Epistemic Freedom Research Articles

Developing critical consciousness of epistemic (in)justice

Societies and economies are, in part, structured and organised epistemically. However, who has the power to shape key territorial decisions and policies, and based on whose/which knowledges? Whose and which voices, practices, methods, problems, problem definitions and solutions matter in the process? Whose/which knowledge systems are legitimised or delegitimised? These are some of the questions that are raised in this paper on epistemic (in)justice. The discussion contributes to reflections on the development of action research pedagogies and methodologies, in particular on facilitating approaches and processes that are respectful and conducive to the central human capability of different people and groups to produce and receive knowledge. The genesis of the argument is rooted in a critical understanding of the on-going damages caused by epistemological hegemony and coloniality of power, and consciously working towards integrating perspectives of epistemic justice in our praxes. By stimulating the inclusion and participation of those who are marginalised, we contribute to countering dominant narratives and bringing forth nuanced perspectives of the lesser heard, and visible. With those in mind, I highlight the importance of epistemic governance, epistemic freedom, epistemic humility, and inter- and intra-territorial connectivity for enabling the co-creation of transformative relations, visions, spaces, dialogues, and actions in responding to climate change and the associated challenges.

CRAFTING A FOUCAULDIAN GENEALOGY METHOD FOR ANALYZING CURRICULUM-AS-DISCOURSE IN SOUTH AFRICA

Introduction/Frame: (Contextualization/Justification) Viewing curriculum as discourse can enable educators to identify how historical markers of discrimination are repeated. Historical markers are archaeologically embedded in the various dimensions of a curriculum and find expression in preferred ways of thinking, speaking, doing, and being. Such historical hypernorms are often maintained by practical rationalities, or technologies of power that reify their taken-for-granted legitimacy as ‘truth regimes’. Research Question/Objectives: This phase of the study aimed to critically explore and disclose how the (socio/politico-historically constructed) rules of knowledge-formation in a contemporary occupational therapy curriculum-as-discourse, are reproduced and maintained as truths at a university that historically supported apartheid in South Africa. Methodology: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) approach was used to systematically craft a genealogy analysis method from foundational Foucauldian theory. Adjacent, a lens of the ‘dimensions of the curriculum’ was employed: i.e., the formal, the informal, the hidden, and the negated curriculum. Various data sources were categorized accordingly, e.g., overarching policy documents; social events; timetables and prescribed texts; physical teaching spaces; espoused values, and underlying assumptions modelled during assessment in teaching and learning spaces. Results: Following the four rules of knowledge-formation that ensued from an archaeology analysis, the contemporary reification of the historical markers was problematised through various technologies of power and self, as well modes of reasoning. Examples are pervasive white demographics of both students and faculty reifying cognitive monopoly and mono-cultural epistemologies; the rationalization of highly ritualized (over)assessment of students suppressing adult-to-adult transactionalism in andragogy practices; the reproduction of mono-cultural epistemologies in clinical training operating in the hidden curriculum. Final considerations: Consciously dismantling the rationalising strategies for the continuation of discriminatory patterns of inclusion and exclusion in a curriculum, can open a space for critical dialogue, disruption, and reconfiguration of a curriculum-as-discourse towards social justice, and epistemic freedom in (higher) education.

Toward an African Critical Orientation

ABSTRACT This essay proposes an African orientation to critical work. We begin by locating the need for postcolonial indigenous African bases for critical interventions in the idea of epistemic freedom articulated by African decolonial thinkers along with the postcolonial critique of Frankfurt School and Chicago circle critical theory. Next, we develop a basis for critical interventions in Bantu cosmology by drawing on Omedi Ochieng’s groundwork thesis and applied sociolinguistics. That basis, we argue, prioritizes relatedness and community wellbeing, and is therefore broader and distinct from the narrow focus on power and domination as they relate to individual subject envisioned in liberalism. We illustrate the heuristic potential of the African critical orientation for critical intercultural and critical rhetorical work by discussing the African Medical and Research Foundation’s (AMREF) Mukogodo community organizational development initiative and the #Rhodesmustfall protests of 2015–2016.

