Epistemic Diversity Research Articles

Diversifying climate policy advice: Research agenda on the expertise of national climate councils

Understanding who influences climate policy and how expertise shapes decision-making is crucial in tackling climate change effectively. This perspective piece seeks to unravel the complexities of climate governance by reflecting on the role of experts in shaping climate policies. We suggest a new research agenda for studies on the representation and role of expertise in national climate institutions and in policymaking. With a shift towards national implementation, following the Paris Agreement, greater scholarly attention to the role of domestic institutions, including their scientific foundations, is crucial for our understanding of today's climate governance. Focusing on national climate councils, we debate the role of their expert composition and diversity of scientific expertise. We highlight the need for more research on the epistemic diversity and pay special attention to the role of social sciences, particularly the discipline's ability to address the political dimensions of climate action, such as equity, justice, and public acceptance.

Generative AI and epistemic diversity of its inputs and outputs: call for further scrutiny

Generative AI and epistemic diversity of its inputs and outputs: call for further scrutiny

Disputes over the figures of the COVID-19 pandemic: Epistemic diversity, dissemination of science, and political opposition.

The health policies imposed by multiple national governments after the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 were publicly justified by official figures on the deaths that the new virus would have caused and could cause in the future. At the same time, however, groups of people from different countries expressed their scepticism about those figures. Although they were categorised as 'anti-science', 'spreaders of misinformation' or 'conspiracy theorists' in some media, many of those sceptics claimed to be based on scientific evidence. This article qualitatively analyses a sample of the content published by sceptics on their social media between 2020 and 2022. More specifically, it examines the shared documents supposedly coming from the scientific community. We find very diverse content ranging from unsubstantiated assumptions to documents produced by prestigious scientists inviting questions about the fatality rates, the mathematical models anticipating millions of deaths, and the real numbers of people who died from COVID-19. The disputes surrounding the official figures lead us to a reflection about the relationship between, epistemic diversity, the dissemination of science, censorship, and new forms of political opposition. We also touch upon the nature and ethics of scientific controversy in times of a 'war' against 'misinformation'.

Virtual diversity: Resolving the tension between the wider culture and the institution of science.

There are widespread calls for increased demographic diversity in science, often linked to the epistemic claim that including more perspectives will improve the quality of the knowledge produced. By distinguishing between demographic and epistemic diversity, we show that this is only true some of the time. There are cases where increasing demographic diversity will not bring about the necessary epistemic diversity and cases where failing to exclude some voices reduces the quality of the scientific debate. We seek to resolve these tensions with an analysis that turns on the way the experience-based expertise of non-scientists can be absorbed into mainstream science. Mostly it has to be done via what we call 'virtual diversity', in which scientists take responsibility for acquiring interactional expertise in the non-scientific expertise-based domains which they consider provide knowledge valuable to the science. We argue that virtual diversity represents the only feasible option in most scenarios, with cases where demographic diversity or full cultural mergers provide the solution being the exception rather than the rule. This analysis is an exercise in the sociology of knowledge, which is considered as being continuous with philosophy. The paper is prescriptive as well as descriptive, and the moral, cultural, political, and educational implications of the argument are drawn out. A main conclusion is that the acquisition of virtual diversity should be a new norm for science, allowing the voices of experienced non-scientist citizens to be heard but without eroding the institution of science, which continues to be a vital foundation of truth in democracy.

Generative AI for Academic Publishing? Some Thoughts About Epistemic Diversity and the Pursuit of Truth

The uses of generative AI have prompted both positive and negative responses. This short commentary contemplates potential issues concerning bibliodiversity, epistemic diversity, and data surveillance. It also cautions the potential erosion of public trust in academic publishing in the age of generative AI. Invoking the Sokal hoax, the commentary sheds light on what it means when knowledge, experience, expertise, and the pursuit of truth are on the line. This commentary is part of the section "AI and Academic Publishing."

