Epistemic Project Research Articles

Anticolonial thought, the sociological imagination, and social science: A reply to critics.

This essay responds to commentaries (this issue) on Go's "Thinking Against Empire: Anticolonial Thought as Social Theory" (this issue). The essay addressed shared concerns and underlying themes of the commentaries, most of which pivot around the problem of the anticolonial and the status of disciplinary sociology as a knowledge project. Is there a need for sociology to incorporate anticolonial thought? How does anticolonial thought as social theory differ from other epistemic projects? Is the distinction between sociology's imperial episteme and anticolonial thought fruitful or obfuscating? And what are the possibilities and limits of a social science informed by anticolonial thought? Ultimately, the essay maintains that anticolonial thought offers a powerful sociological imagination that can be fruitfully tethered to a project of realist social science. It also maintains that realist social science can be emancipatory; provided that it is reoriented by anticolonial thought.

Ethics and Epistemic Injustice in the Global South: A Response to Hopman’s Human Rights Exceptionalism as Justification for Covert Research

Abstract This article investigates the risk of epistemic injustice in conducting sociolegal research in Global South contexts. Diving into the ethical imperatives of honouring knowledge, agency, and voice, we challenge extractive research practices and reframe participants as active, legitimate bearers of knowledge. Covert research is a highly controversial research practice which bypasses the right to informed consent of participants. Marieke Hopman’s article titled ‘Covert Qualitative Research as a Method to Study Human Rights Under Authoritarian Regimes’ advocates for covert research in the field of human rights, provided this covert research passes her proposed ‘ethical test’. We argue that this test permits and requires practices of knowledge-making which unjustly silence, undervalue, and exclude the capacity of systematically marginalised communities to produce knowledge claims. Hopman’s ethical test requires researchers to translate participants’ testimonies and situated knowledge into a doctrinal human rights framework, which comes with certain onto-epistemological assumptions which may not be shared by participants. Her approach frustrates research participants’ agency in choosing their own epistemic projects. Finally, her test exacerbates structural inequalities between the Global North and Global South by reinforcing unequal power relations. We advocate for a situated ethics approach to mitigate epistemic injustice in socio-legal research in the Global South. Cross-cultural ethical dialogue between western and non-hegemonic ethics on a non-hierarchical and equal basis can contribute to building ‘intercultural ethics’. Reflexivity – where researchers critically examine their worldviews and social position throughout the research process – can ensure greater accountability and integrity. Reciprocity – building mutual research relationships and producing research useful to the researched – can help shift the power imbalance between the researcher and researched.

The different facets of 'experiential knowledge' in Swedish women's claims about systemic side effects of the copper intrauterine device.

'Experiential knowledge' has been identified as a key epistemic resource used by lay people to contest medical authorities and build new knowledge related to health. The Internet has created unprecedented opportunities for such experience-based epistemic projects. This article contributes to understandings of the as yet under-theorised concept of experiential knowledge by analysing accounts of a group of Swedish women who claim that their use of contraceptive copper IUDs has led to systemic side effects not recognised by health care providers. Based on digital group interviews and written essays, we distinguish between three components or stages of experiential knowledge at work in the women's use of experience as an epistemic resource: somatic knowing, collective validation and self-experimentation. Drawing on a critical realist framework, we defend a notion of experiential knowledge as crucially, while only partially, based on a bodily and practical access to aspects of reality organised by extra-discursive principles. By providing theoretical complexity to the notion of experiential knowledge, we contribute resources for discriminating between and evaluating various experience-based claims, something that is particularly needed in the current 'post-truth' era where experience-based knowledge claims pointing in divergent directions flourish.