On epistemic freedom and epistemic injustice

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between epistemic freedom, and epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression. I situate epistemic freedom within the larger project of epistemic decolonisation and argue that epistemic freedom is central to both its positive and negative programme. Through exploring the intersections of the notion of epistemic freedom and the scholarship on epistemic injustice and oppression, I argue that one can think of epistemic injustices and oppression as infringements on epistemic freedom. I identify shared themes between the theorisation of epistemic freedom and the literature on epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression, including silencing, active ignorance, and epistemic exploitation. I briefly explore each of these themes, identifying both intersections and divergences. Lastly, I draw on the literature on epistemic injustice and oppression to sharpen Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s (2018. Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization. London: Routledge) general conception of epistemic freedom and develop a tripartite structure for what substantial epistemic freedom entails. I argue that being epistemically free entails being able to choose one’s epistemic endeavours, having the means to pursue them, as well as being able to meaningfully partake in the shared endeavours of the epistemic communities that one belongs to.

South African experiences in a restructured post-apocalyptic geo-political future as depicted in speculative fiction

This article draws on science fiction's aesthetics of instability and multiple perspectives that disrupt the dominance of a Euro-American narrative voice (Langer 2011), as well as decolonial concepts such as coloniality, decentring and epistemic freedom (Ngügï 1986, 1992; Quijano 2007; Grosfoguel 2011; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018), to analyse the human condition and geopolitical patterns reflected in post-disaster worlds as depicted in Gillian Armstrong's "Elton" (2011), Abigail Godsell's (2011) "Taal" and Sarah Lotz's "Marine Drive, Durban Beachfront" (2014). The notion of multiple perspectives and contexts, and Smith's (2012) disruptive view that science fiction occurs everywhere, are used as lenses to examine the decolonised literary imagination. Ngügï argues (1986, 1992), that such an imagination moves the literary setting and vision from the Euro-American centre to another centre, in this case to a speculative post-apocalyptic South African future. The article argues that the depicted literary future and unfolding human experiences enable the constitution of decolonised literary imaginings and a cultural geography that restructure the current domination of geo-political and spatial mappings by the Global North. This restructured imagining places South Africa, and by extension Africa, at the centre of a speculative vision of humanity's sense of itself, knowledge production and agency, which are needed for the future survival of both the environment and other global inhabitants.

Correction to: Material History, Historied Materials and the Question of Epistemic Freedom in Ghana’s Medical Schools

Correction to: Material History, Historied Materials and the Question of Epistemic Freedom in Ghana’s Medical Schools

Material History, Historied Materials and the Question of Epistemic Freedom in Ghana’s Medical Schools

Summary Medical schools rely on a wide range of tools, technologies and materials for their teaching, on books, and bodies, and on the buildings which house them. This article considers the histories of this material culture in the three oldest medical schools operating in Ghana today. Borrowing theoretical concepts from Science and Technology Studies, medical anthropology and postcolonial political economy, this article takes that the material culture of modern medical education often binds contemporary pedagogy to outdated ideas and faraway places. The agential, proselytising nature of these historied materials agitates against the localisation of biomedicine and contributes to a distracting scientific imaginary which remains centred around historical, often imperial centres of knowledge production in Europe and North America.

Finding our place at the table: A more‐than‐human family reunion

AbstractIndigenous worlds are and always have been sites of more‐than‐human (MTH) agency and relationship, despite their largely marginalised status within geographic scholarship to date. The return to cosmologically‐informed earth‐oriented Indigenous Lifeworlds holds transformative power for mobilising collective action toward life‐affirming MTH futures for all. In this commentary, we, as two Indigenous PhD students (Alice, Naxi Chinese and Georgia, Te Whakatōhea Māori), draw on our respective ancestral instructions of kinship to suggest that engaging in MTH geographies is less a ‘discovery’ of new epistemologies and more akin to a praxis of ‘recovery’, similar to showing up to a family reunion. Thinking‐with the metaphor of a reunion, we contend that planetary futurity is contingent on Indigenous futurity, and that epistemic freedom is contingent on epistemic justice.

