously to account for the various contexts where students were situated. Second, we had to strike a balance between empathy towards students’ varying access to ERT and ensuring that the teaching objectives and standards remained appropriate for their level of study. Third, the role of mentorship in the process was a critical element of the virtual field trip and enabled us to engage affective learning strategies and facilitate epistemic access. Due to the shared navigation of ERT between students and educators, a reflexive and critical pedagogy strongly informed our later adaptations of the course. We conclude with reflections on the challenge of teaching/learning ethnography remotely and a brief statement on the value of critical and experimental pedagogies for remote situations.

Epistemic Realism in Bradley and Early Moore

In this paper I attempt to show how Moore’s early emancipation from Bradley’s absolute idealism presupposes a fundamental adherence to certain theses of absolute idealism itself. In particular, I argue that the idea of an immediate epistemic access to concepts and propositions that Moore endorses in his platonic atomism (Hylton) is a reworking of a form of epistemic realism already present in Bradley. Epistemic realism is the conjunction of two theses: i) reality is independent of any constructive work of the human mind; ii) reality is immediately (non-discursively) accessible to knowledge. In this paper I first focus on Moore’s early idealist phase (1897), suggesting that it should be understood as an attempt at isolating this thesis in Bradley against Kant’s transcendental idealism. I then suggest that it is on the background of an invariant adherence to it that we should understand Moore’s later rejection of monism and idealism (1898–9) through his anti-psychologism. I hence explore how epistemic realism is at work in Moore’s platonic atomism and conclude with some remarks about the further significance of Moore’s rejection of Kant.

Knowledge of future contingents

This paper addresses the question whether future contingents are knowable, that is, whether one can know that things will go a certain way even though it is possible that things will not go that way. First I will consider a long-established view that implies a negative answer, and draw attention to some endemic problems that affect its credibility. Then I will sketch an alternative line of thought that prompts a positive answer: future contingents are knowable, although our epistemic access of them is limited in some important respects.

Responding to Information Requests: The Case of Inscribed Object Checks

This paper explores one way that participants use inscribed objects in their immediate environment as resources for interaction. In particular, it identifies and analyzes a type of embodied response turn found in information request sequences. The data come from a video recording of family members engaged in a joint cooking activity, where they are preparing an unfamiliar dish while following recipe instructions. In this setting, participants and inscribed objects hold varying levels of epistemic rights and access regarding the task at hand. This appears to have consequences for how the interaction unfolds. As participants ask questions about the recipe, respondents repeatedly employ a particular embodied practice of checking and reading aloud the recipe, which I call an inscribed object check. An analysis of this practice and its sequential variations shows how participants draw on verbal, embodied, and environmental resources to fill knowledge gaps made relevant by information requests when the knowledge lies within inscribed objects. The findings contribute to our understanding of the role that inscribed objects play in interaction, as well as how responses to information requests are managed in everyday settings when all participants are relatively unknowledgeable about the task at hand.