Beyond the margins of metanarrativity: an inquiry on prejudice, decoloniality and cross-cultural discourse

This paper sets upon the elaboration of two inter-related enquiries: What do being and otherness look like beyond the margins of metanarrativity? What would the crossing of such margins entail? It takes as its basic assumption that prejudice arises from out of the historicity of being. A thesis of prejudice as a pre-reflexive operation or heuristic of the understanding a subject employs in order to arrive upon the conscious inclination to intuit that p is presented. Furthermore, it is posited that human understanding and rational inquiry are a fortiori grounded upon antecedent onto-phenomenological, hermeneutic and epistemic projects of being disclosed in metanarrativity. Metanarrativity, it is here maintained, constrains the horizon of intelligibility and truth in the discursive encounter of being with the “other” of alterity. It precludes the conditions of possibility for a non-prejudiced and value-neutral view in cross-cultural discourse. As such, it may be argued that an understanding of being and otherness cannot ascend the horizon of intelligibility without the sublating operation of prejudice. Prejudice, it is here argued, is sublating in the sense that it prefigures the possibilities for signification, subverting our interrogations from what is the state of affairs to mere intuitends of the form what it is like. Given that metanarrative discourses are invested in prejudice, it is therefore the task of decoloniality, set upon the cross-cultural discursive encounter between being and alterity, to take the physical appearance of an eschatology of liberation enacted in the everyday, performative praxis of non-domination.

Indeterminacies: Queer Tales of Love and Suffering

This is a meditation on love and suffering, pleasure and pain. Despite common sense, public discourse and scholarship narrating these states as diametrically opposed, the lived experience of queer romantic love cannot be disarticulated from the social realities of loss and pain. Suturing love and suffering is the metaphysic of indeterminacy, with the unexpected and uncertain marking romantic encounters and ambitions with precarity and impermanence. Drawing from vignettes gained through an ethnography on queer erotics in Sri Lanka in 2016, I explore how queer love manifests and perishes in the most inexplicable fashion, against the backdrop of structural violence and the vagaries of intersubjective relationalities. A sensitivity to indeterminacy enables an excavation of the elsewheres that inhere to and are conjured by queer romantic love, from the entanglements that live outside of the binaries of heterosexual-homosexual to the utopic futural imaginaries that are made possible at this site. Meanwhile, the suffering engendered by indeterminacy gestures to the precarities of elsewhere, and the transient nature of queer futurity. I engage scholarship on social suffering and romantic love to demonstrate how both corpora of literature are united at the site of the Sri Lankan queer figure, and how centring indeterminacy troubles epistemic projects that seek to know love and the lover with certainty.

Doing your own research and other impossible acts of epistemic superheroism

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an “infodemic” of misinformation and conspiracy theory. This article points to three explanatory factors: the challenge of forming accurate beliefs when overwhelmed with information, an implausibly individualistic conception of epistemic virtue, and an adversarial information environment that suborns epistemic dependence. Normally we cope with the problems of informational excess by relying on other people, including sociotechnical systems that mediate testimony and evidence. But when we attempt to engage in epistemic “superheroics” - withholding trust from others and trying to figure it all out for ourselves – these can malfunction in ways that make us vulnerable to forming irrational beliefs. Some epistemic systems are prone to coalescing audiences around false conspiracy theories. This analysis affords a new perspective on philosophical efforts to understand conspiracy theories and other epistemic projects prone to collective irrationality.

The poetics of togetherness: Conviviality of asylum-seekers in the shadow of Hong Kong

AbstractThis article examines the radical politics of a fragile togetherness on the margins of the state. A small but diverse group of long-term asylum-seekers found themselves in a decade-long limbo in Hong Kong, confronting an increasingly hostile border regime, and met regularly to ‘do something as a group’. Despite the lack of any breakthrough and advice to break away as individual cases, they have persisted in staying ‘as a group’. Drawing on participant observation with the group, Our Lives Matter, the article analyzes the ways these protracted asylum-seekers relate to each other as social beings, the mutuality and togetherness they cultivate, and the political possibilities opened up by such interconnections. Building on the scholarship of conviviality that examines ‘togetherness-in-differnece’, I develop the concept of poetics of togetherness to understand these asylum-seekers’ conviviality as practice, ethics, and a method of being otherwise on the margins, invariably dialoguing with, disavowing, and defying the center. Could conviviality as ethical and political projects create radical alternatives? The poetics of togetherness recognizes the precarity and divisiveness on the margins, while attending to the power of sociality and interdependence, and emergent forms of engagement. The simultaneous making of social and political agents opens up alternative possibilities of being, relating, and acting in the shadow of state violence. We gain insights into the dynamics between ‘margins’ and ‘center’ by understanding these practices and ethics of communality as political and epistemic projects to challenge and possibly transform uneven power dynamics and exclusionary structures.

