Epistemological Tool Research Articles

Black Theology and the unheard cry for impilo of people living with disabilities

This article aims to address the importance of Black Theology of Liberation mainly focussing on the unheard cry of people living with disabilities. Black Theology in its origin is linked to communities of black oppressed beings; its task is to seriously consider the experiences and situation of those who reside in the zone of non-being. In this article, people living with disabilities represent those who reside underside modernity and history, which simply entails that people living with disabilities lack the quality of being recognised as human beings, but as sub-humans who are lifeless. Some scholars of Black Theology eloquently wrestles with the lifelessness fruit which the empire continues to bear by arguing that the Black Theology of Liberation is a theology that aims to give life to victims of lifelessness. It is argued that people living with disabilities in black communities experience a lack of accessibility to transportation, the health sector, education, and building infrastructures in South Africa. The lack of accessibility to opportunities and resources for people living with disabilities portrays a denial of human rights and equality; it instead, promotes the state of lifelessness to people living with disabilities.Contribution: The article adopts ‘The Cry for Life’ declaration which stresses the affirmation of life to all human beings despite their disabilities. The cry for impilo [life] by people living with disabilities is what makes Black Theology an epistemological tool that is derived from below in the search for impilo.

Engaging With Race and Racism Through the Sensory: Four Pedagogical Instigations

Teaching and learning effectively, inclusively, and critically about the power and politics of race and difference remains a protracted yet important struggle. Race is an emotionally laden and provocative issue facing many societies, and the concomitant privilege and ideology that upholds it are oftentimes surpassed through processes and mechanisms of “invisibling.” In this article, I add to the plethora of debates and discussions concerning race as an organizing principle by showing how through the sensory, seemingly one of the most mundane, banal, and quotidian aspects of social life, can be a potent epistemological tool with which to teach how “race” can be reconstructed, negotiated, and maneuvered by social actors in the context of multicultural Singapore. Social formations of “race” undergo new ways of categorization, perpetuation, and judgment with the sensory as an emotive medium of recognition and placement. I foreground some of the pedagogical strategies I have employed that draw on emotions and the senses to instigate meaningful and critical class discussions, and the variegated classroom responses to the teaching of race and multiculturalism in everyday life. More specifically, I show how students as well as their respondents deploy emotions and the sensory in practices of inclusion and exclusion upon racial selves and others. A more creative and inclusive classroom and learning environment is therefore imperative to stimulate discussion, particularly alternative, critical, and meaningful ways of thinking about race. This, I contend, will necessitate a reflexive reconfiguration and maneuvering of power dynamics within the classroom setting, and our experience in teaching undergraduate students through particular kinds of strategies I have used during discussion groups have reaped interesting outcomes, both on the parts of the instructor as a reflexive participant and the students in the classroom.

The Historicity of Economic Sciences: The Main Epistemological Ruptures

The object of this work is threefold: it consists (a) in explaining and justifying, based on Foucault's concept of episteme, the epistemological foundations from which Classical Economics, Keynesian Economics and Neoclassical Economics were built; (b) in studying the nature of the epistemological ruptures that allow differentiating these schools; and (c) in defining the degree of incommensurability of these different paradigms. In the first part, I will define the main epistemological tools that allow studying the birth and evolution of science. In the second part, I will study the nature of the epistemological ruptures that characterize these evolutions and these different schools.

A Critique of Positivism: Human Nature and Anarchy

Positivism and post positivism are two paradigms within the field of international relations (IR) that differ in their approaches to ontology (the nature of reality) and epistemology (how knowledge is acquired) in the study of international politics. Ontologically, positivists are objectivists, meaning that they believe there are objective facts (for example, selfish human nature) and laws (for example, anarchy leads to chaos) in international politics. Positivists apply common rationality and value-neutrality as epistemological tools to discover and analyze such claims regarding external and objective social reality. In this paper, I make two points. First, positivism (realism and liberalism) has a natural propensity to reify social concepts into trans historical essence to generate causal theories. However, in reality, human nature is complex and the meaning of social realities such as human nature and anarchy is conceptual and constitutive. Second, the adoption of common rationality and value-neutrality as epistemological building blocks lead positivism to a rigid and ahistorical view of human nature and anarchy. In contrast, post positivism (critical theory and constructivism) can generate a relatively nuanced and complete picture of international politics.

