Epistemic Framework Research Articles

Post-Ghazali Islamic Philosophy in the Sunni and Shi‘ite Traditions

This study refutes the unfounded yet prevalent view among Western scholars and some contemporary Muslim scholars that Islamic philosophy has declined after al-Ghazālī due to his vehement critique of the philosophers. This study supports the previous studies by George Saliba and Frank Griffel who criticised the decline narrative and argued that Islamic philosophy and science continue to thrive after al-Ghazālī. Moreover, this study gives a general overview of the development of intellectual sciences which include works on metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics and politics both in the Sunni and Shiʻite traditions, and especially in the Malay world. Contrary to the decline narrative, the study shows that the Sunni epistemic framework which was crystalized in al-Ghazālī’s work contributed positively to the development of Islamic philosophy. His critique of Aristotelianism should be considered part of the Islamisation of Greek philosophy, and his works laid down a robust foundation for the development of intellectual sciences in the Islamic world.

Allgemeine Erziehungswissenschaft und die Problematisierung pädagogischen Wissens – in Zeiten von KI

Abstract General Education and the Problematization of Pedagogical Knowledge – in Times of AI The paper takes the recent debate on ChatGPT in higher education as point of departure for demonstrating the relevance of General Education. Its significance lies in the task to scrutinize and reflect the conditions, epistemic frameworks, and consequences of pedagogical knowledge (1). It is shown how this is realized in recent forms of educational-theoretical research as ›problematization‹ (2). This problematization is currently neglected in the debate on AI in higher education (3).

Towards a science of ‘land grabbing’

In the past two decades, large-scale land transactions (LSLTs), commonly known as land grabs or large-scale land acquisitions, have been pursued by agricultural investors and host-country governments in Lower- and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC) to boost crop yield. Existing knowledge on LSLTs is highly diverse, generated by scholars taking a wide range of perspectives and frameworks. However, the global patterns of LSLT-related research and their potential shortcomings remain under-investigated. In this paper, we analyze 370 peer-reviewed papers on LSLTs to advance this field of knowledge towards a science of ‘land grabbing’. Our findings reveal that 1) research on LSLTs displays geographical imbalances; 2) global statistics do not fully capture the complexity of LSLTs on the ground; 3) different disciplinary interests and theoretical traditions result in different use of terms in referring to LSLTs and divergent impressions of their social consequences; and 4) the environmental consequences of LSLTs are under-studied relatively. We suggest that a better understanding of LSLTs could result from greater engagement with each discipline’s strength and epistemic frameworks.

Not just platform, nor cooperatives: worker-owned technologies from below

Abstract This article theorizes about how platform cooperativism is landing in Brazil, challenging dominant notions and presenting a more diverse meaning of worker-owned technologies from below. Drawing on research with platform co-ops under construction in Brazil, the article argues that, in Brazil, platform cooperativism does not necessarily present itself as either a cooperative or a platform. They are prototypes and experiments of worker-owned technologies anchored in local communities and their values. Instead of all these experiences being condensed and captured from Global North epistemic frameworks, there is the production of knowledge by the workers in search of autonomy. The article analyzes potentialities and critiques of platform cooperativism, especially from three dimensions of critique (economics, politics, and technology). It presents perspectives towards diversifying and expanding the meanings of technology in/from Latin America for understanding worker-owned technologies. It discusses two examples of worker-owned technologies: Senoritas Courier and the Homeless Worker Movement.

Distinct Profiles for Beliefs About Religion Versus Science.

