Epistemic Intervention Research Articles

Southeast Asia as a decolonial method of storytelling and epistemic intervention: A reading of Joshua Kam’s How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World (2020)

ABSTRACT This article examines Joshua Kam’s award-winning novel, How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World, against a conceptual reimagining of Southeast Asia. Drawing inspiration from Kuan-Hsing Chen’s model of “Asia as method”, it argues that, in the novel, Southeast Asia functions both as the setting and as a “method” of storytelling and epistemic intervention. “Southeast Asia as method”, it proposes, points to a Southeast Asia-centric methodological framework that, firstly, narrates a non-Eurocentric story about the region for a readership from the region and, secondly, contests, via fiction, the knowledge produced within the framework of western modernity that casts Southeast Asia and its people in deficit terms. The novel’s use of “Southeast Asia as method” is framed as a decolonial one, with a west-decentring grounding and strategy, and the article unpacks this method by drawing on three movements – delinking–linking, reconstitution, and re-existence – as conceptualized by Walter Mignolo.

Subaltern-centred Pedagogy: Field Notes and Reflections from Tunisia

Abstract This essay responds to the challenge of deconstructing the concept of democracy and decolonizing knowledge production. The authors, educators in secondary and higher education, grapple with the pedagogical dilemma of how to re-tell the stories of the marginalized and silenced ‘others’ in their classrooms. They explore the concept of ‘subalternity’ as a decolonial critique and a methodological perspective, with the aim of shifting the epistemic location of narratives about migration. This essay proposes a radical change in educational approaches, urging practitioners to listen to the subaltern rather than speaking for them, and to adopt a ‘subaltern-centered pedagogy’ (Reed 2013) to counter hegemonic and dehumanizing narratives about migration. By doing so, this reflective essay emphasizes the role of educators in fostering critical thinking and awareness about positionality. Before concluding, the authors call for a bold epistemic intervention in education systems, aiming to leave a lasting impact on pedagogical practices. They propose a process of unlearning through critical reflexivity to deconstruct Eurocentric and nationalist narratives, ultimately empowering students to become global citizens in a globalized world.

The politics of (un)counting international migration in Senegal and the Gambia

ABSTRACT Since the European ‘migration crisis’ in 2015, various actors in politics, media and science have called for better data as a basis to efficiently manage migration. This includes a rising demand for more reliable, timely and comparable statistics on the international movement of people, especially on the African continent. International Organizations (IOs) have responded by offering various forms of ‘capacity building’ to their member states. The article looks at the development of statistical knowledge production in Senegal and the Gambia, exploring how interventions by IOs have changed statistical data practices in West Africa. West Africa is a particularly interesting case because, until recently, most post-colonial states did not generate census or survey data on questions of international migration, citizenship or ethnicity. Drawing on recent works in Science and Technology Studies on the performative power of numbers and categories, the article argues that changing data practices have enacted multiple conflicting migration realities in West Africa. Looking at IOs’ epistemic interventions in Senegal and the Gambia, the article offers insights into the ontological politics of counting and categorizing migration in a post-colonial context. It also contributes to a better understanding of the co-production of statistical knowledge and programs of migration management.

Knowledge Born through (In)Justice: Gender Testing, Imposed Humiliation, and Epistemic Interventions in the Indian Hindi Film Rashmi Rocket

Knowledge Born through (In)Justice: Gender Testing, Imposed Humiliation, and Epistemic Interventions in the Indian Hindi Film Rashmi Rocket

After the epistemological turn: A framework for studying populism as a knowledge phenomenon

The recent epistemological turn in populism studies has produced many valuable insights pertaining to populist knowledge practices, conspiracy theories, information bubbles, and cognitive biases. However, various elements of populist epistemology are still studied separately, and there are no common theoretical assumptions that would arrange them into a comprehensive epistemic theory of populism. Thus, apart from presenting a preliminary mapping of recent changes in the field, the article proposes a basic theoretical framework for an epistemic approach to studying populism by conceptualising populism as a set of epistemic interventions: discursive and non-discursive practices that construe the people as a political subject and result in the emergence of a populist epistemic community. The article discusses how the latter concept may help to link discursive, performative, communicative, and cognitive elements of populism, along with describing key features of populist epistemic communities and indicating possible directions for future research on populist epistemology.

