Epistemic Cultures Research Articles

Decolonizing health care: Challenges of cultural and epistemic pluralism in medical decision-making with Indigenous communities.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada made it clear that understanding the historical, social, cultural, and political landscape that shapes the relationships between Indigenous peoples and social institutions, including the health care system, is crucial to achieving social justice. How to translate this recognition into more equitable health policy and practice remains a challenge. In particular, there is limited understanding of ways to respond to situations in which conventional practices mandated by the state and regulated by its legal apparatus come into direct conflict with the values and autonomy of Indigenous individuals, communities, and nations. In this paper, we consider two cases of conflict between Indigenous and biomedical perspectives to clarify some of the competing values. We argue for the importance of person- and people-centered approaches to health care. These value conflicts must be understood at multiple levels to clarify their personal, social, cultural, and political dimensions. Taking into account the divergence between epistemic cultures and communities allows us to understand the multiple narratives deployed in decision-making processes in clinical, community, and juridical contexts. Recognizing the knowledge claims of Indigenous peoples in health care can help clinicians avoid reinforcing the divides created by the structural and institutional legacy of colonialism. This analysis also provides ways to adjudicate conflicts in health care decision-making by disentangling cultural, political, medical, and pragmatic issues to allow for respectful dialogue. Insofar as the engagement with cultural pluralism in health care rights is conducted with reciprocal recognition, the medical community and Indigenous peoples can address together the difficult question of how to integrate different epistemic cultures in the health care system.

‘They are all dead that I could ask’: Indigenous Innovation and the Micropolitics of the Field in Twentieth-century Southern Africa

Recovering the agency, skill and innovation of archaeological field assistants from historical encounters is essential to interrogating processes of knowledge production, but is often hampered by access to appropriate archival sources and methods. We detail a field project from early twentieth-century Basutoland (modern-day Lesotho) that is unique both for its aim to salvage details of rock-art production as a dying craft and for its archive chronicling the project's intellectual journey from experiment to draft manuscripts to published work over more than three decades. We argue that critical historiographic attention to this archive offers a guide for examining the intimate dynamics of fieldwork and the effects of these micropolitics on the archaeological canon. We demonstrate how sustained attention to long processes of knowledge production can pinpoint multiple instances in which the usability of field assistants’ scientific knowledge is qualified, validated, or rejected, and in this case how an African assistant is transformed into an ethnographic interlocutor. For rock-art studies especially, this represents a need for interrogating the epistemic cultures—not just the content—of foundational historical data.

Organisational and professional hierarchies in a data management system: public–private collaborative building of public healthcare and social services in Finland

ABSTRACT Nordic countries are considered international leaders in producing combinable data on their citizens’ encounters with public institutions, as well as the digitalisation of public services. Public-sector professionals increasingly collaborate with private IT companies in developing data analytics products for cost saving and cost-efficiency. This article presents the results of a two-year ethnographic study of a collaboration between the Knowledge Team of a public-sector organisation and a private-sector IT company for developing and maintaining a data management system in one Finnish regional healthcare and social service organisation. The data management system is defined as a data analytics product that provides management with information about clinical and financial aspects of organisation management. We combine perspectives of science and technology studies and the sociology of professions to situate our research on the data management system as a boundary object within the broader context of professional work. Via our theoretical framework, we examine the negotiation process through which the data management system becomes a boundary object in practice. This process includes not only the accommodation of diverse epistemic cultures but also organisational and professional hierarchies that empower some experts to shape the data management system towards their visions and interests. This article applies the ‘boundary object’ concept to elucidate structural power differentials in public–private partnerships and multi-professional collaborations.

Exploring the Gray Area: Similarities and Differences in Questionable Research Practices (QRPs) Across Main Areas of Research.

This paper explores the gray area of questionable research practices (QRPs) between responsible conduct of research and severe research misconduct in the form of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism (Steneck in SEE 12(1): 53-57, 2006). Up until now, we have had very little knowledge of disciplinary similarities and differences in QRPs. The paper is the first systematic account of variances and similarities. It reports on the findings of a comprehensive study comprising 22 focus groups on practices and perceptions of QRPs across main areas of research. The paper supports the relevance of the idea of epistemic cultures (Knorr Cetina in: Epistemic cultures: how the sciences make knowledge, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1999), also when it comes to QRPs. It shows which QRPs researchers from different areas of research (humanities, social sciences, medical sciences, natural sciences, and technical sciences) report as the most severe and prevalent within their fields. Furthermore, it shows where in the research process these self-reported QRPs can be found. This is done by using a five-phase analytical model of the research process (idea generation, research design, data collection, data analysis, scientific publication and reporting). The paper shows that QRPs are closely connected to the distinct research practices within the different areas of research. Many QRPs can therefore only be found within one area of research, and QRPs that cut across main areas often cover relatively different practices. In a few cases, QRPs in one area are considered good research practice in another.