A growing body of research suggests that scientific and religious beliefs are often held and justified in different ways. In three studies with 707 participants, we examine the distinctive profiles of beliefs in these domains. In Study 1, we find that participants report evidence and explanatory considerations (making sense of things) as dominant reasons for beliefs across domains. However, cuing the religious domain elevates endorsement of nonscientific justifications for belief, such as ethical considerations (e.g., believing it encourages people to be good), affiliation (what loved ones believe), and intuition (what feels true in one's heart). Study 2 replicates these differences with specific scientific and religious beliefs held with equal confidence, and documents further domain differences in beliefs' personal importance, openness to revision, and perceived objectivity. Study 3 replicates these differences, further finding that counter-consensus beliefs about contentious science topics (such as climate change and vaccination) often have properties resembling religious beliefs, while counter-religious beliefs about religion (e.g., "There is no God") have properties that more closely resemble beliefs about science. We suggest that beliefs are held and justified within coherent epistemic frameworks, with individuals using different frameworks in different contexts and domains.

Missions

AbstractThis paper discusses the impact of colonization on Christian mission encounters and activities. It utilizes the decolonial epistemic framework to analyze the limitations of approaches that advocate “dialogue,” “revelation,” and “mutual growth.” The paper argues that focusing on these three approaches overlooks the asymmetrical power dynamics inherent in the history of Western Christian missions. Conversely, a focus on a deeper experience of the divine highlights the existing epistemic and spiritual knowledge of individuals and communities who have become “othered” within a colonial framework. The paper begins by defining the terms that describe the power dynamics of colonization. Following is a discussion of the impact of colonization on Christian missions. Next, the paper explores the limits of dialogue, revelation, and mutual growth, and finally, it argues the importance of focusing on a more profound experience of the divine.

Writing with an accent: Travelling scholars and xenophone scholarship

Feminists have been examining the travelling and dominance of Anglophone feminist knowledge across the globe through translation and adaptation, and their revision and transformation in the process. This article suggests that feminist scholarship circulates globally through not only the travelling of theories but also the ‘travelling’ scholars who move geographically, linguistically, and intellectually in and out of the Anglophone scholarly world. It considers knowledge production as an embodied process and explores the relationship between intellectual biography and knowledge production. Directing the gaze to travelling scholars and their ‘accented’ writings, it traces the various types of ‘accents’ in the form of italics or non-Romanized scripts, the invented terms and phases, the meaning frames and conceptual constructions, and creative grafting of ideas and epistemic frameworks. Using various forms of ‘accented’ writings in feminist and queer inquiries about China as examples, this article demonstrates that moving between languages and intellectual traditions, the accented writings produced by travelling scholars can serve as important modes and foci of feminist knowledge production and have the potential to produce ‘xenophone’ scholarship that contributes to feminist knowledge production.

Populism Analytical Tools to Unearth the Roots of Euroscepticism

Populist leaders around the globe magnify pre-existing frustrations and dramatise crises to erode confidence in elites and institutions. They adapt their othering and blame attribution discourses to specific geographical realities to take advantage of local problems and prejudices. Most Eurosceptic parties apply a similar populist logic of articulation simplifying political problems, morally delegitimising their political adversaries and supranational institutions, appealing to an idealised and somewhat homogeneous notion of society as well as presenting popular sovereignty as threatened by Brussels and mainstream parties. Populism literature has developed theories and measurement tools that are very useful to explain the emergence of Eurosceptic movements and to what extent their narratives resonate with citizen’s pre-existing attitudes and/or contribute to shaping them. This article shows the value of using populism as an epistemic framework to analyse Euroscepticism and understand how parties tailor their messages (supply-side) to trigger specific beliefs and behaviours (demand-side) in the inhabitants of different geographic contexts.

