Epistemic Agency Research Articles

Shifts of epistemic agency between children and parents during making at museum-based makerspace

ABSTRACT Epistemic agency is situated within social, cultural, and material contexts of learning. Making and inventing supports children’s and families’ creative thinking, problem-solving, and knowledge construction, through which they are positioned as active knowledge agents and their epistemic agency is represented. This article examines how the epistemic agency of children and parents shifted as they engaged in making activities in a museum-based makerspace. Through video-based, multimodal interaction analysis of thirteen cases, our findings demonstrate moment-by-moment transition patterns between child-led, parent-led, and equally-distributed epistemic agency. Our findings also show how these epistemic agency shifts emerged through the families’ embodied interactions. By doing so, we reveal that (a) the lead epistemic agent role shifted over time during the inventing experience and (b) the epistemic agency of a parent and a child were relative to each other. This study contributes to the theoretical understanding of epistemic agency in situ during collaborative making activities as a fluid phenomenon as well as provides practical implications for museum-based makerspaces to support parent-child knowledge-building interactions during inventing.

A critical understanding of students’ intercultural experience: non-essentialism and epistemic justice

ABSTRACT In this article, I discuss a critical understanding of students’ intercultural experience at a UK university. I critique the potential issues of: a) using essentialist categorisations to understand students’ intercultural experience, and b) imposing epistemic injustice to students by undervaluing their epistemic agency in intercultural experience. Based upon the paintings of five students, I problematise the essentialist categorisations reproduced in the students’ meaning-making about their intercultural experience, which could reinforce prejudice, neo-racism, otherisation, and segregation. The students were, however, able to negotiate with such an issue of essentialism through a non-static and back-and-forth process in their painting. They also demonstrated an active epistemic agency in navigating the complexities of their intercultural experience. Therefore, I suggest intercultural research to adopt a non-essentialist and epistemically-just lens to understand students’ intercultural experience in the increasingly fluid world.

Epistemic agency for costructuring expansive knowledge‐building practices

AbstractAs a hallmark of authentic science practices, students need to enact epistemic agency to shape/reshape the key aspects of their inquiry work as a collaborative community. This study elaborates an emergent temporal mechanism for engaging students' epistemic agency: “reflective structuration” by which members of a classroom community coconstruct ever‐evolving inquiry directions and group structures as their collective inquiry work proceeds. Using an interactional ethnography method, we examined how students (n = 22) in a Grade 5 classroom coconstructed shared inquiry directions and flexible group structures to guide their sustained inquiry about human body systems over 7 months supported by a collaborative online environment. Rich data were collected to trace the work of the eye inquiry group as a telling case. With their teacher's support, students took agentic moves to construct an evolving set of wondering areas as a way to frame what their whole class needed to investigate. Flexible groups, such as the eye inquiry group, emerged and evolved in the various areas, leading to progressively deepening inquiry and extensive idea exchanges among students. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Narratives of epistemic agency in citizen science classification projects: ideals of science and roles of citizens

Citizen science (CS) projects have started to utilize Machine Learning (ML) to sort through large datasets generated in fields like astronomy, ecology and biodiversity, biology, and neuroimaging. Human–machine systems have been created to take advantage of the complementary strengths of humans and machines and have been optimized for efficiency and speed. We conducted qualitative content analysis on meta-summaries of documents reporting the results of 12 citizen science projects that used machine learning to optimize classification tasks. We examined the distribution of tasks between citizen scientists, experts, and algorithms, and how epistemic agency was enacted in terms of whose knowledge shapes the distribution of tasks, who decides what knowledge is relevant to the classification, and who validates it. In our descriptive results, we found that experts, who include professional scientists and algorithm developers, are involved in every aspect of a project, from annotating or labelling data to giving data to algorithms to train them to make decisions from predictions. Experts also test and validate models to improve their accuracy by scoring their outputs when algorithms fail to make correct decisions. Experts are mostly the humans involved in a loop, but when algorithms encounter problems, citizens are also involved at several stages. In this paper, we present three main examples of citizens-in-the-loop: (a) when algorithms provide incorrect suggestions; (b) when algorithms fail to know how to perform classification; and (c) when algorithms pose queries. We consider the implications of the emphasis on optimization on the ideal of science and the role of citizen scientists from a perspective informed by Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Information Systems (IS). Based on our findings, we conclude that ML in CS classification projects, far from being deterministic in its nature and effects, may be open to question. There is no guarantee that these technologies can replace citizen scientists, nor any guarantee that they can provide citizens with opportunities for more interesting tasks.