Digital humanities, knowledge complexity, and the five ‘aporias’ of digital research

AbstractThis article introduces a frame of reference for understanding the fundamental challenges that inform digital humanities as an interdisciplinary research area between arts, humanities, information, and computer science. Its conclusions are based upon the evidence base developed within an EU-funded collaboration known as Knowledge Complexity, or KPLEX for short (www.kplex-project.eu), in particular via the project’s thirty-eight linked interviews about big data research. When viewed from the perspective of the digital humanities, five distinct points of ‘aporia’ with a significant impact on digital humanities (DH) appear in this corpus, places where the interviewees explicitly or tacitly expose gulfs between the epistemic cultures that contribute to DH and that create tensions between these disciplines, even as they seek to collaborate. This article will explore these areas of apparent irreconcilability, and conclude with a series of reflections on how digital humanities researchers might build upon their unique competency profile to negotiate within these critical conversations, in particular in the framework of the emerging subfield of critical digital humanities.

The Production of Epistemic Culture and Agency during a First-Grade Engineering Design Unit in an Urban Emergent School

Primary school practices are often bound by traditions that perpetuate compliance and skills-based, decontextualized, rote memorization activities. These histories of practice, prevalent in schools serving mostly Black and Brown children, make it inordinately difficult for students to author themselves as knowledge builders (i.e., with epistemic agency), which is a form of injustice. Engineering is a potentially fertile context to support the creation of epistemic culture, whereby young students’ assets are recognized, named, and leveraged as they create and shape the group’s disciplinary knowledge. The authors investigated this potential. The primary research question was: How do first-grade students in an urban emergent school author themselves as epistemic agents during an engineering design unit? Using a social practice theory lens and ethnographic methods, the authors studied 29 days of a materials engineering unit focusing on the teacher’s epistemic commitments, implicit meanings of knowledge in classroom discourse, and practices that opened space for students’ epistemic agency. Data collection included fieldnotes and video of class activities and teacher and student interviews. Class discussions about the properties and uses of materials yielded a rich context for studying epistemic culture. The teacher’s epistemic commitments included an eschewing of disciplinary silos, recognizing the nonlinear nature of knowledge-building about engineering, and acknowledging children’s thinking as an asset for engineering knowledge production. Examples of students’ discursive moves demonstrating epistemic agency included: reminding others about the relevance of previous lessons to the current topic, mirroring the teacher’s instructional moves, claiming voice, space, time, and material resources for knowledge-building, translating one another’s ideas, and making unsolicited connections to their lives. Young children’s intellectual assets can too easily be overlooked in traditional learning contexts. This study demonstrates the affordances of responsive engineering instruction in recognizing and building on youths’ intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm for substantively contributing to the classroom’s knowledge-generating practices.

Are Theories Politically Flexible?

Social theories are politically flexible if people use them to support opposite political claims. But is this even possible? And what kind of theories have such a property? Moving beyond epistemological debates about neutrality and value-leadenness, this article defends an empirical approach to the study of flexible and rigid political uses of social theories. I identify two main sources of flexibility: endogenous properties of theories, notably their generality, ambiguity, and neutrality, and exogenous features of the contexts in which they are used and of the individuals who use them, notably differences in political and epistemic culture.

Epistemic Transformation at the Margins: Resistance to Digitalisation and Datafication within Global Human Rights Advocacy

ABSTRACT A post-human “transformation thesis” has emerged which posits that global politics is being radically altered by digital technologies and datafication. There is a polemical tendency to generalise about macro-level revolutions in both the techniques of governance and knowledge production across different political spheres, ranging from international security to development, humanitarianism and human rights. By instead applying a meso-level lens on global politics, this article cautions against excessive generalisations about epistemic transformations. It does so by emphasising the ways in which technological changes are mediated through field-specific struggles. This point is illustrated by demonstrating the absence of a radical data revolution within the field of global human rights advocacy. Through a sociological analysis of leading human rights NGOs and their epistemic cultures, it shows how that the field's humanistic sub-culture limits the adoption of novel digital- and data-centric practices.

