Epistemic Traditions Research Articles

Toward a globally inclusive knowledge base on adolescent development: A charge to the Majority World and a plea for epistemic and paradigmatic pluralism.

Ongoing internal dialog on the limitations of Euro-American developmental science has opened up space to explore how best to work toward a knowledge base that is adequately representative of the values, cultures, epistemic traditions, and lived experiences of peoples, nations, and regions around the world. So far, recommendations for the advancement of a global developmental science have focused preponderantly on (1) methodological considerations and (2) an architecture to support cross-disciplinary international collaborative inquiry and/or enhance research capacity building for Majority World scholars and institutions. In this commentary, instead of focusing on specific contributions to the Special Issue, I make a case for an explicit commitment to field-building within Majority World contexts as the primary gap-closing path toward the cultivation of a global developmental science knowledge base. I begin with a worldwide population analysis to demonstrate the magnitude of geopolitical, eco-cultural, and epistemic imbalances inherent in the shaping of Euro-American developmental science. In tandem with the Special Issue's central theme, I draw on scholarship from the fields of history, sociology, and political economy to link decolonial theory to the advancement of a global developmental science. Finally, I explore ways in which exemplary research establishments already engaged in prolific inquiry and research training may be ideal candidates to support field-building and help to advance multidisciplinary inquiry within an ethos of epistemic and methodological pluralism.

Introduction: MoHoA guest editorial

AbstractThis special edition of Curator on Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene draws on the 2nd International MoHoA conference of the same title held from October 26 to 28, 2022, at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UK), in partnership with the University of Liverpool's School of Architecture. As a global collaborative established in 2020, MoHoA is concerned with decentring the theory and practice of modern heritage and joins the wider global effort to decolonize institutional practices that engage with the research, collection, valorization, or transformation of material culture associated with our collective recent past—from museum curators and creative practitioners to academics, and the built environment professions. Founded on the fact that our precarious present reflects an inequitable past and a perilous future, MoHoA asserts that modern heritage—inextricably bound as it is to Western notions of progress, modernization, and modernity—conceptually, practically, and as artifact, uniquely and disproportionately privileges western, invariably white, experiences and values. Unlike other kinds or classifications of heritage, modern heritage also reflects the existential paradox central to MoHoA whereby the cultural legacies of our recent past are simultaneously of modernity and yet threatened by its consequences. Through its workshops, conferences, publications, and website, MoHoA provides a platform for sharing knowledge, methods, and approaches that challenge the modernist canon and support the construction of new epistemologies centered not on race, color, or ethnicity but on humankind and our self‐inflicted precarious position on this planet. This epistemic and canonical reconfiguration has important implications for museums and heritage practice globally as the reconstitution of modern heritage and its associated modes of knowledge production and registers will direct the composition of collections, lists, and archives away from mythologizing hegemonic Western epistemic traditions, to reflect instead decentred planetary experiences, whether human or non‐human. An important outcome of this collective and restitutive endeavor is the publication of The Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage, an equitable and decentering policy proposal presented to UNESCO and its advisory bodies in 2023.

Access, health, re‐conhecimento: Co‐crafted Brazilian discourses on sustainable food

AbstractAcademic discourse on food justice and sustainable food consumption needs to be informed by empirical contributions and heterogenous conceptualisations from diverse parts of the world. This paper broadens the dialogue with a variety of voices and knowledges, rooting itself not only in the specific political and social context, but also the discursive and epistemic traditions of Brazil, which stand in dialogue with international discourses. Firstly, an analysis is offered of the multi‐stakeholder process that since the mid‐1990s shaped the discourse, theorisation and policy making on food justice and sustainable food consumption in Brazil. Emerging from this process were globally leading Brazilian policy initiatives such as Zero Hunger, the School Feeding Program, the progressive Food Guide, and co‐crafted concepts such as comida de verdade. The institutional architecture for this discourse, the National Food Council and regular conferences, were dismantled in 2019 after a change in government. Secondly, the paper presents data from 30 interviews with key stakeholders from civil society, policy, business, media and celebrity influencers, conducted at the time of the dissolution. Three key subdiscourses on sustainable food consumption emerge: access, with an emphasis on right to food; health; and re‐conhecimento, a term we use to articulate the confluence of multiple knowledges and consciousnesses, including an insistence on the cultural role of food. Throughout the interviews, co‐crafted concepts and phrases emerging from the multistakeholder process reverberated. The paper argues that the multi‐stakeholder process resulted not just in a coherent shared discourse, concepts and policy during a period of conducive policy environment, but also in collective resilience. The invisible edifice of shared ideas and commitments around this public issue is still intact and may be reactivated in future. In times of increased political polarisation, not just in Brazil, this is an important argument for investing in such long‐term multi‐stakeholder dialogue processes.