Neocolonial Digitality: Analyzing Digital Legal Databases Using Legal Pluralism

AbstractA prevalent assumption is that digital legal databases generate an exhaustive and inclusive archive for academics and legal professionals to use for gathering information. Bridging theories and methods from digital media studies and legal anthropology, I challenge this assumption and demonstrate how digitizing law is a politicized process that is tied to legacies of colonialism and modern epistemic frameworks of law and justice. Employing the concept of legal pluralism, I conduct a comparative study of urban secular state courts and rural Islamic/customary non-state courts (shalish) in Bangladesh to show how the construction of digital legal databases distorts and erases alternate frameworks of law and women’s socio-legal experiences. I discuss two significant use of digital legal databases to highlight why it is important to study the gaps and prejudices: (1) they are central to generating new forms of archives—digital archives; (2) they provide the data sets to help train artificial intelligence and influence automated outputs. I develop the term “neocolonial digitality” to explain how power related to legacies of colonialism and other forms of discrimination are embedded in the digitizing process. This concept also holds space for the newer forms of hierarchies, exclusions, and power structures that digitality permits, focusing on the particular harms marginalized communities encounter in the Global South.

Document as a multifaceted knowledge object

The definition of document and its evolution over time and within different disciplinary fields influences and determines norms, safeguarding and protection profiles and also disciplinary boundaries, without, to date, any adequate theoretical reflection and any universally accepted semantics. An attempt to define at the very least a state of the art represents the unavoidable condition towards the re-establishment of text and documentary disciplines within an epistemic framework in the making. The terminological definition influences and determines the very concept of archive which, in a digital context, increases its innate polysemy and requires a deep conceptual redefinition.

Lessons in accumulated rage and rebellious scholarship with Mike Davis

This essay reflects on the ways that Mike Davis's commitment to social justice shaped his pedagogical practice and mentorship. It uses the author's personal experiences to highlight Davis's support for devalued communities and overlooked places. More specifically, the essay provides examples that show how Davis created new platforms that amplified marginalized voices. Finally, the author uses current research on the Salton Sea and the Coachella Valley to illustrate how Davis's intellectual contributions generated valuable epistemic frameworks for those interested in social and ecological justice.

Nel silenzio della mia stanza… Riflessioni pedagogiche sul fenomeno Hikikomori

The category of Care, understood as an ontological construct of pedagogy, is a topic of research and in-depth study by many researchers for several reasons: for the importance it has in the epistemic framework of pedagogical science and for the centrality that this category has in educational practice. Talking about Care means to speak of a fundamental topical category today. The PRIN project Pratiche educative di prevenzione e ben-essere per gli Hikikomori. Dalla onsapevolezza alla “Cura educativa”, presented in 2022 and awaiting evaluation, sought to combine the category of Care with the educational emergency of the Hikikomori: they are young people locked inside their own room, who manifest their vulnerability by cancelling all kinds of relationships except the virtual one.

Epistemological Foundations of Intercultural Education: Contributions from Raimon Panikkar

The present article explores the epistemological conditions of intercultural encounters. Based on an analysis of Raimon Panikkar's intercultural hermeneutics, we argue that intercultural encounters cannot take place adequately when they are based on purely rhetorical rationality or rational persuasion. We point to the limitations of grounding intercultural relationships on dialectical dialogue and, therefore, of educating them by simply enhancing discursive capacities. We underline the need for other epistemological conditions that should be fostered in order to move forward on the path to actual interculturality. These can be summarised by what Panikkar calls "conversion", an epistemic framework of love—personal relationality, that goes beyond objectifying rationality—for the communication between (culturally different) subjects. We conclude that the culturally diverse human condition refers to being encountered and being understood on a level that is not merely logical or linguistic. What can be understood of a person with another cultural background goes beyond what can be comprehended by logical rationality or captured by veritative judgements about objects. In other words, in intercultural encounters, ontological, rather than merely logical truth is at stake, which means that the presence of the other can lead to experiences of meaning: it reveals a being that calls for conversion. Conversion demands an ontic action on the part of the subject, not merely an epistemological one, that cancels the violence that rational persuasion might entail.