An Archaeology of Traces

Archaeology is centrally concerned with the tension between material remains in the present and a reconstructed past. This tension is captured by the concept of a trace, namely a contemporary phenomenon that references the past through some sort of epistemic intervention. Traces are deceptively complex in terms of both their epistemology and their ontology and hence worthy of detailed exploration. In particular, archaeological traces not only concern the past per se but also possess a latent quality of as yet unrealized signification. This gives archaeological traces a future orientation that is rarely considered in discussions of archaeological epistemology.

Identity Work as Response to Epistemic Intervention in Business School Education

Identity Work as Response to Epistemic Intervention in Business School Education

Can Canada become home without a house? The intersectional challenges to housing and settlement among refugees

Service providers’ crucial roles in securing housing for refugees in Canada is a topic scantly addressed in the broader literature. A focus on frontline workers in the housing and settlement sectors offers a productive analytic lens to map the critical link between service provision and housing access for refugees. Based on thirteen semi-structured interviews with service providers across nine organizations in Toronto, Canada, this study illuminates housing access barriers, such as lack of affordable housing and perceived housing discrimination. Furthermore, this paper unearths the intersectional praxis of frontline workers. Broadening the analytical frame to include an intersectional lens centring race, class, immigration status, and gender, this paper enriches current scholarship on 1) housing inequality, 2) refugee settlement, and 3) intersectionality. This paper also makes an epistemic intervention in the evolving field of housing studies at critical junctures. While this research was conducted prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, this study reflects on the added complexity of the pandemic to refugees’ housing access.

More Is Required of Us: Complicating an Ontology of Experience at the Heart of Community-Based Research

More Is Required of Us: Complicating an Ontology of Experience at the Heart of Community-Based Research

Managing ‘Wicked’ Technoscientific Problems: The Postnormal Science of Risk Narratives

Radioactive waste management in Malaysia remains a wicked problem, the result of extracting technoscientific knowledge for techno-economic and industrial science purposes. Early policies were not cognizant of the full extent of these risks. Moreover, wicked problems are complex problems that emerged out of interactions as a result of particular ecological conditions. Postnormal science (PNS) becomes the framework for the negotiation of these complexities. Science-based problem-solving is broadened to include non-science epistemologies, which enables the legitimation of participatory epistemic interventions from lay experts. The problems encountered in radioactive waste management resulted from the high-stake uncertainties involved in measuring and evaluating risks and their causes. Wicked problems arise when there are disagreements over the governance of risk; incomplete information received as a result of obtuseness in the decision-making process, or in the blackboxing of the risks occurrences and mechanisms of predictions; and contextual interpretations of data provided by different expert stakeholders that could culminate into misinformation. Wicked problems in the two cases to be discussed will be considered through these lenses: ambivalence over technoscientific authorities and the structures of (dis)trust, the over-reducibility of complex technoscientific problems, and the difficulties in enacting extended peer review when participatory practices were traditionally excluded from policy-making.