Figures of Misery: The Berlin Housing Survey (1901-1920) as an Epistemic Project

From 1901 until 1920, Albert Kohn, director of the Berlin insurance organization Allgemeine Ortskrankenkasse, conducted a systematic housing survey of defective apartments. The work included statistics, reports, and photographs. I situate the project within the context of social surveys in the years around 1900. In the larger history of housing surveys, Kohn’s project was one of the first that amalgamated diverse media and data visualizations. The original publication exhibits a crucial connection between statistics, reports, and apartment photographs. I will show that both reports and photographs epistemically hinged on numerical data gained from a questionnaire. The assemblage of shocking figures in statistics, reports, and photographs was intended to make visible an epistemic object: the misery of the lower classes. Hence, Kohn’s depictions of urban misery did not depend on a specific form of representation, but rather on the consistency between descriptive registers.

Black place-making and epistemic decolonisation in Brazil: Rio de Janeiro’s Pequena África

ABSTRACT This article approaches the interconnections between Black place-making and epistemic decolonisation in contemporary Brazil. It discusses a region popularly known as Pequena África (Little Africa) in Rio de Janeiro’s harbour district. Taking Little Africa as a case study, the article contends that community organisers and members of the Black movement in this region are active knowledge producers via their everyday experiences and understanding of time and space. As such, the article suggests that acts of spatial reading and writing contribute to the decentring of Euro-Western perspectives and the valuing of subaltern epistemic projects. Considering these connections, it is argued that the social appropriation of space and meaning-making based on Little Africa’s material landscape has gone hand in hand with forms of resistance, encounter, and anti-colonial thinking. Accordingly, and in close dialogue with theorisations from decolonial studies and Black geographies, the article concludes that processes of knowledge decolonisation occur when historically underrepresented communities assert their spatial and temporal existence.

South African Social Science and the Azanian Philosophical Tradition

This article discusses the contemporary history of South African social science in relation to the Azanian Philosophical Tradition. It is addressed directly to white scholars, urging introspection with regard to the ethical question of epistemic justice in relation to the evolution of the social sciences in conqueror South Africa. I consider the establishment of the professional social sciences at South African universities in the early twentieth century as a central part of the epistemic project of conqueror South Africa. In contrast, the Azanian Philosophical Tradition is rooted in African philosophy and articulated in resistance against the injustice of conquest and colonialism in southern Africa since the seventeenth century. It understands conquest as the fundamental historical antagonism shaping the philosophical, political, and material problem of ‘South Africa’. The tradition is silenced by and exceeds the political and epistemic strictures of the settler colonial nation state and social science.

Evidence, Risk, and Proof Paradoxes: Pessimism about the Epistemic Project

Why can testimony alone be enough for findings of liability? Why statistical evidence alone can't? These questions underpin the ‘Proof Paradox’. Many epistemologists have attempted to explain this paradox from a purely epistemic perspective. I call it the ‘Epistemic Project’. In this paper, I take a step back from this recent trend. Stemming from considerations about the nature and role of standards of proof, I define three requirements that any successful account in line with the Epistemic Project should meet. I then consider three recent epistemic accounts on which the standard is met when the evidence rules out modal risk (Pritchard 2018), normic risk (Ebert et al., 2020), or relevant alternatives (Gardiner 2019 2020). I argue that none of these accounts meets all the requirements. Finally, I offer reasons to be pessimistic about the prospects of having a successful epistemic explanation of the paradox. I suggest the discussion on the proof paradox would benefit from undergoing a ‘value-turn’.