Beyond the debate: decolonisation, decoloniality and the reframing of development in Africa

ABSTRACT The paper argues that the current quest for decolonisation and decoloniality struggles are primarily embodiments of disenchantment with the development doldrums in the continent after decades of political independence. While both decolonisation and decoloniality sound like intellectual pursuits concerned with knowledge production, they are in essence efforts towards recasting and rebooting development in the continent. Despite ingrained differences both decolonisation and decoloniality, aspire towards unmasking the futility and incompleteness of Euro-American epistemological traditions and worldviews. Despite differences in the usage of concepts, both decolonisation and decoloniality reframe the notion of ‘delinking’ made popular by Samir Amin. In effect, Amin may rightly be conceived as a precursor of the decolonisation struggle. Apart from agitating for a pluriversality of epistemic traditions and ‘ways of knowing’, both decolonisation and decoloniality seek to reposition Africa in global relations of power and politics and from the above engender sustainable development.

Communicative Pathways

Testimony and witnessing require sentiency, not humanity. Sentiency is distinguished here as the capacity to experience energetic coalescing between elements/entities/presences and to derive a response from such encounters. Taking as its focal point the kincentric ecology and lifeworld of Yanyuwa Country in the south-west Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia, this paper strives to expand the conceptual roots for a discussion of testimony and witnessing through the principle of “unflattening.” Unflattening is a commitment of orientation, one that counteracts the type of narrow, rigid thinking that is flatness, a condition in which humans are often unable to see past the boundaries of current frames of mind, the limits of our existence, our ontology, epistemic and moral habit (Sousanis, Unflattening (Harvard UP, 2015)). In a settler colonial context such as Australia, these are conditions which reflect a dominant epistemic tradition of the West, which relies upon certain ontological habits, reflective of a capitalist, modern, neo-liberal and individualistic tendency. But this is not the only Law and way of knowing that exists across the great landmass of Australia, mapped as it is by the languages and Laws of diverse Indigenous language groups. In Yanyuwa Country, communication between multifarious agents is common, ranging from those between humans, deceased kin who reside as “old people” in Country, Ancestral Beings which have become the embodiment of Country, non-human animals, elements, objects and places. Each and all are capable of communicating; be it as expressions of recognition of one another, revelation of emotional states, health or disorder, responsivity to the presence of others, Law and local empiricism. Drawing on my ethnographic encounters with Yanyuwa families, I aim, throughout this paper, to unflatten on three fronts: first, expand the relational scope of potential communicative pathways to take in sentient presence as a catalyst for relationality (carried forth by responsiveness to and between presences), second, examine the multidimensional nature of testimony and third, expand our vision of the enactment of witnessing – to consider who, what and when. I consider Indigenous, specifically Yanyuwa, relational ontologies as they bond and unify the human and non-human across a field of sentiency and communicative intention, shifting the focus or primal orientation to either side of and all around the human.

Creativity, pursuit and epistemic tradition

This paper revisits the standard definition of scientific creativity in the contemporary philosophical literature. The standard definition of creativity says that there are two necessary, and jointly sufficient, conditions for creativity, novelty and value. This paper proposes to characterize the value condition of creativity in terms of “pursuitworthiness”. The notion of pursuitworthiness, adopted from the recent debate on scientific pursuit in philosophy of science, refers to a form of prospective epistemic worth. It indicates that a certain object (such as a scientific hypothesis) is promising or has the potential to be epistemically fertile in the future, if further investigated. To support the claim that creative scientific instances are, qua creative, valuable in the sense of pursuitworthy, three examples of creative hypotheses taken from the history of the geosciences are introduced: MacCulloch's continuity hypothesis in mid-19th-century geology, Baron et al.‘s phylogenetic hypothesis in contemporary paleontology, and the widely discussed Anthropocene hypothesis.