Breaking the frame: Obstetric violence and epistemic rupture

abstract The concept of ‘obstetric violence’ has emerged as an important legal and activist tool in the global quest for humane, equitable, and respectful maternal and intrapartum care. Over the last decade or so, the term has been elaborated as a legal concept in several countries of the Global South and has travelled across transnational boundaries, with scholars from diverse regions adopting the framework. In this paper, I argue that the term obstetric violence is not just a mode of description or a legal concept, but that it constitutes an epistemic intervention. By naming normalised modes of harm and violation as violence, this conceptual vocabulary challenges normative conceptions of pregnancy and birth. By rejecting the normalisation of reproductive oppression, the language of obstetric violence also constitutes a refusal of epistemic frames that silence, diminish, erase, and devalue alternative and embodied forms of reproductive knowledge and agency. I also argue that we need to consider and conceptualise obstetric violence not just as gender violence but as a specific form of violence against reproductive subjects. This means grappling with what makes this form of violence distinctive. It also means considering a broader entanglement of forces that work to coerce/constrain reproductive subjects beyond the scope of gender or the boundaries of ‘women’. Finally, I explore how Afro-feminist, decolonial, and queer challenges advance the focus on obstetric violence as violence against reproductive subjects, offering new directions that reiterate the epistemic rupturing potential of this conceptual apparatus.

Charlatan epistemology: As illustrated by a study of wonder-working in the late seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

This article highlights the epistemic concerns that have permeated the historical discourse around charlatanism. In it, I study the term "charlatan" as a multivalent actor's category without a stable referent. Instead of defining or identifying "the charlatan," I analyze how the concept of the charlatan was used to make epistemic interventions about what constituted credible knowledge in two interconnected controversies. Focusing on these controversies allows me to thematize how the concept of "the charlatan" expanded beyond medical contexts and to bring a history of knowledge perspective to the history of medicine.The title of the article, "Charlatan Epistemology," indicates a historical epistemological approach to charlatanism as well as the existence of a charlatan's embodied epistemology. On the one hand, I historicize the epistemic characteristics of charlatanism, focusing on virtues as well as vices, knowledge as well as ignorance, by addressing the historical and contextual specificities of two case studies and the larger epistemic concerns at play. On the other hand, I show how references to charlatanism implied the existence of specific embodied knowledges, special skills and techniques to manipulate either natural secrets or the human psyche, and I explore the similarities and differences between charlatan epistemology and artisanal epistemology.

Promoting Conceptual Understanding with Explicit Epistemic Intervention in Metacognitive Instruction: Interaction Between the Treatment and Epistemic Cognition

This study investigated the effect of the metacognitive instruction in which students’ epistemic cognitions were explicitly addressed, on tenth-grade students’ conceptual understandings regarding force and motion. The participants of the study included 107 (49 female, 58 male) tenth-grade students at two public high schools. A quasi-experimental design was employed. Two intact classes of each school were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. The Force and Motion Conceptual Tests I and II were administered to assess the students’ conceptual understandings in force and motion. A survey was applied to probe the students’ prior epistemic cognitions in physics. The results of the study revealed that the metacognitive instruction was more effective than the expository teaching in terms of promoting students’ conceptual understandings. A statistically significant interaction between the treatment and the students’ prior epistemic cognitions was also observed. The students with higher pre-epistemic cognitions got higher conceptual scores in the experimental group whereas the conceptual development of the control group students was independent of their pre-epistemic cognitions.

Financializing epistemic norms in contemporary biomedical innovation

The rapid, recent emergence of new medical knowledge models has engendered a dizzying number of new medical initiatives, programs and approaches. Fields such as evidence-based medicine and translational medicine all promise a renewed relationship between knowledge and medicine. The question for philosophy and other fields has been whether these new models actually achieve their promises to bring about better kinds of medical knowledge—a question that compels scholars to analyze each model’s epistemic claims. Yet, these analyses may miss critical components that explain how these models actually work and function. Using the case of translational medicine, this paper suggests that analyses which treat these models as a primarily epistemic interventions miss the way that new approaches are increasingly shaped by specific financial and commercial agendas. Ultimately, social epistemological analyses that are attentive to market forces are required to make sense of emerging bioscientific research models, which are increasingly tethered to or a manifestation of increasingly financialized models of science research and innovation.