Epistemic in/justice: Towards ‘Other’ ways of knowing

This paper brings a critical awareness to the interrelations between epistemic injustice and knowledge hierarchies, through an insufficient attention to the Other as epistemically harmed. Because of the dominant empirical and theoretical authority Others are subjected to in research practices and dissemination, our paper explores how marginalised voices possess less epistemic agency due to their disciplining, neglect and subjugation as knowers through testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. We contribute two new categories of epistemic injustice in marketing; Silencing and Ignorance; areas, which reproduce and reify knowledge hierarchies but equally provide scholars with an opportunity to contest epistemic dominance. Through an explicit acknowledgement of the relationship between difference, power and knowledge in meaning-making, we argue for Other consciousness which entails (i) privileging Othered knowledge, (ii) highlighting structural epistemic in/justice within Marketing academe and (iii) advocating for artistic-inclusive processes, to alter how we theorise knowing Others, and Other knowers, in marketing scholarship.

Epistemic Agency and the Value of Knowledge and Belief

“Credit-worthiness” accounts of the value of knowledge focus on the exercise of agency as the source of value in question. This focus is shared by an approach suggested by Sally Haslanger to the value of belief (and thus true belief). The standard examples and counterexamples from the “value of knowledge” literature treat the relevant sort of agency in fundamentally individualistic terms. But recent work on relational autonomy recommends that we think of agency as fundamentally socially embedded. This reorientation not only disarms a standard objection to the “credit-worthiness” approach, but suggests that the putative counterexample is actually a paradigm-case of the exercise of epistemic agency for creatures like us. In so doing, it also exhibits the agency-based account of the value of knowledge and its main competitor, which focuses on the status of potential informants, as two sides of the same coin. Meanwhile, epistemic agency is an essential component of agency tout court. Effective action requires information. But perhaps the possession of information can take other forms than the having of true beliefs. Paul Churchland characterizes what’s peculiar to belief in terms of the sentential form in “that”-clauses in belief attributions. The alternatives that he envisages divorce informational content from sentence content. But for creatures like us, sentences are the basic units of communication of information. If our agency is paradigmatically exercised in socially embedded contexts, an essential part of the picture is that our information be in substantial measure communicable in sentences, i.e., that it take the form of beliefs. So the socially-oriented version of the agency-based approach to the value of knowledge also confirms Haslanger’s hunch that the value of belief can be vindicated and developed in terms of the role of belief in the exercise of agency for creatures like us.

Planning for student-driven discussions: a revelatory case of curricular sensemaking for epistemic agency

ABSTRACT Background Teachers need to make sense of curricular materials and design instruction to ensure students will be positioned to pursue their own arc of inquiry in curriculum enactment. Whole-group discussions are crucial opportunities for curricular sensemaking, yet planning and enactment can be challenging. Methods We used a single, revelatory case study approach with one focal teacher to research curricular sensemaking for epistemic agency in storyline materials. We identified episodes of pedagogical reasoning for epistemic agency in the teacher’s pre- and post-interview responses and participation in discussion planning cycles (DPCs). This analysis revealed the recurrent sources of tension and ambiguity that the teacher grappled with concerning epistemic agency. Findings The teacher made sense of two key sources of tension: curricular coherence and student coherence-seeking; equitable participation and incremental building of ideas; and one source of ambiguity: uniform or variable form(s) of epistemic agency in different discussion types. The teacher grappled with these tensions and ambiguity and learned to leverage them to position students with epistemic agency in their learning. Contribution The teacher engaged in curricular sensemaking for epistemic agency. This form of sensemaking involves the teacher’s efforts to engage with students’ emergent ideas and participation in their use of curricular materials.