Palestinian Refugees of the Oslo Generation: Thinking beyond the Nation?

This article analyzes the political narratives and critiques of young Palestinian refugees who have grown up in the bleak post-Oslo period. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted with refugee youth in Jordan and the West Bank between 2009 and 2014, I show that this generation of refugees endorses a collective Palestinian identity and peoplehood with claims to the (home)land while also narrating their identities and relations to land, nation, state, and rights as complex, multifaceted, and fractured. Their political imaginaries do not limit the political and epistemic project of decolonizing Palestine to the classic paradigm of a territorialized nation-state as enshrined in the Oslo two-state agenda. Rather, they point to a creative and radical, post-nation-statist, translocal politics for Palestine.

The epistemic project of open diplomacy and the League of Nations: Co-evolution between diplomacy, PR and journalism

PurposeThe article discusses findings from a research project on the communication history of the League of Nations. It departs from the League's normative goal of “open diplomacy”, which, from an analytical standpoint, can be framed as an “epistemic project” in the sense of a non-linear and ambivalent negotiation by communication of what “open diplomacy” should and could be. The notion of the “epistemic project” serves as an analytical concept to understand this negotiation of open diplomacy across co-evolving actors' constellations from journalism, PR and diplomacy.Design/methodology/approachThe study employs a mixed-method approach, including hermeneutic document analysis of UN archival sources and collective biography/prosopography of 799 individual journalists and information officers.FindingsIt finds that the League's conceptualisations of the public sphere and open diplomacy were fluent and ambivalent. They developed in the interplay of diverse actors' collectives in Geneva. The involved roles of information officers, journalists and diplomats were permeable, heterogenous and – not least from a normative perspective – conflictive.Originality/valueThe subject remains under-researched, especially from the perspective of communication studies. The study is the first to approach it with the described research framework.

Epistemic Projects, Indispensability, and the Structure of Modal Thought

I argue that modal epistemology should pay more attention to questions about the structure and function of modal thought. We can treat these questions from synchronic and diachronic angles. From a synchronic perspective, I consider whether a general argument for the epistemic support of modal though can be made on the basis of modal thoughs’s indispensability for what Enoch and Schechter (2008) call rationally required epistemic projects. After formulating the argument, I defend it from various objections. I also examine the possibility of considering the indispensability of modal thought in terms of its components. Finally, I argue that we also need to approach these issues from a diachronic perspective, and I sketch how to approach this task.

Functionalism, the Panel of Recognised International Market Experts in Finance (PRIME) and Epistemic Projects in International Adjudication

While international lawmaking has long been a top down approach when seen from the perspective of states and the core narrative of “public international law”; that core, has for some time now been challenged by different branches in lawmaking on the international plane. Thus, for instance, in recent years, the expansion of and increase role of sub branches of international economic law have created a number of epistemic projects in international lawmaking that promotes and advances the narratives, interpretations and construction of international law based on the closed nature of the narrow self-interests of these epistemic projects. A good example of these epistemic projects is PRIME Finance – the Panel of Recognised International Market Experts in Finance. PRIME Finance emerged from an initiative of the London School of Economics (LSE) academic community in response to the global financial crisis and morphed into a global arbitral tribunal under the auspices of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) to render Advisory Opinions for disputes pertaining to complex financial transactions. PRIME Finance has now joined the long list of epistemic projects that shapes the process and development of international law from a bottoms-up approach. This article asks whether PRIME Finance is the last link in the global governance of financial institutions on international lawmaking or just part of a social circle.