Will psychology ever ‘join hands’ with disability studies? Opportunities and challenges in working towards structurally competent and disability-affirmative psychotherapy for energy limiting conditions

Despite sustained efforts among critically informed scholars to integrate thinking from disability studies into psychology, the psy disciplines continue to largely neglect the lived experience of disabled people and overlook...

Justifying the position and implementation of English language education in Finland: ‘Circling around hot porridge’?

ABSTRACT This paper addresses ‘distractions’ in the way English language education is discussed and practiced in one of the most debated systems of education in the world today: Finnish primary education. Distractions are considered as ‘makers of disturbance’ in educational ideologies by the authors. Examining the 2014 National Core Curriculum and positionings in relation to languages available in schools through an inductive textual as well as a dialogical discourse analysis, this paper shows that English dominates Finnish primary education under the influence of different economic-political and global reasons. Contradictions around the values of, e.g. equality, justice and access to knowledge are identified. Focusing on ideologies (‘orders’, ‘agendas’ and ‘windscreens’), the polysemy and ‘fuzziness’ of many of these ‘unquestionable’ values and expected outcomes associated with both education and English are found to also represent major distractions in Finland. By urging pupils to focus on themselves, their ‘community’ and culture, the media and (marginally) the market, important problems posed by the omnipresence of English are ignored such as neo-colonialism and a lack of epistemic diversity. English also seems to be presented as ‘problem-free’, a-political, a mere tool for communication, thus reinforcing the status quo.

Colonial erasures in gender and climate change solutions

AbstractDespite deliberate moves to integrate gender with climate change solutions, efforts do not go far enough to account for coloniality, thus falling short of achieving feminist, just and transformative ends. Coloniality is a political blind spot and a systematic amnesia in climate policies and actions, despite being a key driver of climate change manifested through various forms of extractivism, economic growth, and hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge production. As a corrective and a pathway toward realizing a post/decolonial feminist climate praxis, I will disclose the colonial underpinnings in (i) a persistent gender binary and women‐centered approaches; (ii) white feminist epistemic privileging; and (iii) acquiescing to masculine Enlightenment‐inspired techno‐managerialism. Furthermore, disclosures of colonial erasures entail a foundational re‐evaluation of the climate change narrative from an isolated form of natural crisis to a phenomenon embedded in complex histories of colonialism, extractivism, and capitalist exploitation that threatens the intrinsic interdependence of nature and society and planetary survival. As a result, a post/decolonial feminist climate praxis then asks that we foster and restore this interdependence by institutionalizing an ethics of socioecological care, acknowledging epistemic diversity through embodied knowledge, and carrying out intersectional justice.This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Climate Change and Global Justice Climate and Development > Sustainability and Human Well‐Being Climate and Development > Social Justice and the Politics of Development

Understanding the Epistemic Diversity and Essential Components of the Grounded Theory Method: Empowering Human Resource Development Researchers

This article addresses the challenges faced by HRD researchers in selecting a qualitative approach, particularly Grounded Theory Method (GTM), which is underrepresented in the field. The author discusses the epistemological foundations of the four major GTM versions and outlines the six essential elements. The article emphasizes GTM’s flexible yet structured nature and explains differences among Glaserian, Straussian, Charmazian, and Clarkean methods. It also summarizes common GTM features like concurrent data collection, constant comparison, theoretical sampling, phased coding, memoing, and theoretical saturation. The article concludes by providing suggestions to promote GTM’s adoption and popularization. In essence, this article offers guidelines to assist HRD researchers, especially newcomers or those with limited qualitative research experience, in understanding and effectively using GTM.

Responsible assessment of what research? Beware of epistemic diversity!