Problems of insurance law and their solution in the legislation of the Republic of Kazakhstan

Relevance. The relevance of the study is explained by the growing interest of the world's legislative systems in regulating the insurance services market, especially in the private law sector market. In particular, the sale by the state to private legal entities of the rights of a claim for the obligations of the Insurance Benefit Guarantee Fund substantially liberalised the insurance services market under study. Purpose. The purpose of the study is to conduct a formal legal analysis of the national insurance legislation of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the use of comparative legal tools to examine promising institutions of insurance legislation in other countries. Methodology. The study used a systematic approach, epistemological tools of cognition, formal legal method. Results. The study on current problems of insurance law in the Republic of Kazakhstan and other countries revealed challenges such as the fragmentation of regulatory frameworks and a lack of public confidence due to undeveloped insurance mechanisms. The legislation amendments introduced in the Republic of Kazakhstan aimed to enhance accessibility, quality, and consumer rights protection in insurance services, focusing on mandatory types like civil liability and optional types such as life insurance and real estate coverage. Conclusions. The results of this study can be used both for further studies on the features of the insurance legislation of the Republic of Kazakhstan and for the regulatory work of legislative authorities, in particular in the field of insurance of construction activities. Keywords: insurance legislation; insurance payments; civil liability insurance; medical insurance; insurance of construction activities

The Garden City: Infrastructure, spatial politics and resistance behind the nation‐building mode of “tropicality” in Singapore

Abstract“Tropicality” has historically been used as an epistemological tool by colonial settlers and thereafter local rulers to naturalize and espouse Western rationality and modernity. Singapore is no exception to this lingering Western framing, which continues to define state narratives of success and heritage. “Tropicality” as a hegemonic force manifests in infrastructures of large physical networks, institutionalized knowledges, and media representations. This paper dissects three chronological dominant modes of “tropicality”—the colonial, the nation‐building, and the contemporary neoliberal mode—alongside their corresponding subaltern lived worlds that speak of an alternative “tropicality” often unnoticed (Figure 1). These diametric strands are studied through hegemonic infrastructure and everyday acts that resist, appropriate, or hybridize these power‐laden spaces. A heterogenous methodology was adopted, capturing the epistemologies and metis employed in dominant and alternative tropicalities, respectively. Maps, charts, and archives are used to study the former; ethnographic observation, family memory, and affective experiences elucidate the latter. In this paper, I focus on the nation‐building mode of “tropicality”, which shaped Singapore's rapid urbanization in the 1960s. Modernist public housing schemes borrowed from the Tropical Architecture movement are situated within a larger infrastructural field that de‐skilled, cleansed, and civilized an “unruly” population, conflating natural and social order. However, these attempts at creating modern subjects were thwarted by everyday resistance performed at a critical mass, in which displaced populations tapped upon past metis, habitus, and ecological aesthetics to appropriate alienating modern infrastructure. Through these ad hoc infrastructural reconfigurations, a hybrid modern “tropicality” was negotiated. It is through deprivileging infrastructures of “tropicality” and drawing out alternative “infra‐structures” of multiple, lived tropical worlds that we may move toward post‐tropicality—a mentality built on an expanded understanding of how our modern environment is and has been shaped equally by dominant, neocolonial forces and also forsaken memories, practices, and everyday acts of resistance, which hold the key to alternative futures beyond the limited scope delineated by our inherited “tropical modernity”.

