Epistemic Frame Research Articles

Decolonizing the Academic Study of Science and Religion? Engaging Wynter’s Epistemic Disobedience

With roots in the early 1960s, decoloniality as a sub-sect of postcolonial studies made successful attempts at redefining and unearthing essentially Western conceptualizations of knowledge and knowledge formation across different fields of endeavor. Many academic disciplines have benefited from decolonial studies’ self-reflective theories and deconstructive approaches, and religion and science should not be an exception. Within religion and science as an academic field, Western and European intellectual frames have been overwhelmingly presented as definitive of globalized perspectives and knowledge, especially the definition of “religion” and “science” within the academic field. The subtle but evident impact of adopting Western epistemology as ‘the’ definitive reference frame for all peoples and cultures is the transposition of colonial and overtly Eurocentric conceptualizations and definitions of what religion and science mean as perfunctory for what religion and science should mean within non-Western frames as well as a disregard for the latter. This has led to the presentation (or overrepresentation, according to Sylvia Wynter) of a single homogenized perspective for meaning-making and interpretation of topics and themes within the field, a decision which has not only significantly impacted the field, in terms of ongoing dialectics about the relationship between religion and science, but which has also seen the exclusion of other forms of beneficial epistemic reference frames, which have been viewed as subaltern. Drawing from Wynter’s epistemic disobedience, this paper highlights decolonial approaches for engaging in the academic study of science and religion, and which will advance the path towards delinking the field from Euro-Western conceptualizations. This will unravel the rich epistemic formation within non-Western knowledge frames and the inclusion of which will greatly enrich and redefine the academic study of religion and science in the days ahead.

Genealogies of (anti-)Blackness in the Maghreb: Africanity, Arabness, and the French colonial legacy

This essay starts with the unstable valence of the term “African” in governmental discourses and their media treatment in Morocco and Tunisia, which vacillate between a political and cultural solidarity on the one hand, and an oppositional stance on the other hand, whereby the “Arabness” of the Maghreb is posited as oppositional to the Blackness of Africa. The essay grapples with the competing historical and epistemic frames that attempt to explain this conflicting relation. The “colonialist thesis,” whereby the origin of the “tale of two Africas” is traced back to colonial racial schemes, posits pan-Africanism as an anti-imperialist political alliance, one that sought to transcend colonial categories of belonging between so-called “Arab” and Black Africa. However, if taken in isolation, a pan-African approach can also selectively sanitize the historical relation that the Maghreb entertains with the rest of the continent. The essay discusses the urgency of re-centering the precolonial Maghrebi history of the trans-Saharan slave trade, in order to fully comprehend the history of Black and North Africa, while being cautious with importing western concepts, and reinforcing orientalist notions of Islamic “tyranny.” Ultimately, taking Eugène Delacroix’s Femme d’Alger dans leur Appartement as a case study, it argues for an entangled legacy of prejudice , whereby trans-Saharan practices of slavery become palimpsestically reconfigured through the racial schemes of French coloniality. It invites a third mode of relationality, a critically reparative stance, one that posits the necessity of more fully implicating a global audience – a Maghrebi as well as a Western one – as having historically co-constituted the sociocultural and political frameworks through which racial prejudice is reproduced.

Narratives of research collaboration for sustainability at the global science-policy interface: A vehicle for inequality or transformation?

Collaborative science has become a ‘gold standard’ in sustainability science, to address increasingly complex socio-environmental challenges and knowledge divides. Inequalities shaping research collaborations (RCs) however remain unexplored in the science-policy interface. To address this gap, we carry out a critical discourse analysis of texts by international policy and research actors engaged in the global discourse on science for sustainability. We examine which narratives of RC they mediate, and how these address inequalities related to RC. Our study shows that documents of United Nations bodies primarily mediate a deficit narrative, with focus on a lack of resources and innovation capacity in ‘less developed’ countries. The alternative transformation narrative of RC mediated by reports of UNESCO and other science-policy institutions implementing science for the SDGs offers a more complex picture, which accounts for epistemic inequalities and frames RC as essential to address global challenges. The latter narrative holds most potential for change yet emerges with a varying prevalence, which we explain by institutional contexts and disciplinary diversity of experts. We find a disparity in the visibility of the transformation narrative in texts by policy actors and academic actors implementing science for sustainability. This may have structural implications for RC in global science and the inequalities they (re-)produce or counter. We suggest a more nuanced engagement with RC as policy and research subject for science to deliver the holistic transformation the 2030 Agenda strives for.