길랑바레증후군에 대한 ‘의학적 상상’

Guillan-Barré Syndrome (GBS) is a rare neuropathic disease characterized by the monophasic progression of paralysis, affecting the limbs and the trunk, and by the high rate of recovery. The condition is frequently preceded by intestinal infection caused by Campylobacter jejuni, on the basis of which it is believed that the destruction of the myelin sheath covering the peripheral nerve is triggered by a mechanism called ‘molecular mimicry.’ This process occurs when antibodies created by previously generated bacterial infection mistakenly attack the nerve tissues by the misrecognition of molecular markers. This article engages with this interesting condition philosophically through the concept of ‘imaginary’ based on the author’s role as a physician of Korean medicine, the mainstream medical profession in South Korea associated with the practice of traditional East Asian medicine (EAM). With some epistemic freedom from the constraining ‘embrace’ of biomedical principles granted by that positionality, the author offers two imaginaries concerning GBS: one linguistic, the other EAM-based. For the linguistic interpretation, the author argues, based on studies on walking that illustrate the shared properties between walking and speech (having rhythm and cadence, as well as the intent to engage with the outside world), the paralysis of GBS can be analogous to that of speech, i.e. mutism or aphasia, in that those shared properties disintegrate. For the EAM-based interpretation, the author argues that given the non-musculoskeletal characteristics manifested in GBS, the condition can be considered as ‘the cold-damp disorder’(寒濕病), or diarrheal disease, in the imaginaries of EAM. These deliberations open the door for philosophical engagement with medical conditions for improving the clinical management of GBS.

Whither Made in Africa Evaluation: Exploring the future trajectory and implications for evaluation practice

Background: Made in Africa Evaluation (MAE) has gained traction in the last decade, mainly through the agenda of decolonising knowledge and promoting Africa’s epistemic identity through promoting African grounded epistemologies, African indigenous knowledge systems and African grounded evaluation methodologies. While emphasis has been given to theorising MAE and possible methodological implications, limited attention has been given to implications of MAE for development evaluation praxis.Objectives: This article aimed to explore the praxis implications of MAE to development evaluation practice.Method: An exploratory research design was adopted, guided by theoretical constructs from critical systems heuristics (CSH). The assessment is guided by existing evaluation frameworks, practice guidelines (including the African Evaluation Guidelines – Standards and Norms, and the African Evaluation Principles) and theoretical and methodological guidelines. Data were collected through secondary reviews, expert and experiential knowledge regarding development evaluation practice.Results: The study findings show that the critical practice components for MAE include appreciating sources of motivation as guiding principles of developing modalities for evaluation practice; understanding and integrating sources of power and politics of value judgements in development evaluation practice; developing sources of knowledge; and appreciating sources of legitimation (defining the beneficiaries of MAE and implications for practice).Conclusion: In practice, MAE evaluation should adopt methodological approaches that borrow from African-rooted paradigms, including relational approaches and tools grounded in African institutional frameworks, social systems and values. Made in Africa evaluation should mainstream an empowerment evaluation approach that aims at contributing towards positive social change and promoting epistemic freedom of African evaluators.

A new research agenda for Africa’s international relations

ABSTRACT The article takes stock of the eclectic Africa’s International Relations (AIR) scholarship with a view to setting a new research agenda for this vibrant subfield of International Relations (IR). It argues that the AIR community has taken a defensive approach to knowledge production and dissemination. It calls on AIR scholars to shift the emphasis from reactionary scholarship to an offensive knowledge production and dissemination by building research around five key themes. The article shows that a research agenda in the five areas can give epistemic freedom to AIR scholars, contribute to freeing IR from Euro-American metanarratives, and ultimately put AIR scholars in a position to develop analytical frameworks capable of capturing nuances and complexities of international life in Africa.

