Epistemological Struggle Research Articles

Las dimensiones ontoepistemológicas de la minería aurífera ancestral en Colombia: evidencias del Resguardo Indígena Cañamomo y Lomaprieta / The Onto-Epistemological Dimensions of Ancestral Gold Mining in Colombia: Evidence from the Cañamomo and Lomaprieta Indigenous Reservation

The emergence of non-dualist ontologies, in combination with a renewed interest in relational worldviews of indigenous peoples, has forged new analytical frameworks that seek to reevaluate worldviews and knowledge systems of marginalized peoples in the Global South. An important project to recover this “pluriverse” is the Epistemologies of the South framework, which is used in this article to analyze the geography of conflicts in the Cañamomo and Lomaprieta indigenous reservation in the department of Caldas, Colombia. Based on an analysis of qualitative interviews that were carried out in this indigenous reservation during the period 2018-2020, we argue that the struggle for ancestral gold mining is not only an ontological struggle for ancestral territory, but also an epistemological struggle in defense of ancestral mining knowledge and practices. These onto-epistemological dimensions serve as inputs for an emerging definition of ancestral gold mining. As such, the contribution made in this article has a dual purpose: on the one hand, it seeks to provide knowledge that stimulates debates from the Global South on ontological struggles and the construction of alternative territorialities in mining areas while, on the other hand, it contributes to current debates on ancestral mining in Colombia.

The critique of social reason in the Popper–Adorno debate

This article examines the differences and affinities between Karl Popper's critical rationalism and Theodor Adorno's critical theory through renewed attention to the original documents of their 1961 debate. While commentaries often describe the Popper–Adorno encounter as a theoretical disappointment, I reveal a confrontation between conceptually opposed programs of social research. Though both theorists are committed to critique as a political and epistemological struggle for human freedom, their conceptions of this struggle are starkly different. In the original seminar papers, we find a conflict between critique as a practice of social rationality (Popper) and a critique of social rationality itself (Adorno). The versions of critical rationalism and critical theory meeting in this debate thus emphasize opposite dimensions of a reflexive practice of immanent critique. In closing, I suggest dissolving this conceptual tension by recovering the educational orientation of critique.

Colombia’s Cultural Explosion: Vivir Sabroso and Ollas Comunitarias as Pedagogies of Solidarity

This article analyzes the cultural explosion of “28A,” the largest national strike in Colombia’s recent times. It aims to further understand the protest from the point of view of young artists that went out to protest. Following analytical tools borrowed from the performance studies, I bring a decolonial approach to the performance studies debate, analyzing social protests as “epistemological struggles” in relation to alternative pedagogies of resistance and solidarity. I join the decolonial commitment of this special issue by thinking from and with Indigenous, Black, Mestizxs, and Youth discourses and praxes, while opening Indigeneity, Blackness, and decoloniality to other spaces like the performing arts, circus, and the mestizo nation. I draw attention to Afro and Indigenous philosophies and practices that influence circus practice in Colombia. As those praxes transcend specific Afro and Indigenous communities, the cultural explosion not only challenges the idea of the mestizo nation but also reveals the prevalence of inter-epistemic dialogues and pedagogies of solidarity among young artists in Colombia. In the aftermath of 28A and its cultural explosion, those dialogues have been joined by other sectors of society as revealed in the current presidential elections, where Afro and Indigenous philosophies are finally being considered as valid alternative forms of governance within the mestizo nation.

The Tunisian university at the intersection of global-local conjunctures: knowledge, power and the struggle for liberation

This article adopts a longue durée approach to examining resistance around the Tunisian university, tracing current material and epistemological struggles back to the colonial era. To do so, it fuses theoretical insights from the growing bodies of literature concerned with how colonial-capitalist power is manifested and contested within and on the margins of institutions of higher education, including Marxist, social movement theory, and decolonial traditions. The article considers four important conjunctures in the development of the Tunisian academy as an institution where the connections between knowledge generation and (neo)colonial-capitalist power have been articulated and contested. The article will conclude by arguing that the sediments of resistance remaining from all four transformative moments have dialectically contributed to building alternative knowledge projects within and beyond the university. Whereas dominant modes of knowledge production enable and normalise the destructive and grossly unequal patterns of extraction and accumulation associated with (neo)colonial-capitalism, alternative knowledge projects instead seek to transform Tunisians’ relations with one another, with the state and with the land in ways that promote the forging of the collective and meaningful liberation.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Shared Authority and Epistemological Struggles: Tales of Three Racial Groups of Professors