НЕЙРОЭПИСТЕМОЛОГИЯ КАК ОБЛАСТЬ КОГНИТИВНОЙ ФИЛОСОФИИ И ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ ЗНАНИЯ

The article presents the results of an analysis of the concept of neuroepistemology, the history of its formation, the methods of determining its object and characteristics of possible methodological solutions. To achieve this aim, two specific objectives have been mapped out: to consider the evolution of the conception of neuroepistemology in the context of the history of science and philosophy; and to systematize the existing ideas about neuroepistemology, its object, methods and characteristics. The main result of the research is that, despite the forty-year history of neuroepistemological projects, this term is each time constructed anew. Different interpretations are not compared to each other, and the authors rarely refer to the history of the concept, continuing to fill it with new contradictory meanings. This conclusion follows from the examination of thematic publications on neuroepistemology in English, Russian, and mainly in German, due to the high number of references to neuroepistemology in German-language cognitive philosophy (E. Ozer, F. Seitelberger, K. Vogeley, M. Peschl). If we attribute the earliest attempts to synthesize philosophical and biological approaches to knowledge (F. Nietzsche, K. Lorenz, U. Maturana, F. Varela) to presuppositions of neuroepistemology and start with the mentions of the word “neuroepistemology”, we find three relevant interpretations of the concept. The first (probably presented by John Hughlings Jackson) treats neuroepistemology as a research of epistemic communities of producers of neuroscientific knowledge. The object of such research is epistemic culture (K.K. Cetina), and the research aims can be achieved by the methods of the philosophy of science, the sociology of knowledge, and epistemology. The second interpretation of neuroepistemology (P.S. Churchland) concerns the use of neuroscientific methodologies to address issues of knowledge. These studies are an attempt to answer the question of how a person knows, using all the possible tools of the brain studies (the research of concept cells is a relevant example). The third interpretation (E. Ozer) begins with the consistent naturalization of the theory of knowledge in the 1980s and insists on finding its own methods or, in extreme cases, on its own ways of integrating particular methods of neuroscience and epistemology. The article describes the principles and rules of such neuroepistemological reasoning, its features and methodological perspectives.

Turbulent Waters in Three Parts

While scientific accounts of ocean dynamics draw public attention to the turbulence of earthly matter, the science alone tells a truncated story. The ocean's turbulent materiality is more than material: practices of scientific knowledge and historically embedded meanings and metaphors also constitute how we know, understand, and attempt to govern ocean and land alike. Indeed, planetary ocean science is always located within a history and politics, embedded within Western epistemic structures and tied to extraction and colonialism. Additionally, as ocean ecologies and human food systems are recognized as ever more fragile and as the ocean increasingly is understood as up for grabs as a site of investment, extraction, and production, there is much at stake in how and where we locate the turbulence of marine systems. In this essay, we invite turbulence into our writing practices by bringing together three perspectives on the complex relationship between metaphor and materiality with regard to oceanic worlds. Each co-author writes on the ocean from a different perspective: the lines and laws of the ocean (Steinberg); the governance and epistemic cultures of ocean life (Johnson); and practices of marine historical knowledge production (Lehman). Throughout this essay we experiment with bringing those perspectives together to consider how turbulence matters differently when read through different lineages of theory and ocean scholarship: How do legal infrastructures, scientific apparatuses, human histories, and marine lifeforms tell different stories of the ocean and its processes? We further consider how thinking across our different projects might bring to light not only the turbulence of ocean matter, but also practices of knowledge production and meaning as we envision various futures of and with the ocean.

Seeing in the Dark: of Epistemic Culture and Abhidharma in the Long Fifth Century C.E.

Seeing in the Dark: of Epistemic Culture and Abhidharma in the Long Fifth Century C.E.