Schönbrodt et al. (2022) and Gärtner et al. (2022) aim to outline in the target articles why and how research assessment could be improved in psychological science in accordance with DORA, resulting in a focus on abandoning the impact factor as an indicator for research quality and aligning assessment with methodological rigor and open science practices. However, I argue that their attempt is guided by a rather narrow statistical and quantitative understanding of knowledge production in psychological science. Consequently, the authors neglect the epistemic diversity within psychological science, leading to the potential danger of committing epistemic injustice. Hence, the criteria they introduce for research assessment might be appropriate for some approaches to knowledge production; it could, however, neglect or systematically disadvantage others. Furthermore, I claim that the authors lack some epistemic (intellectual) humility about their proposal. Further information is required regarding when and for which approaches their proposal is appropriate and, maybe even more importantly, when and where it is not. Similarly, a lot of the proposed improvements of the reform movement, like the one introduced in the target articles, are probably nothing more than trial and error due to a lack of investigation of their epistemic usefulness and understanding of underlying mechanisms and theories. Finally, I argue that with more awareness about epistemic diversity in psychological science in combination with more epistemic (intellectual) humility, the danger of epistemic injustice could be attenuated.

Epistemic Diversity and Epistemic Advantage: A Comparison of Two Causal Theories in Feminist Epistemology

AbstractFeminist epistemology aims to propose epistemic reasons for increasing the representation of women or socially subordinated people in science. This is typically done—albeit often only implicitly—by positing a causal mechanism through which the representation of sociodemographic minorities exerts a positive effect on scientific advancement. Two types of causal theories can be identified. The “epistemic diversity thesis” presents a causal path from sociodemographic diversity to scientific progress mediated by epistemic diversity. The “thesis of epistemic advantage” proposes a causal path from social subjugation to capacity for inquiry. The latter theory is defined with substantial ambiguity in the existing literature, and I present an explicit causal reformulation that disambiguates it. The epistemic diversity thesis focuses on the effect of group composition on collective epistemic performance and is largely silent about what kind of characteristics lead to individual epistemic excellence. On the other hand, the thesis of epistemic advantage seeks to identify sociodemographic background conditions that make certain epistemic agents strictly better knowers or inquirers than others and pays little attention to the synergistic effects of diverse group composition. Such a difference in the causal structure reflects the diverging political characteristics of the two theories.

Beyond the Human

Building upon recent studies in new materialisms and feminist critical posthumanism with a focus on human and more-than-human relationships, this paper examines how the posthuman paradigm, by postulating the queering of identit(ies) via entanglement with the more-than-human (including technology), and by offering a critical examination of diverse modes of existence within a broader ecological context, can foster more inclusive and ethically sound ways of being in the world. Although posthumanism encompasses a wide range of perspectives and theories, including transhumanism, at its core, it challenges traditional notions of humanism, blurring the boundaries between what is human and what is more-than-human, while calling for a revaluation of anthropocentric, onto-epistemological, and ethical frameworks. This paper mobilises the framework and methodology of composting-with-care as an analytical tool to foster epistemic diversity, from quantum field theory to speculative fabulation, in the examination of the issue concerning human identity. It concludes by proposing a view where the self is not confined to the individual human but emerges through interactions (and intra-actions) with the world(s) of which the human is part, acknowledging the agency and influence of actors beyond the human on identity formation.

Situational Analysis in Accounting Research

Objective: Revise and illustrate the Situational Analysis (SA) method and its theoretical and procedural assumptions to enable novel inductive inquiry in accounting studies.
 Method: We develop a theoretical essay on SA advances Grounded Theory, addressing the challenges of social life in the postmodern world. The essay focus on how accounting researchers can explore SA in diverse projects, especially those requiring multiple data about a particular phenomenon, allowing researchers to integrate action in different contexts. SA’s analytical stance is structured through maps, embracing the notion of empirical evidence to promote epistemic diversity and multivocality and recognize the importance of non-human elements in structuring social relations.
 Results: The paper presents an analytical alternative that is not limited to the micro, meso, or macro levels of events. Facing complexities, it provides relational views of ecologies of situations, repositioning research in individual, collective and discursive ways. With SA, a researcher can develop novel inquiry that challenges the status quo and unexplored facets of complex situations.
 Contributions: The paper explores and illustrates the potential of a qualitative method not yet familiar to accounting researchers, bridging the gap between post-modern perspectives on discourse and investigation of agency on complex phenomena involving accounting concepts and mechanisms.