Sharing teacher authority with students is a common pillar of these progressive pedagogies. This paper takes up the issue of authority in establishing credibility in knowledge claims by examining the dynamics of class discussions over race relations. Using pedagogy of positionality (Maher & Tetreault, 2001), the study pays attention to how authority is exercised and challenged in negotiating differences among participants. The primary data for this study draws from in-depth interviews with seven college professors who teach Racial and Ethnic Relations in a predominantly white institution. The findings of this study suggest that knowledge claims and meaning-making is mediated by relationships among members. That is, authority comes not from professors’ personal (racial) experience, nor from professors’ disciplinary (professional) expertise, but from a mutual construction based on trust, compassion, and empathy between the teacher and students. In order to establish a truly inclusive classroom in race discussions, it is crucially important for professors to care about multiple positionings that students occupy, beyond the student-self and racial self.

Moviendo el orgullo: movimiento social de los jóvenes nasa y misak en Cali, Colombia

This article aims to show the characterization of the struggles and the ways in which emotions are revealed in the movements of indigenous youth in the city of Cali-Colombia, specifically in the Nasa and Misak communities. This research, which uses qualitative tools, involved the application of in-depth interviews and participant observation of young members of the indigenous movement in the city, all of them migrants. Some of theresults show that emotions, which can be considered political, such as shame, indignation, and pride, are devices that support or impede mobilization. These emotions strengthen their various forms of protest, consolidate their epistemological struggles, and preserve the essence of their identity through collectively achieved political processes.

For whom is ignorance bliss? Ignorance, its functions and transformative potential in trans health

ABSTRACT Trans people face biases and barriers in healthcare including health professionals’ lack of training and knowledge of trans health, bodies, and identities. Interactions between health professionals and trans people have been analysed as a site fraught with historical power imbalances, epistemological struggles that position trans people at a disadvantage and one where negotiations of access to adequate services and treatment continue. In this paper, I highlight the need to pay attention to not only how knowledge about trans bodies and possibilities is produced, negotiated and contested, but also to moments of claimed and/or actual ignorance that take place in healthcare. Applying a feminist epistemological lens, I ask what is at stake and what is the function of ignorance in the trans patient/health professional relationship. Such exploration is crucial if we recognize that practices of ignorance are often entangled with practices of exclusion and oppression. Methodologically, I draw on qualitative in-depth interviews with 18 health professionals in the UK conducted as part of a larger research project on trans health. In analysing the multi-faceted manifestations of ignorance within the data and linking them to feminist taxonomies of ignorance, I explore how ignorance can be critiqued and transformed.

The Epistemic Imperialism of Science. Reinvigorating Early Critiques of Scientism.

Positivism has had a tremendous impact on the development of the social sciences over the past two centuries. It has deeply influenced method and theory, and has seeped deeply into our broader understandings of the nature of the social sciences. Postmodernism has attempted to loosen the grip of positivism on our thinking, and while it has not been without its successes, postmodernism has worked more to deconstruct positivism than to construct something new in its place. Psychologists today perennially wrestle to find and retain their intellectual balance within the methodological, theoretical, and epistemological struggles between positivism and postmodernism. In the process, pre-postmodern criticisms of positivism have been largely forgotten. Although they remain deeply buried at the core of psychology, these early alternatives to positivism are rarely given explicit hearing today. The current piece explores some of the early critiques of positivism, particularly of its scientism, as well as early suggestions to tip the scales (back) in favor of sapientia (“wisdom”). This third option, largely overlooked within mainstream psychology, is of tremendous value today as it is both deconstructive and constructive relative to the shortcomings of positivism. It avoids the overly reductionistic “trivial order” of positivism, as well as the deeply unsatisfying and disorienting “barbaric vagueness” of postmodernism, while simultaneously embracing important core elements of both currents of thought.