Rethinking Ignorance Through Confucianism and Daoism: Propriety, Transcendence, and Their Educational Implications

Purpose Ignorance has been seen as negative in the mainstream philosophical narrative and knowledge-based society. This study introduces Chinese epistemic traditions of Confucianism and Daoism as resources to reunderstand ignorance and current educational issues. Design/Approach/Methods Guided by hermeneutic openness, this study fuses ancient epistemic and modern educational horizons by reinterpreting early Confucian and Daoist classics. Findings The boundary between ignorance and knowledge is flexible and blurry in Confucianism and Daoism, and ignorance is distinctively understood as Confucian admissible propriety and Daoist transcendence of conventional knowledge. Rooted in these epistemologies, Confucianism and Daoism have developed unique educational ideas and forms— congyou (从游) and zuowang (坐忘)—which advocate moral socialization and self-reflexivity beyond knowing through language. These traditions inspire today's educators and learners to find more space for self-formation, appropriate forgetting, and illuminating intuition in education. Originality/Value As an initial exploration, this study examines potential nonnegative ignorance and its educational implications in Confucian and Daoist wisdom. The findings are instructive for rethinking today's knowledge-based society and the text-oriented education of Chinese culture and can contribute to world epistemic diversity and cultural interactions.

Understanding emerging from interspecies relations: Horses, pigs, insect hotels, peat bogs in artistic practices, inquiries and processes of becoming to understand in research-writing

This thematic issue of Research in Arts and Education focuses on exploring research with species other than humans. In the original call, my co-editor Helena Sederholm and I named animals, plants, lichen, moss, and fungi as possible others, or rather partners with whom the carried out artistic and arts-based research could be carried out. The first volume of this special issue was published in 2022. Almost a year later, we publish this second volume that has a particular emphasis on the contradictory, paradoxical relations humans have with other species, the natural processes that are part of human life as well as with the conflicting and exploitative relations humans have built with particular species or places. The authors focus on personally built relationships and encounters with individual living or dead animals, while other authors bring attention to and investigate culturally built notions and contradictory practices that have become normative, dominant practices or perceptions. These articles and visual essays are characterized by posthumanist and postmaterialist orientations and although their strategies and approaches for research and art practices vary, their orientation can be characterized to be driven by exploratory criticality as well as deep reflection guided by sensitivity to arts and other epistemic traditions. As such, they are deeply involved in modes of increasing understanding with and through art.

Teaching the normal and the pathological: educational technologies and the material reproduction of medicine

ABSTRACT That pathology and normality exist on a complex spectrum of bodily manifestation is an enduring problem at the heart of the philosophy, anthropology and history of medicine. As the primary locus for the reproduction of medicine, medical schools are important sites for cultivating knowledge of what is normal and what is not. Here students come to engage with the slippery concepts of normality and pathology in collaboration with a wide range of educational technologies – the cadavers, plastic models, illustrations and diagnostic tools which corral student knowledge of the body in both health and disease. These technologies are not universally employed across medical faculties, and variations in their use contributes to various constructions of pathology and normality. Ethnographic observation and historical research in medical faculties in Hungary, the Netherlands and Ghana, shows that educational practices are shaped by the epistemic traditions which manifest in the material environment of the medical school, and that these different sociomaterial settings contribute to inconsistent notions of normalcy. Although educational technologies often tend towards fixity in their representations of the body in health and disease, medical school practice in the north of Ghana resists the imposition of the often alien standards typically found in teaching materials imported from Europe or North America. By teaching around and beyond these materials, Ghanaian educators also challenge their assuredness and the intellectual history of contemporary medicine.