Methodology of the Legal Status of Administrative Agencies Under Martial Law

The urgency of the study is determined by the fact that the coordinated activity of public authorities, in particular administrative agencies is the basis of proper defense capability of Ukraine, preservation of economic development, especially in the conditions of martial law. The scientific study of state and legal phenomena requires the determination and description of epistemological means actualizing the problems of methodology. It is the methodology that ensures the acquisition of comprehensive and sufficient knowledge about the subject under study as well as the objectivity of the information obtained.
 Methodology plays a crucial role in ensuring quality research. It stipulates the limits, principles and approaches allowing to get comprehensive and sufficient knowledge about the researched subject. The objectivity of the obtained information is a key component of scientific research.
 It is noted that the methodology is considered in two aspects: first, as a set of epistemological tools; secondly, as a teaching about the system of methodological tools and their application. In the context of state and law studies, it is important to take into account the specifics of this field and take into consideration the diversity of methodological approaches, since they can include both legal methods and elements of sociological, philosophical or historical analysis.
 When studying the legal status of administrative agencies, it is important to take into account the axiological component, as it allows to understand how these agencies function in a specific social and cultural and political context. The study of the axiological component of the legal status of administrative agencies allows to reveal not only the formal side of their functions, but also the understanding of society's values, on which their functioning is based.
 It is justified that an important methodological tool is an activity approach allowing analyzing the specific actions and functions of administrative agencies, their tasks and work results, which is important for establishing how they affect the implementation of legal norms and how they contribute to the performance of state functions as a whole .
 It is noted that the application of a hermeneutic approach to understanding the legal status of administrative agencies opens up the possibility of a deep understanding of texts, contexts and meanings, providing a comprehensive analysis in legal and cultural dimensions.
 The system approach allows to include administrative agencies in a wider context - the system of state bodies. The systemic approach also allows taking into account the social and cultural context in which administrative agencies function.

Radical understanding: reflections on knowledge production, power, positionality, and practices of refusal within academic research

By looking at scholarly research as well as my own experience of practicing refusal in my research and documentary work, this article focuses on how refusal practices can challenge dominant methods of knowledge production and lead to what I want to conceptualize in this paper as radical understanding; a way of practicing and relating to research otherwise. I propose radical understanding as methodological and epistemological tool to contest the imperialist and capitalist -dominant machinery of knowledge production.

Beyond Reconciliation: Calling for Land-Based Analyses in the Sociology of Sport

This article examines the possibilities engendered by land-based analyses within the sociology of sport. We examine how “Canada’s” Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action on sport reproduce a logic of social inclusion, one which assimilates Indigenous athletes and Peoples into settler models of sport. To consider epistemological tools for unsettling settler sport systems, we turn to critical Indigenous scholarship on land-based analyses and pedagogies. To illustrate the possibilities of land-based analyses, we examine lacrosse, an Indigenous sporting practice with roots embedded in relational interconnectedness with the land. A land-based approach to sport offers opportunities for revising the assumptions, values, and ethics underpinning settler models of sport through, for example, emphasizing the importance of community, healing, and land stewardship.

The Affective Epistemology of Digital Journalism: Emotions as Knowledge Among On-the-Ground and OSINT Media Practitioners Covering the Russo-Ukrainian War

In this paper, we seek to introduce the term “affective epistemology” into digital journalism studies. Building on twenty-seven interviews with media workers reporting on the Russo-Ukrainian War and digital documentation analysis, we address the following research questions: What is the epistemic value of media practitioners’ emotions? How do emotional attachments shape how media professionals and open-source analysts navigate fact-finding and neutrality? We argue that media professionals’ emotional engagement is a form of embodied knowledge with cognitive and strategic rationality. We identify four epistemological affordances of emotions and illustrate that emotions motivate journalistic practices and are motivated by reality on the ground and available knowledge, can serve as a methodological and an epistemological tool, and form a part of reality; emotions also drive innovations and facilitate team collaboration. Furthermore, we argue that the Russo-Ukrainian War is a context where the discourse on impartiality, neutrality, and detachment becomes experienced as problematic and counterproductive. We show how the work of journalists is changing as they align with discourses on human rights and justice and legal fact-finding bodies that are committed to legal objectivity.