Organizing vulnerability exploring Judith Butler's conceptualization of vulnerability to study organizations

AbstractThis paper argues that vulnerability as conceptualized by Judith Butler is a useful lens to study organizations. Judith Butler conceptualizes vulnerability as both universally shared human condition and individually experienced, thereby describes how vulnerability is both a bodily ontology (we are all vulnerable due to our human bodies being dependent on each other to support us), and an epistemic frame (through vulnerability we can know), resulting in an ethical response‐ability (to not hurt one another). Vulnerability, though universally shared, is individually experienced and unequally distributed, because it depends on what Judith Butler calls “social infrastructures”. Organizations and their organizing practices constitute such social infrastructures and at the same time depend on them. Using a vulnerability lens makes it possible to study how organizations co‐constitute vulnerability and the positionality that they inhabit toward vulnerability.

“We don't experiment with our patients!” An ethnographic account of the epistemic politics of (re)designing nursing work

This article draws on ethnographic research investigating experimental reform projects in local nursing practices. These are aimed at strengthening nursing work and fostering nurses' position within healthcare through bottom-up nurse-driven innovations. Based on literature on epistemic politics and critical nursing studies, the study examines and conceptualizes how these nurses promote professional and organizational change. The research draws on data from two pilot projects to show how epistemic politics frame the production and use of knowledge within reform efforts. The study finds that knowledge produced through such experimenting is often not considered valid within the contexts of broader organizational transitions. The nurse-driven innovations fail to meet established legitimate criteria for informing change, both among stakeholders in the nurses' socio-political environment, as well as within the nursing community. The research reveals that the processes inadvertently reinforce normative knowledge hierarchies, perpetuating forms of epistemic injustice, limiting both nurses' ability to function as change agents and healthcare organizations’ capacity to learn.

Passionate humility for global constitutionalism in the aftermath of the Russo-Ukrainian war

Passionate humility for global constitutionalism in the aftermath of the Russo-Ukrainian war

Analyzing epistemic frames during STEM instructional coaching meetings: a quantitative ethnography approach

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the epistemic connections between three instructional coaches and a first-year in-service teacher during remote planning and debrief meetings. Prior evidence suggests that remote instructional coaching leads to better teaching practices and identifies the instructional coaching moves used to prompt teacher reflection.Design/methodology/approachIn this study, the authors utilized quantitative ethnography and epistemic network analysis (ENA) approaches to explore the epistemic frames of three remote university-based instructional coaches as they supported a first-year in-service teacher.FindingsQuantitative ENA findings shed light on the network connections between instructional coaches and teachers, as well as the epistemic frames observed during planning and debrief meetings. Additionally, the authors provide qualitative findings that complement and reinforce the quantitative results.Research limitations/implicationsAll data collection occurred via Zoom, and the class was in a hybrid modality, with some students attending class in person and some attending remotely via Zoom. This unique context could have impacted the epistemic connections surrounding technology and logistics.Practical implicationsThis study provides a practical codebook for use in future studies that explores instructional coaching. Findings from this study can be used to inform instructional coaching decisions.Originality/valueThe ENA findings helped deepen the authors' understanding of how instructional coaches can support a first-year in-service teacher during planning and debrief meetings in several ways. Additionally, this study presents a unique context given the COVID-19 pandemic and the remote model of instructional coaching.

Becoming Black Womxn Through Embodied Inquiry

In this conceptual piece, I use a framework of embodiment to argue for approaches to inquiry that are better suited to engage and amplify Black womxn's knowledges in social work than are more popular social sciences methods. I also relate embodiment to several epistemic frames, and warn against disembodiment through more popular methods. Finally, I present three embodied research approaches that align with feminist social work principles. Throughout the piece, I reference works that explore feminist and embodied practices while centering Black womxn. I also frame discussion through my own embodiment as a Black femme scholar and practitioner, and embodiment and its potential in inquiries through a Black feminist tradition. Embodiment has been a framework of feminist scholarship for decades, broadly defined as living out knowledge through the body and/or in its environments through a process of becoming. Scholars in this school of thought account for their and participants’ emotions and dispositions as part of how knowledge is lived, while treating the body as a text to be read.