Intertextual Continuities: Intergenerational, Multimodal, and Translingual Knowledge Production in Literature by Black German-speaking Authors

Intertextual Continuities:Intergenerational, Multimodal, and Translingual Knowledge Production in Literature by Black German-speaking Authors Andrea Dawn Bryant (bio) In her 1997 article "The Challenge of 'Missing Contents' for Canon Formation in German Studies," literature scholar Elke Frederikson commences a well-versed and intertextual reckoning with the power of the canon to limit and exclude large portions of the human experience1 by recalling a comment by Paul Lauter listing multiculturalism and feminism as something requiring one "to learn new texts, new histories, new conceptions of culture" in ways that open, rather than close, one's mind.2 In my book project, I grapple with issues of canonization, community, and humanity as Frederikson and Gross3 did three decades prior. I thus encounter a reckoning with many of the same complicities contained in canonization of literary texts. More specifically, I traverse within and across varied mellifluous texts by German-speaking writers of the African diaspora. I accomplish these aims by underscoring the continuity of literary production and through visiting four sites of epistemic literary production: intertextuality as a writerly gesture; intergenerational continuums as manifestations of (a) dynamic literary tradition(s); multimodality and translinguality as sites of literary and epistemic resistance(s); and a return to intertextuality as a readerly manifestation. Commencing, as Elke Frederikson did in 1997, through the voices of previous scholars, I observe the ongoing exchange and dynamic dialogue taken on by the nuances of intertextuality, which is understood to mean the conscious amplification of messages produced by previous authors through written, gestural, and spoken repetition. I argue that the intertextual amplification of knowledge production and literary products provides a sustainable and generative continuum that exhibits literariness and contributes to the creation of an adhesive body of work. As I show, the same is true with the cultural, knowledge, and literary production of Black German-speaking writers and authors, which remains anchored in rich literary and epistemic traditions. In the second site of epistemic and literary production, I approach the topic from an intergenerational point of view and recognize the texts as exhibiting additional nuance and depth. My considerations in this realm highlight the generative continuum of works across several generations. Cyclical rather than linear, ongoing dialogues additionally underscore that the literary narrative cannot be bound to one historical framing of identity or belonging;4 rather, they span across generations and demonstrate the dynamic and living presence of individual voices pronouncing them. Indeed, they remain in constant communication across expanses of time, space, language, and place, and transcend those borders of existence and belonging where human limits of bias, location, and oppression refuse them this possibility. These intergenerational [End Page 139] enunciations of canon confirm that the epistemic literary production in works by Black German-speaking writers is full of variation, richness, and nuance. My considerations of border crossings, although limited by the weights of structural oppressions and systemic racisms, progress through several encounters of translingual and multimodal productions of language and sound. These interrelated sites go against the grain to inscribe belonging in canon and existence.5 In this nexus, I link translinguality with transnationalism and multimodality with intergenerationality. I underscore the influence of diasporic resources6 and the affective bonds present in the Black German movement7 and subsequently highlight the possibility of translingual modes of existence8 to push for social justice and activism9. Coming full circle to my position as a reader, I consider how my stance has influenced my experiences and perceptions of the chosen sites of production and literary texts. I additionally grapple with my readerly positionality as a white middle-aged settler woman from the United States who has academic training in the colonial language of German. It is against this backdrop that I further engage with broader questions related to white supremacy and our predispositions to canonize. Throughout the project, I question what a dominant fixation on the written as opposed to the spoken word suggests about the nature of which epistemologies are valued. I highlight those texts by Black German-speaking women and blend literary genres throughout the project. While these aspects have been incorporated in previous scholarship, few combine them in monographs on literary texts and even...

L’habitus de Freud et la naissance de la psychanalyse. Une approche sociohistorique

ContextThe history of Freud's “creation” of psychoanalysis has given rise to numerous controversies, which concern the very status of psychoanalysis. These controversies first oppose “official” historiography, which sees in psychoanalysis the expression of Freud's genius, to “revisionist” historiography, which posits that Freud borrowed all of his ideas from the sciences of his time. These controversies then pit analysts against each other: some think there is a straight line between Freud's medical education and the creation of psychoanalysis, others stress that he abandoned his medical knowledge as soon as he adopted psychology. ObjectivesOur aim is to discuss these two oppositions: the one between Freud as “genius” vs. Freud as “opportunist,” and the one between the “naturalist” tendency (which links psychoanalysis to medical theories and natural sciences) and the “humanist” tendency (which links it to psychotherapy and human sciences). MethodUsing Bourdieu's concept of habitus, we study Freud's invention of psychoanalysis according to the state of the social and scientific fields in the second half of the 19th century and his trajectory within these fields. ResultsWe first study Freud's social origins, regarding his Jewishness and the evolving conditions of the Jewish community in 19th-century Austria-Hungary. These origins will dictate Freud's propensity towards strategies of subversion (rather than continuation) within the scientific field. We then turn to his professional trajectory, showing how he had to give up the world of research to become a practitioner. We study this trajectory in light of the emergence of the new psychology as well as the hierarchy that was established (in the Germanic countries of the late 19th century) between medical research and medical practice. ConclusionWith a socio-historical approach, we can understand Freud's creation of psychoanalysis in light of his trajectory (incorporated as a habitus) and the state of the social and scientific fields, rather than by invoking his “genius.” This approach, however, shows that psychoanalysis’ originality was to establish a new kind of knowledge by borrowing from heterogeneous epistemic traditions. It also demonstrates that the hybrid character of this discipline (between psychotherapeutic practice and medical theory, between human science and natural science) relates to its historical origins. Freudian psychoanalysis (like psychology, to which it is related), took shape, on the one hand, through borrowings from philosophy and medicine, and, on the other hand, articulates scientific research and psychotherapeutic practice.