Phenomenon-driven research and systematic research assembling: Methodological conceptualisations for psychology’s epistemic projects

This article contributes to psychology’s epistemic project by proposing a methodology that foregrounds the relation between research methods and subject matter. Considering method-driven and subject-driven approaches as being opposite poles of a continuum, the science of psychology has historically tended toward emphasising one or the other. Method-driven approaches claim legitimacy through an emphasis on a unifying standardised method, while subject-driven approaches insist on human-centred conceptions of psychology’s subject matter. Both poles are accompanied by one-sided methods-to-matter relations which limit the ways in which phenomena can be known in surprising and unforeseen ways. Phenomenon-driven research conceptualises the engagement with methods and matter as mutually intra-acting. Systematic research assembling points to the practical crafting of research activities through ongoing engagement with how phenomena can be known through intra-action. In our time of particularly unsettled, changing, and complex phenomena, psychology’s epistemic projects need methodologies that aim at ways of knowing that can bring out the unexpected.

Psychology’s epistemic projects

What are the epistemic projects of psychology? What insights does psychology seek to produce, and what kinds of knowledge are adequate for the psychological challenges of contemporary worlds? These are the fundamental questions we address in this special issue. Dating back more than a century, psychology emerged as a discipline in a specific context with specific challenges and tasks. Since then, societies, humans, and the world have changed, and the pace itself at which changes take place has accelerated considerably over the past couple of decades. It is time to pause and revise psychology’s epistemic projects. More than finding solutions to particular shortcomings, the discipline needs to reflect on how psychology comes to define particular phenomena as areas of scientific concern, what kinds of phenomena are relevant and for whom, and how the disciplinary shaping of psychological concerns has a bearing on what can and will be researched.

Knowing Neoliberalism

ABSTRACTCritical accounts over the past years have focused on neoliberalism as a subject of knowledge; there has been a recently growing interest in neoliberalism as an object of knowledge. This article considers the theoretical, epistemological and political implications of the relationship between neoliberalism as an epistemic subject and neoliberalism as an epistemic object. It argues that the ‘gnossification’ of neoliberalism – framing it an epistemic project, and deriving implications for political engagement from this – avoids engaging with numerous ambiguous elements of the production of knowledge. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘scholastic fallacy’ and Boltanski and Chiapello’s work in sociology of critique, the article lays out a framework for the study of the relationship between epistemic, moral, and political elements of critique of neoliberalism, including the conditions of its own production in contemporary academic contexts.

Future experiments from the past: Third Cinema and artistic research from below

This article examines possible articulations of artistic praxis and research in relation to social conflict and political struggle. Taking some of the guiding principles of Third Cinema, which we will consider here both a film strategy and an epistemic project “from below”, our aim is to provide elements for discussion to the current debates on art-as-research. Third Cinema, despite its specificities and differences with current times, provided a dialectical and dialogistic approach to artwork, which was conceived as an open realm for criticism, discussion, and struggle, inscribed within a radical political agenda. This article aims at recovering the importance of this critical movement in the arts and uses it as a source of inspiration to propose a series of insights on artistic research, in relation to contemporary interests in collaborative, long-term projects and the third wave of institutional critique. We seek to challenge commonsensical notions around four fundamental axes—experimentation; temporality; public sphere; and institutionalism—by confronting dominant views on these topics through what could be called a Third Cinema politics of artistic research from below—namely, from the perspective of those who embrace research as an intrinsic part of the creative and emancipatory potential of the arts.

Exploring the knowledge practices of psychology: Reflections on a field study

The epistemic project of psychology is currently under intense and broad debate. As a contribution to this debate—and as a deliberate attempt to steer the debate towards a more situated and material understanding of epistemology—this article presents a 2-month anthropological field study of how knowledge was produced among a group of psychologists in a psychology department at a Danish university. First, the article presents a detailed account of how this particular group of (cultural-historical) psychologists constructed knowledge in their daily practices. Second, the article discusses these specific knowledge practices in relation to a selection of contemporary pragmatic ideas about research, knowledge, and theorising. Finally, the article discusses how the study of this particular case of knowledge production may contribute to the broad current debates about psychology’s contemporary epistemic project and its role in society.