Knowledge Regimes Research Articles

Decolonisation of education through citizen science: Slow science, not slow violence. The case study Diamonds on the Soles of Their Feet

Citizen science projects are vulnerable to top-down directivity, and driven by assumptions of one-directional ambitions with regard to capacity building and knowledge production. Through the story of Ruth, we discuss how deep-seated legacies of inequality influence the politics of knowledge and explore what we, involved in citizen science projects, could learn from the politics of knowledge as it emerges from decolonisation struggles-particularly as manifested within the academy. Most universities are orientated around Western knowledge regimes that mute many other ways of knowing and ordering the world. Significant inroads have been made when writing on decolonising education but less is known about the effects of the colonisation of state institutions and the disturbances, interferences, and disruptions to organising, sharing, and creating knowledge in public spheres outside of these same universities. These disturbances affect the personal and collective histories of people so that when they are part of research linked to the university, their everyday lives become enmeshed with institutional hegemonies. Research is not dissociated from its deeply entrenched colonial roots. If decolonisation means going deeper into the legitimacy of knowledge and who and how this is being defined, then this must include the process of producing that knowledge outside the bastions of power.

The techno-politics of computing the mind: Opening the black box of digital psychiatry.

Psychiatry has recently witnessed the launch of digital phenotyping as a new research agenda. According to digital phenotyping's hypothesis, data about a patient's daily behavior can be continuously collected through wearable monitoring devices and used to build software that would send warnings of mental relapse or would tailor treatment choices. The research is exploratory, and the claims upon which it is based are contentious. Drawing on interviews, we followed a research team that aspired to build a digital system that could send such warnings to patients with mental health disorders like depression and epilepsy. This enabled us to learn how a new instrument to measure mental function becomes constructed and what translations take place in this process. Here we pay particular attention to the role of patients as research collaborators. We observed the frictions and debates in the research team between different mental health knowledge regimes, seeing them before they were black-boxed and lost from sight. We aimed to understand how actors anticipate software and data analytics to function alongside physicians and patients, as well as how different accounts reconstitute the 'mental', 'therapy', or the 'social' itself. We discuss several 'dissociations' that occur along the research trajectory regarding: less motivated and underrepresented patients, the role of clinical knowledge derived from patient self-reporting, and the social, political, and economic aspects of a patient's life affecting mental health. In this sense, we want to open the black box of this new behavioral technoscience.

Urban knowledge regime: Considerations about practices, cartographies and knowledge forged by São Paulo’s graffiti writers

Urban knowledge regime: Considerations about practices, cartographies and knowledge forged by São Paulo’s graffiti writers

Racial discourses and colonial education policy: The discursive construction of education development at a historically white South African university

Motivated by critiques from black students during the protests (2015-2016), I trace continuities between the racialised discourses and knowledge regimes that justified colonial education policies and that of Education Development at a historically white South African university. First, I show how the University of Cape Town’s Humanities Education Development Programme racialised and misrecognised black students, despite attempted reforms. Secondly, I trace the discursive formation of the ED project - from the assimilationist discourse of missionary education; the adapted model of trusteeship; the production of race science during apartheid; to a return to assimilationist discourse via the Cape Liberal tradition during apartheid’s demise. However, after a generation of inferior Banu Education, the attempt to assimilate black students into historically white universities’ curricula was not feasible. Instead, an adapted, remedial model was proposed that became entrenched post-apartheid by a state and HE system that failed to transform its inherited Eurocentric curriculum.