Maths in the time of social media: conceptualizing the Internet phenomenon of mathematical memes

ABSTRACT Mathematical memes are an Internet phenomenon with an epistemic potential noteworthy for the teaching and learning of mathematics. The aim of this paper is to conceptualize this phenomenon on an empirical base, elucidating its educational potential. To pursue this goal, a two-year ethnographic research study has been conducted in a selection of social media communities that exchange mathematical memes. In the paper, a twofold theoretical lens is used to investigate the phenomenon from a memetic perspective focused on the general characteristics of Internet memes, and from a cultural perspective considering the Web 2.0 environment. Analysis tools derived from the memetic and cultural theoretical background are applied to an instrumental case study, to reconstruct how mathematical memes activate the interaction among members of an online community. The investigation elicits key characteristics of the phenomenon, provides grounds to conceptualize mathematical memes as hybrid representations of mathematical statements, and sheds light on the traits of the epistemic culture they establish in the community.

Attaining the Stable Movement of Knowledge Objects through the Swedish Criminal Justice System

This article thinks with infrastructure about the stable movement of knowledge objects such as crime scene reports, traces, and order forms through the Swedish criminal justice system. Infrastructures span different communities and borders; the criminal justice system is made up of necessarily disparate epistemic cultures. Thus, they share a central concern: Both aim for stable movement from one context to another. Thinking with infrastructure, the article argues, makes it possible to widen analytical focus and capture the structures and the continuous work that resolve the tension between different sites and thus enable the stable movement of knowledge objects. Using sensibilities from infrastructure studies– for the resolution of tensions, for continuous maintenance, and for inequalities – the article argues that the criminal justice system enacts the knowledge objects’ stability across epistemic cultures. In other words, the stable movement of evidence-to-be through the Swedish criminal justice system is the result of infrastructuring, that is, of its continuous creating of conditions that facilitate movement and create and re-create stability. This perspective may be useful for studying the movement of knowledge also in other contexts.

The Document as Epistemic Object: Notes on Archival Knowledge Cultures

AbstractThis article strategically resituates scholarly engagement with archival documents within the media ecology and the epistemic culture that sustains literary and cultural studies, noting affinities between historical and contemporary configurations as well as between theoretical and medial-material dimensions of archives. Based on current debates on the growing relevance of archival documents in American Studies and adjacent fields, it stakes out a framework that leans on recent work in a small branch of contemporary literary theory focused on historical epistemology, especially with regard to the notion of ‘epistemic objects’. Engaging these theoretical concerns, the article discusses concrete archival collections and documents, including letters by the novelist Willa Cather and items from a capacious archive documenting the emergence and evolution of Andrew Carnegie’s public library philanthropy. I outline several ways in which the shape and the aesthetics of such archives embody the information economies and epistemic situations of the past – in this case, the formative period around 1900. Finally, the article addresses the digital document overload that confronts the contemporary researcher and comments on the emerging archival knowledge culture of today’s humanities.

The epistemic politics of ‘academography’: navigating competing representations of Africa’s university futures

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the epistemic politics at work in radically contrasting academic representations of African university futures. Euro-American policy entrepreneurs and research funders call for major investments in Africa’s scientific research training capacity to strengthen the continent’s integration into a global knowledge system. Meanwhile, African social scientists and humanities scholars critique the epistemological hegemony of ‘Western’ models of the academy, and call for the decolonisation of African universities. This paper sets out a three-step approach to dealing with the politicisation of ‘academography’ (Thorkelson 2016) in this decolonial moment. The first step is to acknowledge how epistemic power relations shape all analytical moves. The second is to recognise that ‘generative antagonisms’ (Burawoy 2004) are inherent to disciplinary knowledge production. The third is to develop an ethnographic sensitivity to everyday academic practice within these institutional worlds and epistemic cultures. Together these moves offer space for dialogue between different visions of African higher education.

Narrating arts education research impact in and through research policy: affordances and constraints for professional transformation

Governments and funding agencies increasingly expect researchers to demonstrate the impact of their work not only within the academy but also for a range of stakeholders beyond academia. Whilst arts researchers have tended to resist impact measurement, in this article, we will describe one form of demonstrating impact, namely through writing impact narratives in order to argue that such writing can be effective in promoting learning and reflection on the researcher’s work in the society. We provide collaborative autoethnographic narrative accounts of our experiences as arts education researchers, located in Australia and Finland, of developing research impact narratives and consider the ways in which the development of impact narratives can shape researcher identities, research processes and epistemic cultures of disciplines. We suggest that impact narratives are inevitably retrospective but may also be future-oriented in the ways in which they structure ongoing research processes and future projects and their activities providing a space for ‘narrative learning’ and professional transformation. We also suggest that arts educators experiment with and explore the potential for narrative impact statements to inform and engage society beyond academia with research findings and outcomes.