Conceptualizing Scientific Progress Needs a New Humanism

ABSTRACT The paper focuses on the controversial nature of progress in science and society. In the philosophy of science and technology, one usually views scientific progress in terms of theoretical and empirical success of a theory or research program. This view of progress leads to a paradox (novelty versus truth) and a gap between science and society (‘bold guesses’ versus ‘small steps’). Further, it assigns a special epistemological status to science as a condition of progress, which is built on the idea of objectivity. In contrast, this paper proposes a value-focused interpretation of scientific progress, shifting the focus to the circumstances from which scientific knowledge emerges as a social institution and a part of culture. It presents progress as science’s ability to create a new picture of the world, new ways of communication, and new patterns of social order. This understanding of progress is strongly connected to epistemic agency, rooted in the ambivalent temporal nature of the agent who inherits conditions and abilities from the past, uses and develops them in the present though being aimed at constructing the future. The future epitomized in the myth of science proves a humanistic utopia is the integral idea of progress.

Preservice teachers’ perezhivanie and epistemic agency during the practicum

ABSTRACT Although the role of emotions in preservice teacher agency in innovation is well acknowledged, little is known about how emotions relate to their epistemic agency. This study explores the link between preservice teachers’ emotional experiences and their epistemic agency during the practicum, using Vygotskyan notions of perezhivanie and a sociocultural perspective to epistemic agency. This paper's first contribution is an integrated conceptual framework for exploring the link between perezhivanie and epistemic agency in classroom settings. Second, drawing on results from 11 interview-based case studies, this paper shows how preservice teachers’ social situations shape their perezhivanie and epistemic agency. The cases of two preservice language teachers who had different perezhivanie to a similar issue illustrate how their emotions and interpretations of the situation impacted their knowledge practices. The findings highlight that the quality of the epistemic object and the personal connection to it played a key role in the formation of epistemic agency.

'I Must Be from Somewhere. I'm Not from the Moon': Navigating the Politics of Labelling for Stateless Palestinian Refugees from Syria

This article explores the relationship between statelessness and refugeeness over time and space. It does so by drawing on how Palestinian refugees from Syria in Sweden navigate the various stateless and refugee labels imposed upon them before, during and after their flight from Syria to Sweden. Standpoint theory was deployed as the basis for understanding how this group of stateless refugees related to these labels. While the research found that, even though the labelling process was largely non-participatory, both as a manifestation for epistemic agency and a vehicle for epistemic justice in statelessness and refugee research, standpoint theory has offered an indispensable lens through which we have accessed the multiple strategies that the interviewees adopted to accept, reject, resist or negotiate their re/de-labelling throughout their journey.

Fixing Subjects, Fixing Outcomes: Civic Epistemologies and Epistemic Agency in Participatory Governance of Climate Risk

Participatory forms of policy-making have often been criticized for insufficiently theorizing the coproduction of publics and matters of concern. This paper seeks to investigate this relationship further by analyzing how the concept of civic epistemologies (CEs) can provide insights for understanding how political contexts shape both publics and contestable debates. Presenting fieldwork on cyclone governance in Odisha, India, based on the analysis of interviews with vulnerable fishing communities and state actors, the article shows how CEs influence the interdependent formation of vulnerable fisher and state subjectivities on one hand with representations of risk located in external biophysical atmospheric gases on the other, thereby sustaining reductive roles and futures. At the same time, the paper develops the concept of CEs by examining them as performative acts carried out by marginalized communities and state actors at the subnational level of a nonindustrialized country, thereby indicating sites at which epistemic agency can be increased and governed. Participatory knowledge production needs to understand how it is affected by CEs if it is to generate effective expertise for transformative futures in the face of increasing climatic risks.

Aesthetic Understanding and Epistemic Agency in Art

Abstract Recently, cognitivist accounts about art have come under pressure to provide stronger arguments for the view that artworks can yield genuine insight and understanding. In Gregory Currie’s Imagining and Knowing: Learning from Fiction, for example, a convincing case is laid out to the effect that any knowledge gained from engaging with art must “be judged by the very standards that are used in assessing the claim of science to do the same” (Currie 2020: 8) if indeed it is to count as knowledge. Cognitivists must thus rally to provide sturdier grounds for their view. The revived interest in this philosophical discussion targets not only the concept of knowledge at the heart of cognitivist and anti-cognitivist debate, but also highlights a more specific question about how, exactly, some artworks can (arguably) afford cognitive import and change how we think about the world, ourselves and the many events, persons and situations we encounter. This paper seeks to explore some of the ways in which art is capable of altering our epistemic perspectives in ways that might count as knowledge despite circumventing some standards of evidential requirement. In so doing we will contrast two alternative conceptions of how we stand to learn from art. Whereas the former is modelled on the idea that knowledge is something that can be “extracted” from our experience of particular works of art, the latter relies on a notion of such understanding as primarily borne out of a different kind of engagement with art. We shall call this the subtractive conception and cumulative conception respectively. The cumulative conception, we shall argue, better explains why at least some insights and instances of knowledge gained from art seem to elude the evidential standards called for by sceptics of cognitivism.