What’s the point of being a discipline? Four disciplinary strategies and the future of International Relations

While disciplinary identities are among the most fraught subjects in academia, much less attention has been given to what disciplinarity actually entails and what risks different disciplinary strategies involve. This article sets out a theory of disciplinarity that recognises not only their coercive but also their redeeming features, particularly in view of the coexistence of multiple competing disciplines and powerful transdisciplinary movements (such as rationalism). On this basis it identifies four disciplinary strategies and each is assessed in relation to the future of IR: (1) remaining a subdiscipline of Political Science (‘stay put’), (2) becoming an interdisciplinary field (‘reach out’), (3) dissolving into transdisciplinarity or abolishing IR (‘burn down’), or (4) establishing IR as a discipline in its own right (‘break out’). Rejecting the false choice of disciplinary constraint versus epistemic freedom, this framework allows IR and other subfields to more consciously consider a range of disciplinary strategies and to entertain the risks and affordances they each offer. The article concludes that a future independent discipline focused on the implications of ‘the international’ not just for politics but all fields – including disciplinarity – would make for a broader, more diverse IR, ultimately also better able to engage other disciplines.

3 - Sociology of Knowledge in the Era of Academic Dependency in Africa: Issues and Prospects

In recent years, sociology of knowledge – especially in terms of knowledge production, circulation and consumption – has been dominated by the global North, leaving the Third World, Africa included, in a dependent position. Many scholars have described this continued academic dependence as part of overall colonial and postcolonial relations between the centre and periphery, where the former is seen as the thinker, actor and speaker for the latter. There have been various critical agitations for the indigenisation of (social science) knowledge in order to liberate the Third World from the academic dependence that has been in force since the period of African colonisation. This critical review article summarises major contributions and different dimensions of the academic dependency paradigm within the social sciences. The relevance of social science on the continent of Africa, the nature and origin of academic dependence, as well as key areas that require adequate attention for the emancipation of social science knowledge in Africa are discussed. A reinvention of African scholarship is vitally important for epistemic freedom from intellectual dependence. African countries should not give up their exclusive local practices and norms, and must document and preserve them for the present and future generations. They must generate ideas, terminologies and research technologies that are amenable to African social realities.

Fatal misconceptions: colonial durabilities, violence and epistemicide in Africa’s Great Lakes Region

The contributions of this special issue explore the concept of colonial durabilities in a bid to unearth both the concrete and invisible sites through which coloniality continues to circulate and materialise in the African Great Lakes Region (GLR). Colonial durabilities, we argue, are non-linear dynamic processes that suffuse the realities and structures of international and national politics, as well as the conduct of daily life. These become particularly evident in the knowledge economy of the GLR, in endeavours as broad as state building and everyday practices, within international development and peacebuilding interventions, and in academic theorising, methodologies and writing formats. We introduce the papers in this special issue that urge us to address an important question: Can we truly decolonise if we do not fully understand the coloniality of the present and its effects? We argue a careful investigation of the structural conditions that enable coloniality to actively form and re-form is essential to accurately understand real-world ramifications of asymmetrical power relations, a crucial aspect of the process of decolonisation. Lastly, we reflect on avenues for re-thinking the effects of colonial durabilities and to work towards generating anti-/de-colonial knowledges to perhaps achieve ‘epistemic freedom’.

Reimagining Social Justice: Epistemic Freedom and the Marginalized Roles of Research Assistants in Knowledge Generation

Reimagining Social Justice: Epistemic Freedom and the Marginalized Roles of Research Assistants in Knowledge Generation

Researching higher education in Africa as a process of meaning-making: Epistemological and theoretical considerations

In this article, we argue for a new way of thinking about knowledge construction in African higher education as a basis for developing new theoretical and epistemological insights, founded on inclusivity, epistemic freedom, and social justice. We recognise coloniality as a fundamental problem that needs us to scrutinise our knowledge of decolonisation (about decolonisation itself) and our knowledge for decolonisation (to make change possible). Following Bourdieu (1972), such thinking also requires degrees of vigilance that entail fundamental epistemological breaks, or put differently, it requires epistemological decolonisation as a point of departure. Thus, the future of tertiary education in Africa must be located within a new horizon of possibilities, informed by a nuanced political epistemology and ontology embedded in the complex African experience and visibility of the colonised and oppressed. In short, there can be no social justice without epistemic justice.