Epistemic virtues and data-driven dreams: On sameness and difference in the epistemic cultures of data science and psychiatry.

Data science and psychiatry have diverse epistemic cultures that come together in data-driven initiatives (e.g., big data, machine learning). The literature on these initiatives seems to either downplay or overemphasize epistemic differences between the fields. In this paper, we study the convergence and divergence of the epistemic cultures of data science and psychiatry. This approach is more likely to capture where and how the cultures differ and gives insights into how practitioners from both fields find ways to work together despite their differences. We introduce the notions of "epistemic virtues" to focus on epistemic differences ethnographically, and "trading zones" to concentrate on how differences are negotiated. This leads us to the following research question: how are epistemic differences negotiated by data science and psychiatry practitioners in a hospital-based data-driven initiative? Our results are based on an ethnographic study in which we observed a Dutch psychiatric hospital department developing prediction models of patient outcomes based on machine learning techniques (September 2017 - February 2018). Many epistemic virtues needed to be negotiated, such as completeness or selectivity in data inclusion. These differences were traded locally and temporarily, stimulated by shared epistemic virtues (such as a systematic approach), boundary objects and socialization processes. Trading became difficult when virtues were too diverse, differences were enlarged by storytelling and parties did not have the time or capacity to learn about the other. In the discussion, we argue that our combined theoretical framework offers a fresh way to study how cooperation between diverse practitioners goes and where it can be improved. We make a call for bringing epistemic differences into the open as this makes a grounded discussion possible about the added value of data-driven initiatives and the role they can play in healthcare.

Barriers to creating a science of the art of teaching via Participative Action Research; learning from the tribulations of Lesson Study in different epistemic cultures

ABSTRACT The question of how to create a common framework for teaching (a science of the art of teaching) has often been a topic of discussion. As a result of Lesson Study, such a framework has emerged in Japan for science education. Outside Japan, however, creating a common framework for teaching has appeared to be far from easy. This article focuses on two cases in which Lesson Study outside Japan was (tacitly) transformed in such a way that the focus of research changed from a classroom level to a meta-level. The analysis relates the transformation to the epistemic culture outside Japan, where, at most education faculties, conducting research is separated from practicing the craft of teaching in mandatory education. This epistemology encourages research about teachers rather than for teachers. As a result, the development of a common framework for teaching is overshadowed. Based on the tribulations of Lesson Study, this article draws conclusions which could foster a habitat for participative action research that can contribute to teaching becoming a true profession.

Scaling up and rolling out through the Web

The purpose of this paper is to investigate online public participation and engagement in science through crowdsourcing platforms. In order to fulfil this purpose, this paper will use the crowdsourcing platform Zooniverse as a case study, as it constitutes the most prominent and established citizen science platform today. The point of departure for the analysis is that Zooniverse can be seen as a “platformization” of citizen science and scientific citizenship. The paper suggests that the mobilisation of individuals who participate and engage in science on the Zooniverse platform takes place through an epistemic culture that emphasises both authenticity and prospects of novel discoveries. Yet, in the process of turning “raw” data into useable data, Zooniverse has implemented a framework that structures the crowd, something that limits the sort of participation that is offered on the platform. This limitation means that the platform as a whole hardly be seen as fostering a more radical democratic inclusion, for example in the form of a co-production of scientific knowledge, that dissolves the institutional borders between scientists and non-professional volunteers.

The epistemic culture of the OECD and its agenda for higher education

ABSTRACT The rise of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as a global actor has been attributed to its capacity to create and redefine the boundaries of knowledge through powerful discursive concepts, such as the idea of a knowledge economy. The organisation’s reviews, forecasts and statistics have been perceived as producing multifarious effects within and beyond its member countries while shaping the perceptions of policy alternatives or lack thereof. The shared views and arrangements of knowledge creation within the organisation, from which the organisation produces its artefacts, have nevertheless received minor attention. This article approaches the OECD and its agenda for higher education from the perspective of organisational cultures and knowledge creation within organisations. The article investigates the changes that have taken place in the OECD and its higher education agenda. Moreover, it examines whether any dominant narratives on higher education emerge from the interview data and the OECD reports, and if so, what their differing or opposing narratives are. Lastly, the article aims to understand the dynamics of the changes by analysing whether an epistemic culture exists within the OECD, and if so, what kind of culture it is.