Knowledge for Whom? Inviting Students to Establish an Audience for Knowledge and to Shape Knowledge Construction Activities in a Biology Course.

One main obstacle for instructors in inviting students to design knowledge construction is the tension between prioritizing students’ ideas and maintaining the scientific validity of the activity. In this study, as a way of supporting students in shaping their own knowledge construction, the establishment of an audience for knowledge was enacted in a knowledge construction activity in a biology course. Applying the multiple case study method, this study aimed to explore whether and how the establishment of an audience for knowledge can support students’ shaping of knowledge construction that is both scientifically valid and meaningful to students. The recordings of 26 student discussions and student-produced artifacts were analyzed as the main data sources. Student-created audiences and the epistemic features of knowledge construction processes were identified, and how the establishment of the audience did or did not support students’ knowledge construction was inferred. The analysis revealed that the students first explicated their epistemic goals by creating audiences as persons who hold students’ uncertainties and then designed processes to resolve these uncertainties. This indicates that the created audiences could explicate the object orientation of student activities, serving as the central axis in the students’ subsequent shaping of the process to construct knowledge that is meaningful to themselves. However, the activity had limited value in supporting the students’ plans for scientifically valid knowledge construction. The instructional strategies that are needed to support students in maintaining scientifically valid plans in practice are discussed. This study has pedagogical implications for the development of instructional strategies to support students’ epistemic agency as they engage in shaping their own knowledge construction.

Epistemic Justice as a Political Capability of Radicalised Youth in Europe: A Case of Knowledge Production with Local Researchers

ABSTRACT This article has sought to explain a research process where a senior researcher felt the need to form an alliance with local researchers in order to enable more authentic research with marginalised youngsters. The aim of this paper is to suggest a useful model demonstrating the focal role of the primary investigator in creating an inclusive and participatory setting to produce knowledge challenging epistemic injustices. By cooperating with novice researchers in the countries we study, our methodology recognised and fostered their epistemic agency. As knowledge mediators, they helped us access many self-identified Muslim youth and native youths who are labelled as far-right in Europe. In addition to emphasising the relevance of local setting in knowledge production, the paper will also question the epistemic injustice that these youngsters have been exposed to. Both groups have been clustered in two distinct categories by previous research that has been overwhelmingly engaged in the civilisational discourse that sets these groups apart in two culturally, religiously and civilisationally defined boxes. We believe that our participatory commitment to producing high-quality knowledge will be helpful in the scientific consideration of socio-economically, politically, spatially, and nostalgically deprived youths, who feel pressurised by the perils of modernisation and globalisation.

Conversational Epistemic Injustice: Extending the Insight from Testimonial Injustice to Speech Acts beyond Assertion

ABSTRACT Testimonial injustice occurs when hearers attribute speakers a credibility deficit because of an identity prejudice and consequently dismiss speakers’ testimonial assertions. Various philosophers explain testimonial injustice by appealing to interpersonal norms arising within testimonial exchanges. When conversational participants violate these interpersonal norms, they generate second-personal epistemic harms, harming speakers as epistemic agents. This focus on testimony, however, neglects how systematically misevaluating speakers’ knowledge affects conversational participants more generally. When hearers systematically misevaluate speakers’ conversational competence because of entrenched assumptions about what speakers know, I call these conversational epistemic injustices. I argue the same epistemic harm in testimonial injustice arises for non-assertoric speech acts, generating conversational epistemic injustices. For across speech acts, deflated knowledge attributions create second-personal harms that prevent speakers from using their knowledge in linguistic exchanges, limiting their epistemic agency. These harms however are not reducible to linguistic harms, (e.g.,) silencing or discursive injustice. This article applies insight from how second-personal epistemic harm arises in testimonial exchanges to conversational exchanges more generally, demonstrating that epistemic injustices arise beyond testimonial exchanges and contexts of inquiry because deflated knowledge attributions undermine general conversational norms requiring participants assume each other’s conversational competence, generating conversational epistemic injustices.