Questionable stepwise explanations for a robust additive preference model

In this paper, we study Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding (MCDA) problems modeled using an additive value function. We consider an epistemic framework in which the preferences of the decision-maker are imprecisely specified, yielding a robust additive preference model. In this context, we are interested in explaining recommendations derived from such robust model using a transitive sequence of preference swaps. Previous work laid the foundations for explaining the necessary preference relation through a sequence of necessary preference swaps. We extend this to take into account non-necessary preference, yielding to so-called “questionable explanations”: a chain of alternatives which is non-increasing w.r.t. preference of the decision-maker. This approach provides additional descriptive power for explaining robust recommendations. We propose an efficient resolution engine based on Mixed-Integer Linear Programs, and we conduct numerical experiments to assess the benefit of our explanation strategy.

Behind the metropolis: understanding Grand Paris through the history of its regional plans

ABSTRACT The history of Grand Paris has been partly constructed around the markers provided in the major regional plans that have punctuated the development of the Greater Paris region, from the 1913 ‘Report for the enlargement of Paris’ to the 2009 ‘Grand Paris international consultation process’. By providing an epistemic framework for understanding the major regional plans, this article clearly posits that their history – i.e., both their succession and development – has a structuring impact on the ‘reality’ constituted by ‘Grand Paris’. The research we present here was conducted as part of the Inventing Grand Paris research programme with the objective of visualizing what we have termed the ‘depth of plans’, their contents and conflicts as well as their nature and temporality. To this end, a research device was created in the form of a digital ‘Atlas of Grand Paris plans’. By presenting the vast corpus of archives generated by the development of regional plans, this helps present a nuanced perspective and clarify the complexity of the metropolitan dynamics of Greater Paris. By looking at the possibilities it opens up for understanding the process, this article ultimately explores the way in which the digital humanities can contribute to the history of planning.

Habermasian Discourse Theory for Educational Policymaking: Attending to Perspective Taking and Communicative Agency

This paper identifies and considers issues of perspective taking and communicative agency in applying Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory to policymaking in educational settings. The central question is whether Habermas provides an epistemic framework that supports reciprocal and sincere expressions of the views and interests of individuals in a heterogeneous society. Examining this question leads to a discussion of “practical discourse” in light of a willingness of participants to reach mutual understanding and agreement, and the centrality of perspective taking and communicative agency in such discourses. Also examined is a conceptualization of “application discourses,” the implications of such discourses for perspective taking and communicative agency, and the role these discourses might play in further assuring the overall inclusivity and context sensitivity of applying education policies in specific circumstances. The paper then gives a brief re-analysis of an empirical study that used Habermas’s concept of the “ideal speech situation” as a normative framework for interpreting data. The re-analysis means to illustrate the practical value of practical discourse for guiding and assessing educational policymaking. The paper ends with a short justification of the necessity of attending to perspective taking and communicative agency when viewing education as a basic human right.

Extraction is not a metaphor: Decolonial and Black Geographies against the gendered and embodied violence of extractive logics

AbstractWe are witnessing a proliferation of new critical scholarship on the manifold forms of extractivism. Yet, there are risks associated with extraction being rendered a broad metaphor for innumerable forms of removal and value‐making through exploitation and misappropriation. Theorising within decolonial Black feminisms, we respond to the metaphorization of extraction by (re)asserting the need for persistent analysis on the material and embodied effects and consequences of extractivisms. That is, the specific processes, logics, ideologies, and relations of extractivism recast lands, labours, ecosystems, and bodies, and particularly the bodies of women of colour. This helps to ensure the concept does not become figuratively empty and abstracted in politically and analytically debilitating ways. Drawing on more than a decade of research with three communities entangled within and targeted through extractivism along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline and the extractive‐tourist coastline of Panama, we mobilise a conception of 'extractive logics' to refer to the unnamed, unquestioned, often contradictory, foundational epistemic frameworks that permit the seemingly‐permanent structures and relations of removal, destruction, and dehumanization. We analyse documents from the Chad–Cameroon oil consortium, which projected and then calculated the economic ‘costs’ of the pipeline's triggering of an increase in rates of HIV/AIDS in adjacent towns and cities, alongside the entanglement of capitalist extraction with the medical neglect of Black labourers in Panama. Doing so demystefies the ways that racial and gendered violence are sanctioned (and even premeditated) within extractive logics. We hope that this work challenges some of the methodological nationalism so common within extractive scholarship, and brings extractive processes across disparate South–South and black geographies into conversation, activating a cross‐fertilisation of research across otherwise distinct geographies and geographical refrains. We reflect on the imperatives for and (im)possibilities of decolonial research against extractivism.