The case, the registry and the archive: reflections on truth, reconciliation and retrieval

ABSTRACTSignificant critical interventions have refigured colonial and settler colonial archives as sites of political, ontological and epistemological struggle. The rich, interdisciplinary debates characteristic of the archival turn, however, have been insufficiently attentive to the role of court registries, their relationship to state archives and the movement of their records. This article emerged from research conducted in court registries and state archives in Ontario and British Columbia, Canada focusing on judicial articulations of reconciliation that appear in Indigenous rights and title cases and the role that witness testimony, documentary evidence, orders, motions and applications have played in shaping them. In contrast to the fixed places of domicile that Derrida and Mbembe have theorized, following Mawani, Mildon, Stoler, Hunt and Frogner among others, I position law’s archive as both an itinerant site of encounter and exchange and a system of enunciation. When not subject to losses, deliberate or otherwise, its records move between and across spatiotemporal contexts. They challenge the legitimacy of the settler state at the same time as they both reproduce and mask law’s originary violence and the masculinist triumphalism of its archival grain revealing the importance of truth before reconciliation.

Alien Feminisms and Cinema’s Posthuman Women

In this essay, I ask how we can chart new feminist epistemologies around the figure of the posthuman woman. To explore how the posthuman female body is situated as a site of ontological and epistemological struggle around feminism, femininity, and subjectivity in contemporary screen culture, I examine two recent films about alien/cyborg posthuman female entities: Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 Under the Skin and Alex Garland’s 2015 Ex Machina. Both films illuminate the complex assemblages of subjectivity of the feminine posthuman. Moreover, they explore the sites of circular convergence—rather than fissures—between the human and posthuman form. I discuss how alien feminisms can respond to the new and emerging epistemologies across this nature–(techno)culture continuum without inadvertently upholding humanist anthropocentrism. I conclude that the posthuman condition is not (yet) a postgender condition. Rather, it is a becoming-gendered condition, where traditional gender features stubbornly persist but as a contingent process of perpetual assemblage and undoing rather than of continued stability and fixity. For the posthuman women discussed here, their posthumanness is concealed by the surface layer of skin, which peels off and can be put back on as an unstable barrier between the human and the posthuman, and between surface and depth.

Studying the materiality of media archives in the age of digitization: Forensics, infrastructures and ecologies

Discourses on the immateriality of digital information have given way to a radical rethinking of digital materiality within information studies, cinema and media studies, and other related fields. This rethinking occurs as media archives are increasingly converting their collections into digital form, stored less and less on shelves in climate-controlled vaults, and instead stored and accessed through data servers. This newfound complexity and potential for the media archive to become “black boxed,” call for a critical approach to media archives that takes into account these new realities and their material entanglements at multiple scales of analysis. Newfound scholarly interest in multiple scales of materiality, from the micro (computer code, transmission protocols, etc.) to the macro (large, sociotechnical infrastructures) may offer new directions for rethinking the nature of media archives in the age of digitization. This paper reviews the literature on these recent trends and identifies three intertwined research approaches for analyzing emergent phenomena related to the digitization of media archives: Critical forensic, institutional/infrastructural, and global/ecological perspectives. These approaches help to extend postmodern conceptualizations of the archive by showing how the archive as infrastructure is bound up in unfolding political, ecological and epistemological struggles.

The simulators: truth and power in the psychiatry of José Ingenieros.

Using Michel Foucault's lectures on "Psychiatric power" as its starting point, this article analyzes the book Simulación de la locura (The simulation of madness), published in 1903 by the Argentine psychiatrist José Ingenieros. Foucault argues that the problem of simulation permeates the entire history of modern psychiatry. After initial analysis of José Ingenieros's references to the question of simulation in the struggle for existence, the issue of simulation in pathological states in general is examined, and lastly the simulation of madness and the problem of degeneration. Ingenieros participates in the epistemological and political struggle that took place between experts-psychiatrists and simulators over the question of truth.