The Impact of Incorporating Indigenous and Other Nontraditional Ways of Mathematical Knowing into a University-Level Geometry Course

During the Fall 2021 semester, the author taught a university-level geometry course into which they incorporated texts and discussions on mathematics and mathematical epistemology from outside of the “Western” tradition typically centered in college math curricula. Analysis of student survey responses and students’ reflections on their work offer some evidence that even minimal engagement with these nontraditional perspectives, facilitated intentionally, led to increases in students’ appreciation of other epistemic traditions. Though the smallness of the sample size prohibits drawing broader conclusions, the significance of some findings suggests a critical need for further study of these pedagogical practices.

Epistemic Rhetoric in Virtual Reality Interactive Factual Narratives

The turn to Interactive Digital Narratives to understand complexity offers a new model for creating, developing, and maintaining knowledge. At the same time, storytellers have turned their attention to Virtual Reality (VR). The confluence of these trends draws attention to how non-fiction practitioners can use the technical and aesthetic affordances of VR to create knowledge about complex subjects through the IDN form. This article explores the epistemic rhetorical nature of using narrative discourse in VR to create knowledge about a non-fiction subject. The IDN community has not addressed this rhetorical aspect in their proposed epistemological process. Clarifying the epistemic rhetorical aspect inherent in producing knowledge on complex subjects through IDN provides insights into practitioners’ persuasive and political design and development choices. These intentional choices, in turn, impact the kind of knowledge produced. This rhetorical approach to knowledge production can be grounded in a Neo-sophist epistemic tradition wherein aesthetic choices are used rhetorically. I will present and discuss the Sophist rhetorical tactics of antithesis, the rhetoric of the possible; enargeia, the rhetoric of vivid details; kairos, the rhetoric of opportune timing; and mêtis, the rhetoric of the body. Their implementation by practitioners, how these aesthetic choices rhetorically create knowledge in the System-Process-Product model is presented. The article clarifies these rhetorical processes and choices and analyzes the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival’s Best Immersive Narrative, The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage: Episode 1. This VR factual IDN allows interactors to experience historical moments of racial injustice in the United States. The production team was interviewed about how they used the technical and aesthetic qualities of VR and IDN rhetorically to produce knowledge about the complex and violent history of racial injustice in the United States. Their responses indicate their active use of epistemic rhetorical tactics that capitalize on the technical and aesthetic affordances of VR and IDN to create knowledge.

