Epistemic Realities Research Articles

Negotiating local linguistic and epistemic realities through critical language pedagogy (CLP) in Pakistan

ABSTRACT With critical pedagogy (CP), teachers and students are empowered to disrupt the dominant ideological structures that tend to dehumanise people and impose oppressive historical consciousness upon them as historical subjects. Inspired by CP, over the last three decades critical language pedagogies have been conceptualised to promote social justice and counter privileged ideologies. This study examined university teachers’ pedagogical engagement with students’ local multilingual resources and epistemologies in the Remedial English classes at Pakistani universities. The study made use of theoretical insights such as coloniality, raciolinguistic perspectives and critical scholarship on multilingualism. Findings suggest that some teachers maintained the linguistic and epistemic hierarchy that favoured English, American/British accent, Anglo-western literature and culture, while other created multilingual and epistemic spaces where students’ local languages, nativized English varieties, culture and values could find a place. Furthermore, the Remedial English course perpetuated a gap between word and world by ignoring students’ contemporary concerns, such as discursive (values, culture) as well as material (unemployment, corruption, human rights, environmental degradation, etc.) factors. Some teachers’ use of bottom-up agency to counter foreign literature and a monoglossic model of instruction suggests how some teachers with a critical pedagogical attitude can empower their students to reclaim their historical and social roots.

Muuseumikogude potentsiaali kaardistamine päritolu-uuringute kaudu

This article focuses on the possibilities created through provenance research in the museum. Setting out current interest in provenance research against the backdrop of antiracist and decolonial movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, the article focuses specifically on the history of research in ethnographic museums shaped by legislative acts such as NAGPRA in the USA, critical thinking about representational practices in anthropology, and collaborative work with originating communities. Using the Siberian collection acquired by Maria Czaplicka in 1914 and held at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford as a case study, I argue that broad-ranging and open-ended provenance research akin to anthropological fieldwork allows to uncover different narratives pertaining to museum objects. It enables to understand why and how the objects were brought to the museum, the kinds of epistemic realities they have helped to build but also to attend to different cultural meanings and realities embedded in these objects. A close historical study of the Czaplicka collection has added to our understanding of the nature of ethnographic research in the early 20th century, brought to attention immoral acquisition of grave goods and human remains during the Siberian expedition but also highlighted close relations between ethnographers and their Indigenous hosts. Contemporary fieldwork in Siberia and creative engagement with the collection have further broadened the understanding of the origin of these objects in relation to Evenki worldview and lived experience. Through such nuanced research, a “thick description” emerges that enables a museum interpretation that can speak to the emergence of drifts and fault lines in the society, bring different worldviews into one space, and within that space address topics of global concern.

Making of the Sacred in India: Religious or Social Othering?

Sacred in ecclesiastical terms is understood as something kept apart towards attainment of ‘real’ for the social group where real is transcendental. The group is generally considered as one unit, and, therefore, religion in this way becomes instrumental in attainment of higher end of all. Hinduism, when analysed as a religion, provides an epistemic reality of othering in the society and sacred text becomes basis for origin and continuation of peculiar social stratification in India. Looking in this way, Hinduism defies some universal characteristics assigned to the term ‘religion’, especially on the progressive count, and appears to be static and status quoist. This paper is an attempt to highlight such an aspect with the help of a meticulous and erudite analysis by Dr B. R. Ambedkar.

Artificial Intelligence and the Marginalization of the Poor

Artificial Intelligence aims at recreating human intelligence through a computer program. AI programmers tend to see intelligence as what they have, so it reflects the vision of wealthy, able-bodied, white men. This paper examines the experience of poverty in the first world as a challenge to AI research. The poor tend to have their interests dominated and denigrated by the upper classes, make choices good and ill out of desperation for survival, and experience a fractured consciousness of their class status as a result of their situation and exploitation. These epistemic realities are foreign to an AI whose aim is optimal choice selection. As a result, the more common place AI algorithms become for making decisions, the more marginalized we should expect the epistemologies of the poor, and consequently the poor themselves, to be. A Catholic ethic based in the “option for the poor” must prioritize the epistemology of the poor over current AI work and resist definitions of intelligence that fail to account for “the least of these.”

Trust/distrust in Multi-disciplinary Collaboration

In this paper we theorize trust as emerging in different material/infrastructural and epistemic realities as part of our multidisciplinary collaboration about water, called Neighborhood Environments as Socio-Techno-Bio Systems: Water Quality, Public Trust, and Health in Mexico City (NESTSMX)”. This collaboration, led by feminist anthropologists, brings together anthropology, environmental-public health, and environmental engineering researchers to analyze how neighborhoods as “socio-techno-bio systems” shape how people trust or distrust water. Our project follows the infrastructures and social structures that move water in and out of neighborhoods, households, and bodies making them trust it more or less. At the same time our multi-disciplinary research team inhabits different epistemic research environments that creates tensions about how we make knowledge and what counts as data. Trust and distrust then shapes how we constitute both our object of inquiry and how we know it.