Amartya Sen, Karl Polanyi, and Universal Basic Income

ABSTRACT This paper develops a Polanyian capabilitarian framework to understand and justify the universal basic income. I combine Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach with Karl Polanyi’s substantive view of economy to mount a normative case for basic income. Using this approach, I also ground the basic income debate in a relational ontology, the idea that the self and society are mutually constituted. By doing so, I problematise hegemonic assumptions underlying much of the basic income discourse and call for ontological and epistemic diversity. The paper both provides a critique of individualist ontology and offers an affirmative modification centred on relationality and interdependence.

Distrusting Consensus

Although the institutional model of science communication operated well during the corona-pandemic, and relevant public institutions (media, science, politics) garnered higher levels of trust following “rally-around-the-flag” dynamics, other people would develop distrusts towards those institutions and the emerging orthodox corona narrative. Their ideas are often framed as conspiracy theories, and today’s globalized media eco-system enables their proliferation. This looming “infodemic” became a prime object of concern. In this article I agnostically study those distrusts from a cultural sociological perspective to better understand how and why people (came to) disbelieve official knowledge and their producers. To do so, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in the off- and online worlds of people labeled as conspiracy theorists in the Netherlands, which includes the media they consume, share and produce. Based on an inductive analysis of people’s own sense-making, I present three dominant reasons: media’s panicky narrative of fear and mayhem; governments sole focus on lockdowns and vaccines; and the exclusion of heterodox scientific perspectives in the public sphere. Each of these reasons problematize a perceived orthodoxy in media, politics and science, and this uniformity bred suspicion about possible conspiracies between these public institutions. Too much consensus gets distrusted. While we can discard those ideas as irrational conspiracy theories, I conclude that these findings have important implications for the way we deal with and communicate about complex societal problems. Next to keeping things simple and clear, as crisis/risk/science communication holds, we need to allow for uncertainty, critique and epistemic diversity as well.

Interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation among out‐of‐field and in‐field physics teachers

AbstractOut‐of‐field teaching is a global educational challenge. In particular, many teachers whose academic background and main teaching experience is in biology are called to teach middle school physics and have limited opportunities for productive professional development. Based on previous studies, we expect these teachers to hold different epistemic cognitions from the in‐field teachers. The present study builds on this epistemic diversity and offers dialogic argumentation as a means to promote mutual learning among physics teachers from different disciplinary backgrounds. We describe guidelines for designing interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation activities that aim to encourage teachers to express their disciplinary perspectives in the context of inquiry‐based physics and to facilitate a deliberative discourse among them. We demonstrate in a case study the ways in which the discourse of a group of in‐field and out‐of‐field teachers unfolds under the proposed design guidelines. Using the Actor‐Network methodology and an analysis of power relations, we uncover a complex interplay between the social and the epistemic in the discourse: when interactions become more dialogic and power relations more equalized, the out‐of‐field teachers take an active role in the discussion, foregrounding their epistemic practices and enhancing the epistemic practices of the group, including the in‐field teacher.

Towards epistemic diversity in sustainability transitions: an exploration of hybrid socio-technical systems

A wealth of scholarly work has contributed to make visible and describe the place of indigenous peoples and knowledge in sustainability transitions. We follow suit, exploring if, and how, indigenous peoples and knowledges take part in the construction of hybrid socio-technical systems, i.e. socio-technical systems where heterogeneous knowledges already coexist and give rise to the emergence of specific and nuanced socio-technical patterns. We address the question: What are the types of interaction between techno-scientific and indigenous/local knowledges in socio-technical configurations aiming at sustainability? Our inquiry focuses on knowledge circulation patterns in hybrid socio-technical systems. Conceptually, we build on epistemic diversity and hybridisation as means to reflect on socio-technical systems. Empirically, we carry on a theory-driven literature review and ground a model on the backdrop of the MLP perspective. Results show that hybrid socio-technical systems present overlapping socio-technical assemblages coexisting in constructive tension. Such tension stems from the manyfold possible directionalities that take place in the social production of hybrid-oriented and non-hybrid-oriented performativity of knowledges. This paradoxical nature implies that each encounter performs a potential tension within the broader web of relations in the system. In terms of sustainability transitions, hybrid socio-technical systems pose particular knowledge governance challenges. Its paradoxical nature risks enabling contradictory, non-viable or illegitimate transition pathways towards sustainability.