Correction to: Enhancing place‑based learning progression through epistemic agency: a response to toward a hypothetical place‑based learning progression for haze pollution in the Northern region of Thailand

Correction to: Enhancing place‑based learning progression through epistemic agency: a response to toward a hypothetical place‑based learning progression for haze pollution in the Northern region of Thailand

Fanon’s Decolonial Transcendence of Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT Coloniality continues to invade the psychomaterial lives of the condemned. Invoking psychoanalysis and phenomenology to engage with modern psychopathologies and race, gender, and sexuality, Fanon developed seminal ideas on social suffering in the context of colonial violence on psychic life. In reading Fanon, we discern two challenges: the decolonial transcendence of psychoanalysis as a theoretical framework, and the decolonial transcendence of psychoanalysis as a practice. These challenges are integral to the transcendence of disciplines and healing practices, and the requirement to develop a “multidimensional investigation” of human beings in the face of alterity and sociality in human reality. Fanon’s decolonial turn in psychoanalysis offers the makings of a decolonial and Fanonian oath for healing, of which decolonial love is a central principle. Our instantiation of transcendence of practice orients toward the provisions for a decolonial and Fanonian oath for healing, animated through epistemic agency, politico-affectivity, actional consciousness, and radical relationality.

Storyline Units: An Instructional Model to Support Coherence from the Students’ Perspective

ABSTRACT The vision of the Framework and NGSS requires important shifts in teaching approaches and instructional materials. We argue that this commitment to engaging learners in meaningful practice and supporting students’ epistemic agency entails that we support coherence from the students’ perspective. This coherence arises when students see their science work as making progress on questions and problems their classroom community has committed to address, rather than simply following directions from textbooks or teachers. We present an instructional model, storylines, to support this form of coherence. The storylines approach includes design principles for engaging students with phenomena and problems to elicit their own questions that teachers, with support of curriculum materials, use to guide the trajectory of their sensemaking. We describe how storylines organize cycles of engaging with phenomena, questions, and sensemaking to incrementally build, test, and revise explanatory models and design solutions. Storylines are supported by a collection of instructional routines and norms that provide strategies and tools to guide teachers’ work with students around phenomena, questions, and sensemaking. The routines reflect strategies for eliciting questions from anchoring phenomena, navigation to engage students as partners in managing the direction of investigations, problematizing to help students find gaps in their work so far, and putting pieces together to support students in assembling what they have figured out. We present examples from elementary, middle, and high school storyline-based units awarded the NGSS design badge to illustrate the application of these design principles in the design and enactment of storyline-based units.

“Absent Contrary Indication”: On a Pernicious Form of Epistemic Luck, and its Epistemic Agency Antidote

It is widely accepted that knowledge is incompatible with the presence of non-neutralized defeaters. A common way of addressing this issue is to introduce a condition to the effect that there are no non-neutralized defeaters for the belief that p (i.e. a “no-defeaters condition”). I argue that meeting this condition leaves open a possibility for defeaters to squander our knowledge. The no-defeaters condition can be fortuitously met, and as a result it can be met luckily. I shall argue that this kind of luck is inconsistent with knowledge. In order to prevent this pernicious form of luck I introduce a “defeaters-responsiveness” condition, according to which subjects ought to be disposed to adequately address defeaters if they were to arise (even if they in fact do not arise).

Engendering Students’ Epistemic Agency in a Mathematics Class at a University in South Africa

This article draws on the notion of epistemic agency to illustrate how the enactment of shared epistemic agency is enabled or hindered in a mathematics classroom for student teachers. I used data from an ethnographic study that was conducted in a third-year class of mathematics for educators. Data was drawn from verbal interactions that took place between mathematics student teachers, and between student teachers and myself as their lecturer, as they worked on class tasks. A narrative mode of analysing data was employed to synthesise data from critical incidents, while excerpts of these incidents represented data. From this analysis, I argue that, with extended wait time by a facilitator, students’ disposition of epistemic virtues and vices may enable or hinder enactment to epistemic agency, respectively. In article, those vices presented themselves as epistemic stinginess, prejudices against answers by peers and epistemic disclaimer. The epistemic virtues were presented as impartiality and intellectual courage. I further suggest that the recommended wait time of 1–3 during classroom questioning and answering should be extended for classes where epistemic practices are encouraged.