Reconfiguring Asian Modernity: Negotiating Tantric Epistemological Traditions

Reconfiguring Asian Modernity:Negotiating Tantric Epistemological Traditions Abhisek Ghosal (bio) and Bhaskarjyoti Ghosal (bio) What Shiva (and the world, according to the tantric episteme) preserves are not the ashes of Sati's corpse but the scattered body parts of that corpse and her ornaments (which, though ostensibly material objects and not organically linked with Sati's body, partake of the energy she embodies), enshrined as the epitomes of the sacred. These physical fragments of the corpse, paradoxically, serve as the most powerful sources of the kinetic energy of life. They are worshipped not just to achieve moksha, liberation from physical existence, but also, and perhaps more importantly for the popular dimension of this religious episteme, in order to live meaningful, happy and even hedonic lives. —Anway Mukhopadhyay (2018, 71)1 Is it possible to identify Tantra as a deified religion, antinomian counterculture, or a social movement that attempts to circumvent racial divides and sexual hegemony? —Justin Hewitson (2021, 32) When Western scholars are engrossed in exploring indigenous cultural patterns by means of employing non-Asian epistemological interventions, it seems quite important nowadays to re-explore and reposition a typically Indian epistemic tradition called Tantric tradition to divulge the importance of having an "Asian theory" to unsettle the conventional Western theoretical inroads into "Asian modernity." For instance, Western scholars have understood the diversity of Asian modernity from the perspectives of colonial discourses, neocolonial frameworks, posthumanism, capitalist hegemony, material realism, and so on. But, surprisingly and unfortunately, no Indic scholar has, as of now, felt an urge to remap Tantric traditions in the context of critical interventions into Asian modernity and to relate it to dominant Western epistemologies so as to underscore the former's ontical and ontological trans-historicality. In addition, Indic scholars are silent on the possibility of engaging Tantric epistemologies in divulging the processuality of Asian modernity, thereby making a modest attempt to destratify theoretical codifications veering around it. [End Page 33] This article seeks to engage Tantric epistemologies in critical dialogue with some contemporary Western thinking traditions, intending to bring up fresh debates on Asian modernity in general. For instance, Western scholars, more or less, assess that Indian modernity is to a large extent contingent upon the Western counterpart, for the people of India always look up to politico-cultural, economic, and critic-philosophical residues of West. This stereotypical formulation could be taken up from Tantric epistemologies to show that Indian modernity, instead of resorting to the cultural remains of the West, could consider an indigenous thinking model called Tantric epistemology, which is capable of vying with Western thinking models, so as to reconfigure Indian modernity from an indigenous critical perspective. It also aims at foregrounding Tantra ecology to address emerging issues pertaining to climate catastrophe. This article is split up into three sections so as to clearly articulate different nuances of Tantra. In the first section, historical background of Tantra is briefly articulated to put focus on various epistemic dimensions of it. In the second section, the notion of "Tantra ecology" is teased out and contrasted to Stacy Alaimo's "trans-corporeality" to bring out the singularity and efficacy of Tantrism. The third section lays out the scientific underpinnings of Tantra to underscore its ability in reshaping Asian modernity, dismissing colonial epistemological legacies. The discussion closes with a prospective conclusion that gives direction to the future of Tantrism in reshaping the contours of Asian modernity. Tantric Epistemologies: Contexts and Concerns What is Tantra? Is the Tantric knowledge system solely predicated upon religio-spiritual accomplishments? Does Tantric epistemology bear the potentials for revolutionary change in the paradigm of critical thinking? Does it provide ecological insights needed for climate thinking? Does Tantra rest on the dynamics of energy? Does the Tantric knowledge system stand in disagreement with (em)bodied thinking propounded by Western thinkers? These questions need to be taken up not just to lay out nuanced dimensions of Tantra and its position in contemporary critical discourse but also to point out how Tantric epistemology exceeds the bounds of temporality and works as a useful tool for building up ecological consciousness within the ambit of Asian modernity. The word tantra has multiple significations and is used in different contexts...

Fourth Industrial Revolution and Geopolitics of Knowledge Production: The Question of Africa’s Place in the Global Space

Francis Fukuyama postulated that there are two powerful forces at work in human history. One, he calls, ‘the logic of modern science’ and the other, ‘the struggle for recognition’. I agree with Fukuyama that human developmental progression is propelled by these twin principles. It is my position that these principles have been the drivers of geopolitics. In this paper, I argue that, in addition, knowledge production is a major factor in geopolitics and that the Euro-American worldview has occupied the place of hegemony by reason of knowledge production. Africa has been denied having any form of epistemic tradition by the Euro-American world to sustain itself in the position of hegemony. In the era of Fourth Industrial Revolution, it will be antithetical for Africa to continue to adopt or consume technologies driven by Eurocentrism without projecting its contribution to the global space. Hence, using a critical hermeneutical approach, I contend that Africa needs to make a unique African contribution in the era of Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is Africa’s unique contribution that will guarantee Africa a place in geopolitics.