The personal is political in the struggle for equity in global medical education research and scholarship

Medical education research is rooted in a long tradition of objectivity, evidence-based methods, and clinical surety. However, the inexorable confidence, health professions research education, and scholarship have in the manifest supremacy of western science as the foundational epistemology is questionable. Is this bravado legitimate and if so by what authority? How does this dominance of western epistemic frames determine how we are seen and how we see ourselves as health professions educators scholars and researchers? In what ways does western epistemic dominance influence how and why we conduct research? What do we consider as important to research in health professions education (HPE)? The answers are different depending on where we position ourselves or are placed in a hierarchy of scholarly privilege. I pose that the supremacy of Western scientific epistemology in modern medical education, research, and practice blurs differently colored scientific lenses and silences marginalized voices from legitimate contribution to HPE.

Melody Mystery: Learning Music Theory through Escape Room Puzzles

This paper explores the use of escape room puzzles and instructional scaffolding in teaching novice learners about basic music theory. This study used the notion of epistemic frames in games as the basis for its experiment, combined with the use of technology-based scaffolding. We examined how effective it is to engage and motivate novice learners when they are made to mimic the role of an expert in music and solve problems using their knowledge and skills in the subject. We found positive responses from participants’ attitudes toward music theory and the ability to retain knowledge of the subject, as well as evidence which proves that games can have significant effects on motivation in the learning process.

Economic analyses of repugnant market transactions: a modest typology

AbstractEconomic accounts of repugnance concern two broad questions: the rationalisation of sentiments of repugnance (do emotional and visceral reactions of repugnance track valid reasons for not engaging in or condemning certain (trans)actions?) and institutional design (how to institute, regulate, or restrict markets in response to reasonable objections). If repugnance expresses valid practical reasons for regulating or limiting markets, our institutions should acknowledge and express these. If attitudes of repugnance are not rationalisable in the sense of instrumental or moral values, we should disregard or eventually counteract or reduce them. Focusing on a special case of repugnance, when commodification, i.e., the sale of goods or services for money meets societal disapproval, this paper identifies three characteristic ways to combine conceptual, empirical, and normative arguments and map repugnance into a disciplinary ‘epistemic frame’ of economics: repugnance as taste; repugnance as proxy for market failures or moral reasons; repugnance as hypocrisy or contingent cultural fact. Correspondingly, economists advise to (1) work around; (2) make sense of; and (3) explain away people's sentiments of repugnance.

Поэтика образа главной героини повести Е. Ган «Утбалла»

Introduction. The article examines poetics of the protagonist’s image in Yelena Hahn’s Utballa which was highly appreciated by V. Belinsky. The literary work remains understudied, which makes it relevant enough to be approached with interdisciplinary analytical strategies that combine both literary and philosophical components. Goals. The paper attempts an analysis of the protagonist’s image from a perspective of gendered Orientalism with due account of genre specifics. Materials and methods. The study analyzes the text of the novel describing the life drama of a half-blood girl in Russian and Kalmyk cultural environments. The fact that the author’s farther A. Fadeev had served as Chief Supervisor of the Kalmyk People — and his views on colonization may have influenced the former — proves essential in our analysis that rests on modality poetics and gendered Orientalism. Results. The insights into poetical specifics of Utballa conclude that genre narratives of realism and romanticism play a key plot-forming function in the novel. A combination of romantic and realistic narrative logics yields a unique plot of certain interest to be examined from a perspective of gendered Orientalism. The drama of the protagonist’s life is explained by that having been incorporated into European epistemic philosophical frames she tends to view from the latter positions — the Kalmyks and culture she belongs to by birth but refuses to accept. As a result, the girl finds herself in a situation of two-worldness where none of the worlds is perfect enough. Describing the tragic fate of Utballa, the author thus addresses the question of woman’s place in patriarchal society.

Mental health law, policy & program in India – A fragmented narrative of change, contradictions and possibilities

There has been a long-standing history of over 150 years of mental health legislation in the Indian sub-continent. India formulated its National Mental Health Program (NMHP) in 1982 and National Mental Health Policy (MHP) only in 2014. In this paper we mark significant influences on the evolution of mental health law, policy and program in India starting from colonial laws. We suggest that discursive continuities from these colonial laws have existed for a few decades in post-independence India. International influences of deinstitutionalization and growth in community psychiatry took root in India by the late 1970s and considerably shaped mental health program thinking. The decade of 2000s with two major international developments, the UN Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) as well as Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH) have had a significant impact on the mental health sector in India. We comment on a disjuncture between the progressive frames of the current mental health law and policy framework on the one hand and the national and district mental health programs in the country on the other. We then focus on technology assisted solutions for mental health care and their promise as widely promoted by the state and the market and what these mean for a country like India. Throughout the paper, we raise critical questions regarding dominance of western bio medical psychiatry as the epistemic frame guiding policy imagination at the cost of diverse, community resources and practices.

Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

Epistemological process towards decolonial praxis and epistemic inequality of an international student

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the epistemic inequality of international students as a “new” inequality that is under-represented in the current debates about decolonisation (albeit shaped by colonial discourses depicting international students as in deficit and incapable of meeting the standards of (colonial) universities). In this theoretical context, the paper reflects on a multi-modal digital methodology used in a research project that aimed to understand how international students deploy their epistemological resources to learn the curriculum. The paper describes selected artefacts submitted by the students around which their epistemic frames were expressed, suggesting where these may be concealed by epistemological situatedness of the lecturers. Based on the analysis of these artefacts, the paper develops and interrogates an epistemology for support towards interrogating the role of our own epistemological binaries in adversely affecting students’ epistemic frames in the curriculum. As such, it contributes to a gap in the literature around decolonial pedagogy, and its role in tackling educational inequalities.

Epistemic responsibility predicts developing frame awareness in early childhood: A language socialization perspective

This article examines the emergent relationship between epistemic responsibility and frame awareness in early childhood, wherein a mother uses language socialization practices to guide her child into a new frame. The pair co-constructs the parameters of the new frame through negotiation of epistemic responsibility and remedial interchanges. The analysis demonstrates that these remedial interchanges arise from conflicting understandings of the embeddedness of frames and the epistemic dynamics that these frames entail. The child maintains epistemic primacy in her concurrent play frame, which carries over to the recording activity given that the recording activity is embedded within her larger play frame. I argue that the data predict epistemic responsibility to be acquired earlier than the ability to shift epistemic dynamics outside of role-play. This study contributes to our understanding of frame and epistemic development in early childhood.

From right or wrong to true or false: Moral and epistemic framing in debates over cannabis policy reformulation

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PSICOMOTRICIDADE E PARADIGMA DA COMPLEXIDADE

The aim of this article is to reflect about the relevance of incorporating the paradigm of complexity in psychomotor thinking, which involves different epistemic frames. It describes the simplifying thinking that reduces and fragments the different areas of knowledge, as opposed to complex thinking, which integrates them in a systemic way. At the same time, it presents a reflection about its possible influences on the foundation of psychomotricity as a health area practice. It is concluded that complex thinking is useful in the transdisciplinary foundation of psychomotricity and structuring of psychomotor praxis to meet the needs, specificities and psychomotor performance of each human being.

Judith Butler and the Politics of Epistemic Frames

ABSTRACT Judith Butler’s work has tended to be read through two axes: (1) an early gender theory/later ethical theory division, and/or (2) an ethical/political divide. In contrast, I aim to undercut both hermeneutical strategies by turning to her epistemology, as manifested through her analyses of normativity and “frames,” to argue that the latter acts as the hinge uniting her so-called early and later works and the ethical and political dimensions of her thinking. From this premise, I maintain that Butler (1) affirms that these frames are conditioned by power relations and contingency, (2) points to the existence of multiple frameworks that simultaneously compete against one another, and (3) insists that frames are culturally specific and determining of the categories that identify what counts as a legitimate life for a particular community and the ways in which each (form of) life is to be treated. By highlighting the social, performative, and normative dimensions of epistemic practices, Butler offers an epistemology based in the construction of contingent and contestable frameworks and shows how the contestation between distinct frameworks conditions the ethical-political life of each community.

Posthuman feminism and global constitutionalism: Environmental reflections

AbstractThere is a need for the field of global constitutionalism to consider a wider array of voices, such as women’s voices and perspectives from the Global South. Here, I argue that global constitutionalism must pay attention not only to a wider array of human perspectives, but also to non-human perspectives and to different understandings of what the law is and can be. Evaluating how international law categorizes the environment and non-human animals as things or objects to be exploited for human needs, I argue that posthuman feminism provides an alternative epistemic frame for rethinking both global constitutionalism and international law.