Parenting Expertise during Transitions-to-Motherhood. Exploring Transformations in Knowledge Regimes in Poland

This study explores transformations in parenting expertise in Poland, focusing on maternal knowledge perspectives during transitions-to-motherhood. It combines empirical data from two sociological studies: in-depth interviews (with to-be mothers) and expert interviews (with reproductive medicine practitioners; professionals offering antenatal, perinatal, and postpartum care services; and digital parenting advisors). Based on a thematic analysis, we describe the competing visions of parenting expertise in contemporary Poland, treating them as emanations of rapidly transforming knowledge regimes. We demonstrate vestiges of parenting expertise legitimized during state socialism; illustrate stories of granular expertise visible to mothers and experts, embracing the overflow and multiplicity of parenting experts under neoliberal intensification; and identify the potential of a new familistic framing of expertise by observing aspects of traditionalism refactored into expertise in recent years. This study argues that the characteristics of parenting expertise strongly hinge on cultural contexts and the pace of systemic changes that frame the knowledge regimes therein.

Epistemic gerrymandering: ESG, impact investing, and the financial governance of sustainability

Finance plays an increasing role in the global governance of sustainability. To explain the rise of finance, scholarship is increasingly turning to the financial sector as a producer of policy-relevant knowledge. However, scholarship has paid little attention to how differences within the financial sector affect such knowledge production. This article differentiates two important ways how the financial sector addresses sustainability: investments following environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards, and impact investing. Whereas diversified ESG investing is centered around index and data providers, impact investors manage non-listed assets and develop idiosyncratic ‘impact’ approaches. I introduce the term ‘epistemic gerrymandering’ to describe how impact investors tailor ‘impact’ to their financial portfolios and to explain how the resulting heterogeneity and ambiguity is stabilized. Tracing the historical development of impact investing from three distinct strands into a transnational club, I argue that the club structure, together with impact investors’ proximity to private wealth management, explains the persistence of epistemic gerrymandering. As a knowledge regime, epistemic gerrymandering reinforces three dynamics of particular importance to political economists: the subjugation of sustainability to financial returns, the restriction of access to epistemic arenas to wealthy elites, and the rechanneling of charitable and public resources to de-risk private investments.

Towards a new knowledge regime in the Anthropocene. The contribution from anthropology

El mundo está sobrecalentado, la civilización global se ha arrinconado y negocia un incómodo doble dilema entre los imperativos del crecimiento y la urgente necesidad de soluciones sostenibles. Hoy en día existe un amplio consenso sobre la necesidad urgente de tomar en serio estos retos en la investigación, la movilización política y la elaboración de políticas. La cuestión es qué tipo de conocimiento se necesita para dar los pasos adecuados. La respuesta corta es: Muchos tipos de conocimiento. Una respuesta más larga comienza con una pregunta complementaria: ¿Qué conocimientos? Utilizando el concepto y la metáfora del sobrecalentamiento para explicar el estancamiento contemporáneo, esta contribución muestra la importancia de la interdisciplinariedad y se pregunta hasta qué punto los conocimientos producidos en antropología pueden contribuir al tipo de esclarecimiento que se necesita. ¿Debemos aprender de los errores y aciertos del pasado, buscar los conocimientos necesarios en las pequeñas sociedades restantes o, por el contrario, insistir en que la modernidad tiene que resolver sus contradicciones por sus propios medios, ya sea con algún tipo de gobierno global o con soluciones tecnológicas?

Climbing, stalling, falling: How people experiencing housing instability anticipate their futures

For people experiencing housing instability, considerable uncertainty and future risks coincide with a lack of affordable housing supply. Housing instability often entails movement across different forms of accommodation while facing the possibility of homelessness. Thinking with anticipation outlined by Adams et al. as a regime of knowledge espousing specific governing principles, this study explores storytelling about the future by people experiencing housing instability. Here, anticipation manifests as agentic future orientation in hopes, practices and social norms geared towards secure housing. Drawing on narrative interviews and participant-produced photographs collected in 2022 in an urban centre in Queensland, Australia, we analyse how participants imagine their futures and what they consider right and actionable. Our findings highlight how such imaginings leaned on and challenged the linearity inscribed in metaphors depicting a predictable progression towards stable housing through appropriate action in the present.