Developing epistemic impartiality to deliver on justice in higher education South Africa

In South Africa, the scholarship of epistemic justice has taken on an historical gaze with higher education framed as a social institution that might ameliorate the historical traumas of colonialism. Undoing the legacies of colonialism has been framed as the democratisation of the knowledge project. Using the White Paper 3 of 1997 that posits academic freedom, institutional autonomy and public accountability as fundamental to institutional governance, in part I of this analysis I broadened public accountability to include the social, political and economic factors that inhibit or act as catalyst to the attainment of educational desire. In this second part publication, I am interested in developing and proposing epistemic impartiality. This concept is developed from Mitova’s proposition of ‘decolonising knowledge without too much relativism’, which ultimately fosters epistemic justice through rigorously scrutinising each epistemic tradition. My suggestion is that epistemic impartiality enables dialogue between divergent traditions.

Urban food policies for a sustainable and just future: Concepts and tools for a renewed agenda

In the context of pressing socio-ecological challenges, from poverty and pandemics to climate change, urban food policies are expanding across the globe. The special issue on “Urban food policies for a sustainable and just future” aims to reflect on a decade of work and identify key concepts to deepen and broaden a transformative urban food agenda. This editorial provides an overview of the twelve papers that make up this collection, demonstrating some of the breadth of approaches used to study this phenomenon in different regions of the world, informed by different epistemic traditions and exemplified by diverse case studies such as urban agriculture, street vending, public procurement, spatial planning, city networks or deep explorations of specific urban policy-making processes. Building on this work and the broader literature, in this paper we identify three core turns in the urban food governance scholarship: a shift towards systemic engagement with the food system; increased engagement with scalar complexity; and a growing focus on relational aspects of urban food governance and policy-making dynamics. However, our analysis also points out three key aspects that require further focus for the field to be transformative: a stronger conceptualisation of the urban; a clearer definition and articulation of the nature of governance and policy; and a more engaged focus on issues of power and inequities. To address these gaps, we propose a set of tools in the form of definitions and frameworks to support the unfolding of an urgently needed more just and transformative urban food agenda.

Teacher views of experimentation in ecosystem science

ABSTRACT Education reform calls for portraying science as a process of inquiry and argumentation grounded in the epistemic traditions of a domain. While experimentation is a core scientific investigation strategy, diverse approaches are represented across different domains of science. Ecosystem scientists use experiments as a core part of their investigations, yet also acknowledge limits to its applicability. They describe experimentation as one approach among investigative strategies – combining these into a ‘body of evidence’ (BOE) approach that triangulates sources of evidence to support causal claims. A study was conducted to explore how these epistemic assumptions in ecosystems science are understood by K-12 teachers. Ten teachers from across the United States were interviewed. The teachers expressed understandings of experimentation that did not fully align with a BOE approach but displayed knowledge of some approaches used by ecosystem scientists. This knowledge was less apparent in their descriptions of their ecosystems science unit pedagogy and curricula and teachers cited a number of obstacles to incorporating it. The results suggest that if a BOE approach were to be introduced in K-12 ecosystems science, teachers would need a fuller understanding of this perspective and support in overcoming obstacles to employing it in the classroom.

Literature Synthesis Research

Literature Synthesis Research

Morena Mohlomi le Badimo: reading decolonial articulations into the intellectual property law curriculum.

The Council on Higher Education (CHE) expresses itself cogently in affirming the validity of the calls to specifically decolonise the LLB curriculum. Public discourse and the CHE report present an emerging clarion call for the academy to critically engage the question of decolonisation of the curriculum. This paper proposes Transmodernity as a methodological endeavor towards engaging African epistemologies in an effort to find alternatives in teaching various intellectual property law concepts. To tease out the fundamental decolonial question of how the dismembered can be re-membered, the paper tests the theory of Mohlomism and its applicability to the intellectual property law curriculum. Mohlomi was a mentor to the king of the kingdom of Lesotho, Morena Moshoeshoe I. He would travel around Southern Africa teaching society about his philosophy of truthfulness, justice, peace, the love of man and for sane humanism. Re-membering the Being of the proverbial “other”, reverses the effect of the prevailing legacy of epistemicide in the curriculum and may gradually lead to a transformed legal pedagogy. The paper discerns decolonisation as a project that inter alia seeks to create a pluriversal intellectual community that embosoms the epistemic traditions of the global South.