Disagreements as a form of knowledge: How journalists address day-to-day conflicts between sources

Disagreements over facts, in which news sources are leading journalists in opposite directions, are an ultimate test of journalists’ knowledge, forcing them to develop their own understanding of the actual state of affairs. This study focuses on how reporters think, act, and establish knowledge during the coverage of day-to-day disagreements – contrary to former studies, which focused on large-scale scientific and political controversies based on content analysis that narrowed their exposure to the epistemic realities of disagreements. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative reconstruction interviews we show that rather than eliciting an ‘epistemic paralysis’, as widely expected in the literature, disagreements attract significantly greater knowledge-acquisition energy. Findings support the problem-centered approach of epistemology and pragmatics that highlight the complexities of disagreements, rather than the adjudication-centered approach of journalism studies, which push for more journalistic ‘bottom lines’. Maximizing adjudication seems too ambitious and unrealistic for the time frame of daily reporting and the mixed epistemic standards seen in this study.

Praye(red)

This performance uses a poem autoethnographically to engage the poet-researcher’s lived experiences in order to examine the relationship of their identity intersections (queer, Latinx, gender non-comforming) to their culture(s) through the current events that inform their experiences and identities. Identifying as gender non-comforming, the poet uses terms like “Latinx” and the pronoun “they” to simply state and relate to a line of Sylvia Plath’s the Bell Jar that “I am, I am, I am.” The usage of literature helps the poet become aware of what they are feeling. Using poetic autoethnography, these pieces strive to amplify the emotions—sadness, anger, anxiety, and fear—that stem from their positionality in relation to events like the tragedy in Orlando. Further, using poetry to engage in embodied and often hidden epistemic realities, the poet looks to the relationship of identity, culture, and the gender/queer, Latinx body that carries this cumulative knowledge from lived experience to lived experience to express those feelings. Using these poetic connections, the poet strives to question their existence in the current world, and make sense of their authenticity.

Tuskegee University experience challenges conventional wisdom: is integrative bioethics practice the new ethics for the public's health?

The Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care was established in 1999 in partial response to the Presidential Apology for the United States Public Health Service's Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male conducted in Macon County, Alabama, from 1932 to 1972. The Center's mission of promoting equity and justice in health and health care for African Americans and other underserved populations employs an integrative bioethics approach informed by moral vision. Etymological and historical analyses are used to delineate the meaning and evolution of bioethics and to provide a basis for Tuskegee's integrative bioethics niche. Unlike mainstream bioethics, integrative bioethics practice is holistic in orientation, and more robust for understanding the epistemic realities of minority life, health disparities, and population health. The conclusion is that integrative bioethics is relevant to the survival of all people, not just a privileged few; it could be the new ethics for the public's health.

Representação Social do Aluno na Sala de Aula e seu Estilo no Ato de Aprender

The concept of social representation theorized in this study is based on procedural approach advocated by Moscovici and Jodelet. The social representation is a common sense knowledge. It is an approach that is now in the field of interdisciplinary dialogue, in that it attempts to symbolize, to appoint and entangling relations with social reality. Social representations direct their gaze to understand how epistemic reality constructs the reading of symbols found in everyday life. It is a theoretical concept that invites us to think and feel that social representations are linked with cognitive and social, but the subjective aspects, such as the affection and the unconscious, are part of that representational drawing. It is possible that this object of study reveal a need for the teacher to build constitutive processes, seeking to escape the repetition of creation and that his speech, his affection and style reflect what the student wants to learn in the classroom.

SABERES Y ENTORNOS: NOTAS PARA UNA EPISTEMOLOGÍA DEL TERRITORIO1

Territory is a reality which manifests itself through a plurality of areas and factions that we will call here perspectives. Two of them seem to us, theoretically, are always correlative: the metaphysical perspective and the epistemological perspective. According to the first, territory is a kind of effective reality, though not always in a concrete fashion, while the second is a notional reality, a concept, a theory. In this essay we approach territory through this second condition, reviewing what we generally understand as epistemic reality; and what territory seems to be to us in regard to an epistemic reality, and we indicate the correlations that appear between both perspectives.

Aboriginal Educational Policy in Ontario (Canada): Professional and Moral Implications for Catholic Teachers

This paper presents the policy context of Ontario (Canada) education for Catholic teachers. The analysis suggests that a seminal policy related to Aboriginal education compels Catholic teachers to profound considerations of what it means to teach in the Catholic faith. More specifically, it suggests that the policy, when juxtaposed to the other policies and practices, force Catholic teachers to account for ideological and political implications related to their practice. It is argued that Catholic teachers are bound to analyze critically the tensions and complexities of Aboriginal students’ epistemic realities and the profound socio-political implications that contribute to a new and different level of professional and moral responsibility.

EUROPE AND AFRICAN THOUGHT SYSTEMS AND PHILOSOPHIES OF EDUCATION

This essay problematizes the place of African thought systems and philosophies of education in the European Canon. It also looks at the theoretical and analytical perspectives this Canon has spread across the globe, which trivialized Africa histories, epistemic realities and epistemologies. The essay engages a brief summary of the works of select but prominent European philosophers and situates them in the context of European colonialism and post-colonial discursive hegemonies that continue to marginalize African worldviews and ways of knowing. To analytically counter-weigh these hollow assertions about Africa, the article introduces new as well as previously well-known, anti-colonial writings by both emerging and established African philosophers and cultural critics. The essay also makes use of other works that are relevant for this exercise. At the end, the essay proposes possible ways of advancing and harnessing the rich and life wise, effective platforms and trajectories of African thought systems and philosophies of education.