A Knowledge Regime Fit for Geoeconomics? The Changing Production, Consumption and Practices of Policy Knowledge in the EU

A Knowledge Regime Fit for Geoeconomics? The Changing Production, Consumption and Practices of Policy Knowledge in the EU

Beyond (and Alongside) Shameful Attachments: The Lived Experience of Critique Within the Entrepreneurial University

During 2019, we embarked on a fieldwork based on 18 semi-structured interviews with international scholars in the humanities and social sciences in Chilean universities to explore their experiences with knowledge. Drawing on theories of critique and neoliberalism, we analyzed their ambivalent and unsettling conjunction of attachments to neoliberal and critical knowledge formations. By developing the notion of regime of epistemic subjectification, we emphasized the affective intensities these experiences brought to bear amid the differential weight and interplay of neoliberalism and critique as ethico-epistemic modes of engagement. We argued that the dominant focus on neoliberal knowledge and entrepreneurial subjectivity, albeit intense, expansive, and seemingly omnipresent, must be complicated by exposing its ambivalent affective and somatic force, and recognizing the difference between critical academic products and the lived experience of critique. The latter was constituted in the outsides of the inside of the neoliberal knowledge regime.

Using algorithms to improve knowledge work

AbstractWe explore how organizations leverage algorithms to improve knowledge work in contexts where the tasks require skilled work, as distinct from routine tasks that have traditionally been the focus of academic enquiry. Drawing on a multiple‐case study of four business areas in a multinational energy firm undergoing a digital transformation, we find that contrary to what the literature predicts, tasks that require skilled work can also benefit from the adoption of algorithmic solutions. To benefit, business areas engaged in two distinct pathways for transforming knowledge work. The first focuses on automating a specific task, replacing human activity with algorithms in a single task. The second involves re‐engineering an entire process, whereby sequences of steps adjacent to the task at hand are redesigned on integration of an algorithm. We find that these pathways have different effects on the ability to improve knowledge work, suggesting that alignment between the task and the pathway chosen is crucial to realizing any improvement. We also find that the ability to sustain any improvement depends on the adjustment of the knowledge regime—the practices and structures that sanction knowledge. Building on these findings, we propose a general process model for the adoption of algorithmic solutions in knowledge work. In the wider context of the future of work debate, our findings challenge the prevailing notion that a task's skill requirements determine the extent to which knowledge work can be improved by algorithmic solutions.

Aiming at the 'proper' body: How exoskeletons foster 'risky' bodies and conflicting knowledge regimes.

Exoskeletal devices are new technologies that have been developed in the medical field to provide assistance and rehabilitation for persons with motor impairments. Among these impairments, spinal cord injury and stroke are the most common. Drawing on materials collected during multi-sited ethnography conducted in France, Germany and Switzerland from 2014 to 2019, I suggest that exoskeletons contribute to a more general process that I identify as 'aiming at the "proper" body'. As they materially craft motor impaired bodies but also are responsible for datafication and dataveillance, exoskeletons allow to categorise new aspects of 'risky' bodies. Simultaneously, they foster conflicts between experts' perspectives about rehabilitation practice and the users' phenomenological experiences that exoskeletons aim to transform. After describing how exoskeletons expand the realm of contemporary medical technologies in their purpose of 'aiming at "proper" bodies' while being 'miraculous', I identify two conceptions of 'risky' bodies: a first one related to materiality, a second one to processes of digitalisation to which exoskeletons actively participate. Finally, I investigate some conflicting levels between the regimes of expert knowledge and the phenomenological experiences of the users and reassess the latter's role in rehabilitation practice with exoskeletons.

Intersectionality and humanity: A keynote for “remapping the feminist global”

ABSTRACT That Modern Feminist Thought shares its lineage with the liberal Enlightenment and Humanism has continued to render certain feminist practices assimilable to the colonial-racial regime of knowledge that has long underpinned what we normatively uphold as political modernity and its foundational assumptions. This article, originally presented as a conference keynote address, revisits the familiar feminist aporia through exploring the multiple genealogies of feminisms to highlight their theorizations of difference, the human, and other ways of being and caring. It also reconsiders how “intersectionality” – a concept originally forwarded as an alternative legal doctrine yet extensively deployed for various political ends such that the term appears to have lost its original relevance for some – can be repurposed as a critical methodology with which to challenge the universalism of liberal humanism/feminism and the attendant compartmentalization of academic knowledge, but ultimately, to strengthen coalitional possibilities. The article addresses how some of the largely North America-based conversations can resonate transnationally and effectively with some of the most urgent feminist engagements that have unfolded across and beyond plural “Asias,” however imagined.