Clarity and confusion: Epistemological struggles with Islamic identity and secular education

As a first-year doctoral student, I experience challenges of confronting conflicts between my secular education, my Islamic beliefs, my past in Guyana, and my present and presence in Canada, while simultaneously contemplating my future. In this paper, I share my struggles with identity and epistemology through the contours of clarity, confusion, and twilight as I think about my doctoral research. I will present a brief synopsis of my professional and educational background, as well as my identity as a Muslim immigrant, and examine what emerged from this as a personal epistemology that will guide my qualitative research.

Text and Determination

Protagonists of the ‘philological turn’ have claimed philology to be a self-reflective praxis. The history of modern philology however demonstrates that this can only be understood as a demand. All too often, philological conceptions went hand in glove with a deterministic anthropology. Whereas current research on the nexus between philology and racial thought focus on how biopolitical assumptions could be applied within philological disciplines, the idea of a ‘hard’ anthropological nucleus and a ‘soft’ textual culture referring to it needs to be revised. Because of their methodological potential and cultural strength, European philologies were scientific models up to the second half of the 19th century and relied on the same epistemic assumptions from which ‘modern’ raciological discourses were born. This comes mainly from the relation established since the 17th century between the variety of languages, scripts and textual cultures on the one hand, and rationality on the other. The arguments that stem from this discourse of a challenged universalism were amalgamated with genealogical thought in 19th century philology and an obsession with origins as the biblical narrative faded away. Thus, spiritual or cognitive forms, understood as determining factors in historical evolution, could then be linked to an assumed ‘original’ intellectual or anthropological potentiality. However, raciological conceptualizations have been far from being without alternative. My paper argues that if the return to philology aims to be more than a reaction to the normative loss of textual culture, then the epistemological struggle within the history of philology needs to be reflected in its relevance for any ‘future’ philology.

The language of Secular Islam

In her study of Urdu language politics in late colonial India, Kavita SaraswathiDatla traces the rise and eventual demise of an alternative Urdu movement thatenvisioned the language not as a marker of Muslim religious identity, but as ameans to articulate a modern secular nationalism with roots in India’s Islamicpast. By highlighting this largely forgotten moment of secular Urdu nationalism,the author pushes back against two well-established historiographical narrativeson Muslims in colonial India: the dominant understanding of theHindi-Urdu controversy as a process of sharpening communal boundaries andthe scholarly emphasis on the epistemological struggles to make Islam andWestern science compatible. She complicates both of these existing historiesby shifting her geographic lens from northern India to the so-called colonialperiphery: the Muslim princely state of Hyderabad. Specifically, Datla’s researchcenters on the establishment and initial decades of intellectual activitiesat Hyderabad’s innovative and Urdu-medium Osmania University.In the book’s opening chapter, Datla argues that Hyderabad’s leadingMuslim intellectuals and administrators were largely uninterested in epistemologicalquestions about the relationship between Islam and modern Westernforms of knowledge. To underscore this disinterest, she examines Wilfred S.Blunt’s unsuccessful proposal from the late nineteenth-century that the Hyderabadistate build a modern Islamic seminary. Whereas Blunt envisionedan Islamic university as a catalyst for Islamic reform in India, Datla demonstratesthat his Muslim interlocutors remained unconvinced about the necessityof any Protestant-style reformation of Islam. Instead of possessing such boldtheological agendas, leading Hyderabadi educators focused on extending educationalaccess and forging a stronger connection between the values taughtat home and the knowledge acquired at school. They located the solution tothese twin issues in vernacular education. For them, the use of Urdu insteadof Persian, Arabic, or English as the medium of instruction would remove theexisting language barriers in Hyderabad’s education system and simultaneouslyensure a greater continuity between home and school cultures. Accordingto Datla it was this focus on vernacular education, not Islamic reform, thatinspired Osmania University’s founding in 1918.The second chapter provides an in-depth examination of the university’sTranslation Bureau and its projects designed to reform Urdu into a modernscientific language. She explains that the Osmania faculty hoped to ...