Then and Now: On Activating Sikh Visual and Material Culture at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA)

A museum’s relevance must lie in its ability to inspire reflections on the works it contains, fostering and cherishing a plurality of interpretations. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has been exploring new avenues of interpretation, rejecting the idea of an exhaustive overview of the arts of the world’s various regions in the manner of the so-called universal museums of the nineteenth century. From the multitude of realities its art collections embody and the histories they index, nodes of encounter and entanglement emerge, the so-called space “in between,” from which new visions arise. Within this new epistemic framework, the museum recently welcomed The Kapany Collection of Sikh Art, a new gallery dedicated to historical and contemporary Sikh Art, part of a commitment to render the museum into a space receptive to the shifting plurality of voices that comprise our ever-changing Canadian society. The Kapany Collection presented a timely opportunity to re-think conventional museological approaches and offer new perspectives to Sikh art and art in general, incorporating
 Sikhi as a meaningful curatorial praxis and prompting contemporary diasporic artists to weave new histories from within.

The shape-shifting form of UK floodplains: Fusing analysis of the territorially constructed with analysis of natural terrain processes

Physically, river floodplains have both the subdued morphology of natural terrain created as extreme discharges and sediments pass through catchment drainage systems and, to an increasing extent, the forms that arise from purposeful human constructions. Together, these direct out-of-channel inundation. As defined here, ‘territories’ and their humanly constructed physical forms have historically consumed or modified naturally created ‘terrains’ in a collection of actions that we summarize as ‘morphophagia’. A more inclusive physical geography is presented, adding-in explanations for the evolutionary phasing of humanly-generated, but environmentally functioning, physical forms in the UK in the Modern Era (since c.1500 CE). Floodplain developments here took place in five main episodes of historically-contingent accumulation: the Early Modern (c.1500–1780 CE) started with a framework of purposeful owned land, and then followed periods that can be related to Kondratieff global economic phases (c.1790–1840,1840–1900,1900–1947,1947–2000 CE). Three different groups of forcings operated: (1) the compartmentalizing and patched infill patterns set by territorial units, rights and developer ownerships; (2) the availability, motivations and timings for capital and labour investment; and (3) the evolving technical possibilities exploited by entrepreneurs and agents. Epistemic frameworks for broadening the analysis of coupled terrain and territory systems, exploring actuating social forces as much as their symptomatic physical outcomes, are discussed. Globally, there have been different forcings, timings and emplacement layouts operating at scales from local river reaches to city expansion and economic regions. As perceptions of environmental stasis now disintegrate, enthusiasm for reinvigorating economic growth, with further population increase and sprawling construction may, as in the past, discount the hazards of floodplain occupation. When and why risky anthropo-physical floodplain emplacements occur needs greater systematic understanding as social and economic initiatives are being considered.

Three ways to change your mind: an epistemic framework for cognitive interventions.

Belief change is an important element of much CBT, yet very little consideration has been given to the theories of knowledge, the epistemology, which underlie this process. This article argues that understanding the epistemic basis of the techniques therapists use can help guide their choice of interventions. The empirical evidence for cognitive restructuring is considered, the importance of distancing and decentring noted, and three epistemic styles are identified: the rational-empiricist, pragmatist and 'constructivist' approaches. Different schools of CBT emphasise one or more of these. The article describes how these epistemes can be used to make decisions about which cognitive interventions to use, particularly when clients may be sceptical about reality testing because of entrenched beliefs or real-life adversity.