The “boy problem” in public policy

AbstractThe article investigates how gender differences in school performance are conceptualized in recent Swedish and Norwegian public commission reports against the backdrop of an increasing public focus on “problem boys” and boys' underachievement in school as a policy challenge. We found substantive country differences, despite regime similarities and the considerable level of gender equality norms and policy diffusion within the Nordic region. Whereas Swedish reports address gender differences in school performance and behavior equipped with radical feminist perspectives and theories of patriarchal oppression, Norwegian reports largely avoid explicit references to feminist theory and include analyses of the unfair burdens of boys in school and society. It is argued that the diverging approaches are connected to features of the commissions and of the wider knowledge regimes of the two gender equality forerunners, but also to historical differences in the ideological underpinnings of Swedish and Norwegian gender equality policy making.Related ArticlesIreni‐Saban, Liza. 2013. “Give Me Children or Else I Die: The Politics and Policy of Cross‐Border Reproductive Care.” Politics & Policy 41(1): 5–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12004.Svallfors, Stefan, Erica Falkenström, Corrie Hammar, and Anna T. Höglund. 2022. “Networked Reports: Commissioning and Production of Expert Reports on Swedish Health Care Governance.” Politics & Policy 50(3): 580–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12462.Tusalem, Rollin F. 2022. “Does Gendered Representation in National Legislatures Promote Substantive Representation and Human Development? Evidence from the Developing World.” Politics & Policy 50(6): 1096–137. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12503.

The specter of race in global Covid-19 responses: the future is decolonial.

The Covid-19 pandemic reified pre-existing inequalities predicated on anti-Black racism, imperial geographical cartography, and the violent language of biomilitarism. In this reflective essay I deploy tools of historical sociology to underscore the importance of race, racism, racialization, and global responses to pandemics. I considerer the following questions. First, how can world society develop ideas and concepts for the imagination of a post-imperial global health regime? Second, can alternative futures be imagined if the monopolistic control of power, global scientific processes and knowledge regime is framed around a problematic lexicography of a Eurocentric totalizing project of being human? Lastly, if there is a scientific consensus that we need alternative futures, what kinds of knowledge is needed to bring about a post-imperial liberated order? The future of global health regime is a decolonial one predicated on a new biopolitics. I provide four paradigmatic approaches to subvert imperial global health: (i) pivoting ecocide in the imperial global health regime; (ii) abandonment of a Eurocentric conceptualization of racial hierarchy and modernity; (iii) disbanding the commodification of public health; and (iv) organizing a new world order through health reparations.

Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality: Negotiating Parent–Child Relations in Local Legal System in Republican China, 1911–1949

AbstractThe principle of filial piety underpinned both parent–child relations and, more broadly, Qing legal and social order. Entering the turbulent years of the Qing–Republic transition, filial piety went through substantial changes. Drawn from the local legal archives in Jiangjin county, Sichuan, this research traces the transformation of filial piety in legal practice during the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that two overlapping processes—legal reforms and nation-state building—synergized to restructure the meaning of filial piety from a largely integrated principle in Qing, which bridged the gaps between filiality and loyalty to the emperor and between personalized morality and imperial state legitimacy, to divergent new interpretations of filial piety, including the individualist filial piety, nationalist filial piety, legal filial piety, and sentimental filial piety. Each new interpretation inherits only part of its original meaning and incorporates newly introduced legal knowledge of legal equality and property ownership. The article concludes that various, sometimes contradictory interpretations of filial piety indicate the Republican legal reforms as an in-between, dynamic spectrum of legal change with vigorous negotiations among different legal actors and knowledge regimes.