How should the non-Indigenous speak? A discussion of decolonizing academia, positioning, and freedom of speech

ABSTRACT How can we engage in Indigenous research that allows multiple perspectives and knowledge production that is open to epistemic diversity? Answering calls for decolonization of the academy and the need for researchers to do their homework, I use my position as an ‘inbetweener’ in a Sámi, Indigenous context, experiences with peer reviewers as gatekeepers, and theoretical and methodological discussions about Indigenous research, to reflect upon this question. The review processes are seldomly discussed, although reviewers have the power to decide whether research gets published or not. Questions remain on how research should be carried out and who can speak, especially in a Sámi-Norwegian context where Indigenous identity and being Sámi or not by no means are easy questions, due to colonialism and Norwegianization processes. There is confusion regarding how to do research, and what positioning means. I argue that Indigenous methodology raises a dilemma because it one the one hand offers criticism of previous western, ‘dirty’ research, urging non-Indigenous researchers to involve and ‘do their homework’, while simultaneously emphasizing that research should be done by and for Indigenous peoples, with their worldviews as a starting point. Discussions on positionality show that the outsider/insider dichotomy is problematic and that for some scholars, being Indigenous is a precondition for doing valid and important research. Non-Indigenous researchers may be associated with a colonial sin, or shame. Being morally inferior, I argue, makes it difficult for the researcher both to involve, and to have critical approaches. Doing homework should involve being able, and allowed, to engage with Indigenous peoples and societies and go beyond the colonial gaze coloured by the us/them, and victim/sinner dichotomies. Secondly, I also call upon universities, that are now institutionalizing Indigenous perspectives, to take responsibility and offer support to the individual researchers in their struggle to ‘do things right’.

The epistemologies of the South and the future of the university

AbstractEven though the university has the potential to help humanity in what amounts to a paradigmatic transition, it has been very restrictive and very selective in the kinds of knowledges it validates. In fact, the kinds of knowledges in which it has excelled are those most responsible for the paradigmatic crisis in which humanity finds itself. In a nutshell, the paradigmatic change calls for cognitive justice, justice for the different ways of knowing that circulate in society. Cognitive justice is the polar opposite of ‘anything goes’. The assumption is that there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice, justice among knowledges. Looking back, while privileging one specific kind of knowledge and, indeed, granting it a cognitive monopoly, the university has been the privileged site for producing and legitimating cognitive injustice. As a result, the immense epistemic diversity of the world has been ignored or suppressed. In the following, I identify the problem and the promise for overcoming it.

Rethinking Ignorance Through Confucianism and Daoism: Propriety, Transcendence, and Their Educational Implications

Purpose Ignorance has been seen as negative in the mainstream philosophical narrative and knowledge-based society. This study introduces Chinese epistemic traditions of Confucianism and Daoism as resources to reunderstand ignorance and current educational issues. Design/Approach/Methods Guided by hermeneutic openness, this study fuses ancient epistemic and modern educational horizons by reinterpreting early Confucian and Daoist classics. Findings The boundary between ignorance and knowledge is flexible and blurry in Confucianism and Daoism, and ignorance is distinctively understood as Confucian admissible propriety and Daoist transcendence of conventional knowledge. Rooted in these epistemologies, Confucianism and Daoism have developed unique educational ideas and forms— congyou (从游) and zuowang (坐忘)—which advocate moral socialization and self-reflexivity beyond knowing through language. These traditions inspire today's educators and learners to find more space for self-formation, appropriate forgetting, and illuminating intuition in education. Originality/Value As an initial exploration, this study examines potential nonnegative ignorance and its educational implications in Confucian and Daoist wisdom. The findings are instructive for rethinking today's knowledge-based society and the text-oriented education of Chinese culture and can contribute to world epistemic diversity and cultural interactions.