Decolonizing Ableist Pedagogy

AbstractHow can someone born without a privileged language and not educated in a privileged educational institution engage in decolonization? This is a very relevant question for most people who live in the context of the global South. This paper proposes a constructive imagination to decolonize ableist pedagogy through feminist disability analysis. I argue that colonial pedagogy is inherently ableist. This paper is situated in an anti‐ableist and anti‐patriarchal framework, unveiling the normate culture and patriarchal‐colonial logic. However, the main source of analysis and epistemological tool is my body and experience as an Indonesian woman living with a disability. In trying to decolonize pedagogy, the experience of the body becomes more important than forming a new abstract theory of decoloniality. This paper proposes decolonizing ableist pedagogy as a communal work which requires examining colonial language and the binary thinking of body and mind through delinking the colonial space and crippling the colonial time. Based on this awareness, the decolonialization of ableist pedagogy is as imperative as the decolonialization of church mission.

By Means of the Line: Meyer Schapiro and Drawing as an Epistemological Tool

By Means of the Line: Meyer Schapiro and Drawing as an Epistemological Tool

The The Designed Limitation of Human Epistemology and the Necessity of Faith

This article argues that the attacks of atheists or philosophers against the Islamic conception of God (i.e., Allah) are constructed on the misunderstood notion of Islamic theology. Because God is already at a station where the standards of reason alone are frivolous if His existence is understood vis-à-vis the claimed teleological essence of His message (Islam). The fundamental approach here is to highlight the doctrinally necessary transcendence of God vis-à-vis human epistemological tools in Islam in the light of its objective (i.e., a test of faith). This article demonstrates the normatively affirmed limitations of reason in logically necessitating the being of Allah under the faith-test dynamic of Islam, which is a necessary component of the purpose of human existence according to the Qur’ān. The article aims to establish the necessity of faith vis-à-vis a designed limitation of the capabilities of the logical arguments for God’s existence through three major claims: faith in the unseen, Allah’s signs in creation, and the trial of faith, all three being rooted in the Qur’ān. The article also explains the nature of imān in the system of Islamic epistemology, referring to the works of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī and Ibn Taymiyyah and highlighting the incoherent, unreasonable scepticism of atheists in attacking Islamic theism through the principles of reason.

The field site as a religious frontier: Negotiating blasphemy accusations and reflexive tensions in Pakistan

In this article, I explore the reflexive tensions of a Muslim Anthropologist who conducted an ethnography of blasphemy in his own backyard exploring the predicament of fellow Christian Pakistanis in the face of growing blasphemy allegations. My authorial voice influenced by fluid emotional and religious frontiers raised certain critical questions such as how to reconcile my faith, personal judgment, and representation and how to keep a distinction between my positionality as a researcher and an advocate for my faith at a significant juncture when Islam and Pakistan became a focus of the world’s anxiety endangering religious freedom and safety of minorities. The article employs case study and narrative inquiry as a merged method to develop a critical narrative perspective on the blasphemy politics in Pakistan. I suggest that although my faith as an epistemological tool allowed me to investigate the intricacies and nuances surrounding the blasphemy accusations and victims’ plight, my ethnographic revelations could be subject to the severe criticism that I think is an inherent feature of postmodern ethnography.

Virtualising Africa’s Arts, Securing the Future Engendering Africa’s Popular Songs on TikTok’s Enchanted Space

This paper, locating itself within the locus of Southern Perspectives, examines how TikTok, rehabilitating the local memories imbued in the African popular song genre, re-situates African popular knowledge at the centre of dialogues around the human question. The paper used a lit-crit methodology to show how African female content creators, by creatively archiving and curating Black voices into what was the realm of Northern thought, have used TikTok’s space to dissolve epistemological and ontological boundaries. This paper posits that TikTok is the new canvas for espousing indigenous knowledge within popular literary meditations in Africa and provides a veritable space that has placed contemporary African art forms at the centre of transformative possibilities. The paper concludes that African music on TikTok is an epistemological tool that communicates context and community- specific knowledges.