Asuwada Epistemology and Globalised Sociology: Challenges of the South

Professor Akiwowo propounded the Asuwada Theory of Sociation in the 1980s as a contextual episteme to explain African social experience. The theory particularly attempts an indigenous postulation to social interactions among Africans in general and the Yoruba in particular. Its concepts attempt to emphasise contextual values of social beings who would contribute to social survival and community integration and development. This theory postulates that among Africans in general and the Yoruba in particular, the need to associate or co-exist by internalising and rightly exhibiting socially approved values of community survival and development, is integral to local social structure, as failure to co-exist potentially endangers the community. A deviant who defaults in sociating values is deemed a bad person ( omoburuku), while the one who sociates is the good person ( omoluabi). This theoretical postulation contrasts western social science theories (especially sociological Structuralist (macro) and Social Action (micro) theories), which rather emphasise rationality and individualism (at varied levels depending on the theory). Western social science ethnocentrically depicts African communal and kin ways of life as primitive and antithetical to development. Western social science theories have remained dominant and hegemonic over the years while Akiwowo’s theory is largely unpopular even in Nigerian social science curricula in spite of its potential for providing contextual interpretations for indigenous ways of life that are still very much extant despite dominant western modernity. This article examines the Asuwada Theory within the context of globalised social sciences and the complicated and multifaceted glocal challenges confronting the adoption of the Akiwowo’s epistemic intervention.

Qurʾānic Studies and Historical-Critical Philology

Qurʾānic scholarship in the west today tends to privilege historical queries, focusing on fragmented texts, their alleged subtexts, and the codex’s earliest venues of transmission. It usually abstains from attempts at making sense of the text as a literary artifact, let alone as an epistemic intervention into the reception of the Bible. Such concerns are left to philology which—if we follow Sheldon Pollock—is a tripartite venture: a query for “textual meaning,” an investigation into the text’s traditional understanding, i.e. its “contextual meaning,” and finally a re-thinking of one’s own scholarly preconceptions and responsibilities, the “philologist’s meaning.” Few topics are better suited to demonstrate the urgency of complementing historical with philological research than the Qurʾān’s controversial relation to the Bible. A fresh approach—updating the time-honored but somewhat fusty historical critical method—is required: a diachronic, yet contextual, and moreover holistic, reading of the Qurʾān. This paper will discuss texts that—featuring Muhammad and Moses respectively—reveal two major shifts in the relationship between the Qurʾān and Biblical tradition.Historical research should not be left alone: philology’s two assets, the contextual reading and moreover the researcher’s self-reflection, need to be admitted to the stage of Qurʾānic Studies. Christian interpretation of the Bible that, for historical and political reasons, has until now not taken the Qurʾān into account, could benefit substantially from the Qurʾān’s Biblical criticism, let alone its intrinsic challenge to rethink prevailing exclusivist positions.

: ---------------- (Epistemic Intervention: In Search of New Models of Cross-Disciplinary Interactions)

Russian Abstract: В работе исследуются условия и возможности осуществления эпистемических интервенций. Процесс импорта одними объяснительными нарративами ресурсов других теоретических языков иллюстрируется на материале анализа конкретных эмпирических кейсов с использованием возможностей языка эпистемологии и социальных наук. Основным результатом работы является построение концептуальной модели эпистемической интервенции, а также ее апробация и уточнение на основе конкретного историко-теоретического материала. Разработанная модель состоит из набора объяснительных схем, соответствующих аксиоматическому ядру дисциплины (региональной онтологии), и совокупности объясняемых феноменов (феноменального поля). Необходимым условием для успеха эпистемической интервенции является возникновение новой региональной онтологии, с помощью которой может быть объяснено то, что требует объяснения в рамках данной науки, и то, чем оно раньше объяснялось. Достаточным условием является специфика дисциплинарной среды, которая определяется замкнутостью каузальных рядов и внутренней гетерогенностью объяснений, присущих конкретной науке. В результате выявляются четыре способа реагирования дисциплин на вторжение в их сферу чужих объяснительных моделей: исключение, игнорирование, ассимиляция, оппортунизм. English Abstract: This paper investigates the conditions and the feasibility of epistemic intervention. The process of importing of resources of other theoretical languages by explanatory narratives is illustrated by the matherial of analysis of specific empirical case studies using language features of epistemology and social sciences. The main result of the work is the construction of a conceptual model of epistemic intervention, as well as its testing and refinement based on a particular historical and theoretical material. The developed model consists of a set of explanatory schemes corresponding axiomatic core of the discipline (regional ontology), and a set of explained phenomena (the phenomenal field). A prerequisite for the success of the intervention is epistemic emergence of a new regional ontology, with which can be explained by the fact that requires explanation in the framework of this science, and what it was previously explained. A sufficient condition is specificity of the disciplinary environment that defines a closed causal series and internal heterogeneity of explanation inherent specific science. As a result, four ways to respond to the invasion of foreign explanatory models in their sphere for disciplines are identified: exclusion, ignoring, assimilation, opportunism.