Dark knowledges and uneven connections: transnational experimental practices of surveillance and imitation among Cold War empires

ABSTRACT This article looks at the transnational and transsystemic spread of a particular Cold War knowledge regime characterized by (neo-)positivistic premises for the calculation and prediction of human action, attitudes and behaviour, as well as its practical use for matters of propaganda and surveillance. The article analyses, thereby, moments of imperial imitation. It focuses on the scientific and state actors of newly emerging experimental spaces and methods, including their shortcomings and dark spots, that accompanied mutual surveillance practices and inter-imperial exchange circuits. Consequently, Cold War empires are analysed as entities that brought into being scientific but also social, economic and political laboratories. The aim of this article is therefore to place scientific exchanges and practices in the fields of sociology, mass communication and public opinion research within the framework of entangled histories of empire. These histories, however, will also be situated against the complex conflations with and paradoxical relations to the global and local (dis)orders, ruptures, alliances and networks of the Cold War. Empirically, the interest of this article lies in tracing the exchanges, taking place under the watchful eye of their respective secret services, of Polish sociologists and social psychologists with their Soviet and US-American colleagues in the late 1950s to 1970s.

Imperialism, Revisionism, Counter-hegemony, and the Greek 1940s as Event

Abstract: This study focuses on contemporary cultural projects dealing with the Greek revolutionary event of the 1940s. Empirically, the study examines a growing corpus of different cultural practices dealing with aspects of the Greek 1940s. These cultural practices are viewed as counter-archives and conceptualized using the notion of the proletarian public sphere associated with counter-hegemonic legacies, discourses, narratives, and practices situated in today's Greek political antagonisms. The past is understood to haunt the present in instances when the constitutive violence of hegemonic discourses and institutions unfolds. The projects studied create public presences of subjects and circumstances repressed by the official Greek public sphere. This signifies a production of knowledge from below, beyond what official knowledge regimes foreground and exclude. The projects unfold utopian margins, pointing towards the existence of a living social memory of emancipatory and revolutionary struggles that remain incomplete.

(UN)DOING HISTORY: A CASE FOR EPISTEMOLOGICAL ALTERITY

ABSTRACTThis article addresses two primary tensions that currently beset medieval history. The first concerns a contentious debate within the field regarding the relative merits of two interpretative approaches: that which seeks to situate the Middle Ages within a narrative of continuity wherein aspects of the medieval bear some relationship of familiarity with the present and that which accords a radical alterity to the past that instigates moments of historical rupture. The second tension concerns the fraught relationship between history as a site of knowledge production with some proximity to engaging and producing truth and history as constructed, wherein its purported object of study, the past, is not an ontological fact but a cultural artifact. In this instance, what we witness is less a debate among scholars within history than an amorphic anxiety about history. This article makes a case for engaging the radical alterity that confronts the historian of the Middle Ages. It does so, however, cognizant of an ontological impasse: if alterity is attentive to difference, a difference that resists translation into modern knowledge regimes, then what does it mean to engage it historically—that is, through a temporal structure that would have been foreign to the very period of study?

Preliminaries on an Unknown Greek Translation of the Covenant of Muḥammad by Sophronios of Kilis

Abstract This study offers preliminary remarks on a hitherto unknown Greek translation of the Covenant of Muḥammad by the Patriarch Sophronios of Kilis. The translation is preserved in a single miscellaneous codex entitled Sarakēnika, which was compiled between 1770 and 1780 by the renowned Phanariot scholar and bibliophile Nikolaos Karatzas, a former official of the Patriarchate of Constantinople (MS Gr. 112, Princeton University Library). As the inclusion of the translation in the codex is representative of the cultural transfers that took place between the Arabic-speaking and the Greek peoples during the 17th- and 18th-century Ottoman Empire, this study examines, in particular, the knowledge regimes for the production of the text. In the Appendix, an editio princeps of the translation is provided.