Commentary: Visual/Multimodal Anthropology of Aging, Care and the Life Course: Notes on an Emergent Field

In this commentary we map the recently burgeoning interest of anthropologists in mobilizing visual and multimodal methods to explore issues related to aging, care, and the life course. We demonstrate how within the anthropology of aging, visuality, multisensoriality and various media formats have been used as objects of research, epistemological tools and/or a mode of recounting ethnographic stories. We also highlight the current debates about ethical challenges involved in doing the visual ethnography of ageing and care. We conclude by suggesting solutions that may help create more sustained conditions for a visual and multimodal anthropology of aging to be pursued within academia and beyond.

Is Cancer Reversible? Rethinking Carcinogenesis Models-A New Epistemological Tool.

A growing number of studies shows that it is possible to induce a phenotypic transformation of cancer cells from malignant to benign. This process is currently known as "tumor reversion". However, the concept of reversibility hardly fits the current cancer models, according to which gene mutations are considered the primary cause of cancer. Indeed, if gene mutations are causative carcinogenic factors, and if gene mutations are irreversible, how long should cancer be considered as an irreversible process? In fact, there is some evidence that intrinsic plasticity of cancerous cells may be therapeutically exploited to promote a phenotypic reprogramming, both in vitro and in vivo. Not only are studies on tumor reversion highlighting a new, exciting research approach, but they are also pushing science to look for new epistemological tools capable of better modeling cancer.

Spatial Liminality as a Framework for Revitalising Dilapidated Abandoned Buildings in Historic Cities: A Case Study

This paper develops the theory of liminality as a guideline for revitalising disused urban fabrics in historic cities. Since Middle Eastern historic cities exist as a transitional phenomenon, spatial liminality is identified as an epistemological tool for their investigation. This paper sets up a mixed-method approach based on questionnaire surveys and field studies in twelve urban blocks in historic Yazd and Kashan. Using an interpretive historical study, it is verified that, during the premodern eras, spatial liminality has been synonymous with the formation of sense of place/citizenship, mainly generated as a result of the existence of in-between spaces in historic cities, which, in turn, could have facilitated the rites of passage for residents. In a quantitative layer, the correlation between dilapidated abandoned buildings (DABs) (i.e., disused urban fabrics) and sense of place/citizenship is investigated in case studies, which unfolds associations that lack of sense of place amongst local communities could convey to the meaning of spatial liminality. The analysis demonstrates DABs are associated with lack of spatial liminality, contributing to the breakdown of sense of community identification/place. Therefore, DABs need to be reutilized while maintaining their heritage values. The discourse identifies in-between spaces that once facilitated spatial liminality and demonstrates a guideline for revitalising historic cities. This study put forward a theoretical contribution that enables the use of spatial liminality to guide the understanding and management of historic cities.

Reimagining Folklorisation in the Covid-19 Context: A Case of Endangered Tshivenḓa Traditional Dances

Among the Vhavenḓa people of South Africa, dance does not serve entertainment purposes only, but also functions as a carrier of their philosophy. This is evinced by a representative sample of Tshivenḓa poetry produced by the Vhavenḓa poets Ramudzuli Ralson Matshili and Daniel Malivhadza Ngwana. This article analyses three poems which thematise three Tshivenḓa traditional dances, namely, Malende, Tshikona and Malombo. These three dances are viewed in this article as being under the threat of extinction, particularly due to the prevailing Covid-19 pandemic. This paper, therefore, is a clarion call to Vhavenḓa cultural experts in particular and the Vhavenḓa people in general to salvage these embalmers of culture and tradition. The article adopts a qualitative approach to analyse the three purposively selected poems based on a set of themes, namely, dance as an index into the Vhavenḓa’s cosmology, dance as a pedagogical and an epistemological tool, and dance as an expression of selfhood and culture. This article relied on the Philosophical Aesthetic Theory and Sociological Aesthetic Theory to analyse the selected poems on Tshivenḓa dance. It was noted that Malende largely facilitates courtship and marriage in Venḓa; Tshikona accompanies all events of national importance in Venḓa whereas Malombo aids communion with the ancestors among Vhavenḓa. The paper recommends that Tshivenḓa traditional dances feature in the development of curricula on African indigenous knowledge systems that should be offered at basic and tertiary institutions of education in South Africa.

Being a master of metaphors

Being a master of metaphors