Consent to epistemic interventions: a contribution to the debate on the right (not) to know.

The debate on the 'right (not) to know' has simmered on for over 30 years. New examples where a right to be informed is contrasted to a right to be kept in ignorance occasionally surface and spark disagreement on the extent to which patients and research subjects have a right to be self-determining concerning the health related information they receive. Up until now, however, this debate has been unsatisfactory with regard to the question what type of rights-if any-are in play here and to what extent they can provide a normative basis for informed consent. This paper provides an analysis of informed consent in the context of 'epistemic interventions': interventions which involve the communication of (health-related) information. First, I offer an analysis of the concept of a 'right not to know' in the context of consent to epistemic interventions. I argue that the scope of the consent is determined by the extent to which this intervention can be seen as an infringement of the private sphere. After that I show how this analysis affects the scope and standards of informed consent.

Eviction and the archive: materials for an archaeology of the Archivo General de Indias

This essay outlines an experimental microhistory of the founding of the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Seville, Spain, one that attends to the localized exclusions that characterize this Enlightenment project. If the “archival turn” has highlighted in ethnographic terms the ways in which silences are inscribed in archival practices and protocols, I propose an archaeological approach that looks to the archive's material and architectonic foundations. The critical turn in eighteenth-century historiography was linked to the emergence of the modern, historical archive, and it is at the intersection of these methodological disputes and the geopolitics of imperial competition that the AGI was established. New scholarship by critical historians in northern Europe provoked calls for an official response in Spain, and this task fell to Juan Bautista Muñoz. His historiographical defense of Spanish colonialism would lead to not only the publication of his Historia del Nuevo-Mundo but also the founding of the AGI as the infrastructure of modern historiography. I read Muñoz's work as an epistemic intervention in ongoing debates over the writing of history that necessarily turns on an architectural intervention in the built environment – not a “domiciliation” but the eviction and subsequent erasure of the inhabitants of the building chosen to house the archive. By foregrounding this eviction and the renovations that followed, I underscore the violence that founds the modern archive, bring into relief the colonial materials from which it is assembled and trace a shift from the nomological to the historiographical as the ground of imperial sovereignty.

Sociology beyond despair: Recovery of nerve, endogeneity, and epistemic intervention

Sociology as a scholarly vocation within the university in South Africa is bedevilled with the claims of its demise. Both the discipline and a cross-section of its practitioners seem beset with ‘status anxiety’ and what I call ‘status ambiguity’ In this presidential address, delivered to the 2005 Congress of the South African Sociological Association (SASA), I examine these claims. The paper examines the sources of the anxiety. It argues that the claims of sociology's death are grossly exaggerated, as Mark Twain might have put it. I argue that if we were to operate on a wider canvas we might have persuaded ourselves to the position that the ebbs and flows in a discipline like sociology are not evidence of ‘death’, ‘fall’ or whatever else we might want to call it; it is not even an evidence of a discipline that is yet to attain maturity. The key to doing ‘sociology beyond despair’ and the recovery of disciplinary nerve requires a commitment to endogeneity, with a distinct commitment to epistemic intervention in global sociology; it requires us to take our locales seriously; it requires us to take ourselves seriously.