Translating the academy: Learning the racialized languages of academia.

This article presents narratives of 2 women faculty of color, 1 early career Latina and the other tenured Asian American woman, regarding their ontological and epistemological struggles in academia, as well as the hope, impetus, and strategies for change that they constructed together. Drawing on a critical pedagogy perspective, mentoring is discussed as a praxis of allyship that develops organically within relationships that recognize each person’s strengths, provides instrumental knowledge about the academy, provides intellectual stimulation and reciprocal reflection, and is a collaborative endeavor that helps them to resist erasure and insert visibly diverse knowledge systems into people’s academic pursuits and responsibilities.

Interprofessional education in allied health: a systematic review

During the past decade, several studies have systematically reviewed interprofessional education (IPE), but few have inclusively reviewed this literature. None has focused primarily on IPE in allied health, despite differences in recruitment and socialisation across the health professions. This systematic review seeks to uncover the best approach to pre-licensure, university-based allied health IPE to determine which aspects require modification in which contexts to provide optimal learning experiences. A systematic search of 10 databases was conducted for articles published in English, between January 1998 and January 2013. Studies were included if they used quantitative or qualitative methodologies to report on the outcomes associated with IPE in allied health. Two independent reviewers identified studies that met the inclusion criteria, critically appraised the included studies and extracted data relating to the effectiveness of IPE in allied health. Data were synthesised narratively to address the study aims. Large gaps - relating to methods, theory and context - remain within this body of literature. Studies measured students' attitudes and understanding of other health professional roles, teamwork and knowledge in response to IPE interventions using patient scenarios, lectures and small-group work. Differences in power and curriculum placement were described as factors affecting IPE effectiveness. Evaluation remains the primary aim within this literature. Few studies use theory, take an inductive approach to understanding the processes behind IPE or include detailed participant descriptions. Therefore, we suggest that IPE research is currently caught in an epistemological struggle, between assumptions underpinning biomedical and health science research, and those underpinning education studies. As part of a systems approach to understanding interprofessional socialisation, we call for researchers to take a realistic approach to evaluation that is inclusive of, and responsive to, contextual factors to explore how IPE leads to improved long-term outcomes in differing circumstances.

Understanding Relations between Science, Politics, and the Public: The Case of a GM Field Trial Controversy in Belgium

AbstractIn 2011, a Belgian field trial with genetically modified crops triggered fierce public protests and debates. Opponents of the trial protested against its performance and some advocated its destruction, in response to which scientists and the government defended a scientific freedom to perform the trial. This article investigates why the different stakeholders came to occupy such mutually exclusive positions towards the trial. Based on analyses of qualitative interviews with key stakeholders, document analyses, and field observations, the article argues that the different stakeholders were involved in an ontological politics. This politics centred on the question of which ontologically different, co‐existing versions of the trial should be attended to in institutionalised scientific and political appraisals of the trial. The article concludes that the institutional handling of the trial as if it represented a single reality that merited only epistemological struggles contributed to turning a multifaceted debate into a dichotomous one, figuring field trial proponents and opponents. As such, the opposition between the different stakeholders was not antecedent to the institutional handling of the trial – as different stakeholders claimed – but rather an outcome of it.

In defense of conviviality and the collective subject

This essay takes up the question of a “new” social paradigm by first examining the recent emergence of the U.S. Occupied Movement (OM) as a provocative and inspiring moment of political re-composition, but one that also narrates a more complex unraveling of what W.E.B Du Bois called “democratic despotism.” The most recent political tensions and economic “crisis” of the global north point to the disruption of a white “middle class” hegemony alongside inspiring moments of reconstructed conviviality. I suggest that the tension within spaces of occupation and convergence are animated by conviviality that should be read “politically” by noting the emergence of tools in service of community regeneration. Towards that end, I introduce Universidad de la Tierra Califas, a local project somewhere in-between network and collective pedagogies that is also a project of strategic conviviality and a Zapatismo beyond Chiapas. I argue that UT Califas engages a collective subject as part of an epistemological struggle inspired by Indigenous autonomy currently underway throughout Latin America.