Good Learning and Epistemic Transformation

AbstractThis study explores a liberatory epistemic virtue that is suitable for good learning as a form of liberating socially situated epistemic agents toward ideal virtuousness. First, I demonstrate that the weak neutralization of epistemically bad stereotypes is an end of good learning. Second, I argue that weak neutralization represents a liberatory epistemic virtue, the value of which derives from liberating us as socially situated learners from epistemic blindness to epistemic freedom. Third, I explicate two distinct forms of epistemic transformation: constitutive and causal epistemic transformation. I argue that compared with the ideal conception of epistemic virtue, constitutive epistemic transformation that involves good learning has a transcendent value in light of agents constantly renewing their default epistemic status toward ideal virtuousness.

THE DYNAMICS OF EPISTEMOLOGICAL DECOLONISATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY: TOWARDS EPISTEMIC FREEDOM

The problem of the 21st century in the knowledge domain is best rendered as the ‘epistemic line’. It cascades directly from William E B Dubois’s ‘colour line’ which haunted the 20th century and provoked epic struggles for political decolonisation. The connection between the ‘colour line’ and the ‘epistemic line’ is in the racist denial of the humanity of those who became targets of enslavement and colonisation. The denial of humanity automatically disqualified one from epistemic virtue. This conceptual study, therefore explores in an overview format, how Africa in particular and the rest of the Global South in general became victims of genocides, epistemicides, linguicides, and culturecides. It delves deeper into the perennial problems of ontological exiling of the colonised from their languages, cultures, names, and even from themselves while at the same time highlighting how the colonised refused to succumb to the ‘silences’ and fought for epistemic freedom. The article introduces such useful analytical concepts as ‘epistemic freedom’ as opposed to ‘academic freedom’; ‘provincialisation’; ‘deprovincialisation’; ‘epistemological decolonisation’; ‘intellectual extroversion’; and ‘epistemic dependence’. It ends with an outline of five-ways-forward in the African struggles for epistemic freedom predicated on (i) return to the base/locus of enunciation; (ii) shifting the geo-and bio-of knowledge/moving the centre; (iii) decolonising the normative foundation of critical theory; (iv) rethinking thinking itself; and finally (v) learning to unlearn in order to relearn.

Signifying Islamic Psychology as a Paradigm: A Decolonial Move

Abstract. Recognizing the fluidity around the definitions and boundaries of Islamic psychology (IP), I propose that the assumption of decolonial thought may help IP reimagine its vision, orientation, and directions. Distinguished by three fundamentals – epistemic freedom, liberation, and humanization – paradigmatic IP may harvest psycho-spiritual, cognitive, and affective resources as well as methodological, ethical, and metaphysical substance through the creation of an archive of Islamic humanism to speak back to all areas of psychology and cognate disciplines focused on human behavior. The espousal of decolonial thought locates IP within larger bodies of solidarity and decolonizing scholarship committed to pluriversal and transformatory enactments of knowledge.

The cognitive empire, politics of knowledge and African intellectual productions: reflections on struggles for epistemic freedom and resurgence of decolonisation in the twenty-first century

What has been the contribution of African intellectuals to postcolonial and decolonial scholarship? This question arises because there is emphasis on privileging works of Diasporic scholars from the Middle East and South Asia for postcolonialism and Diasporic scholars from South America for decoloniality/decolonisation. This article contributes to the complex politics of knowledge in Africa through centring often-ignored contributions of African intellectuals to the decolonisation of knowledge and politics. Conceptually and theoretically, what is introduced are issues of how epistemology framed ontology, how the cognitive empire invaded the mental universe of Africans, and how the quest for epistemic freedom informs resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the twenty-first century. Thus, the article performs four key tasks: (1) it explains how epistemology frames ontology as its entry into the topical politics of knowledge; (2) it introduces and defines the concepts of the cognitive empire and epistemic freedom as they enable a deeper understanding of the complex politics of knowledge; (3) it historicises African struggles for decolonisation as reflected in African decolonial scholarship and the quests for epistemic freedom; and (4) it makes sense of resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the twenty-first century as embodied by the Rhodes Must Fall movements in South Africa.