Political Epistemology Research Articles

Percepciones sobre legalidad de estudiantes de educación superior de Medellín. hacia una ética educativa desde la socialización política y la epistemología feminista

The Research Project “Civic education and construction of political subjects in highereducation institutions ascribed to the municipality of Medellin, practices to overcomethe culture of illegality at the university level” was developed by researchers of theInstituto Tecnologico Metropolitano in the framework of the Alianza Medellin - Antioquiaand Sapiencia programmes. This project’s results show the imaginaries about illegality,justice and civic culture in students, professorial and administrative communities inthree Higher Education Institutions in Medellin. Based on the findings of our research,the present paper aims to show the urgent need to contribute to the construction ofan educational ethics in order to guarantee the development of political subjects inour universities. For that, we propose two possible discursive and epistemic perspectives– political socialization and feminist epistemology -. If we were to adopt theseperspectives in our education institutions, they would contribute to the constructionof the aforementioned educational ethics and in so doing, to the construction of politicalsubjects capable of building democratic societies

Border cases between autonomy and relevance: Economic sciences in Berlin—A natural experiment

The faculty of economics at today's Humboldt University in Berlin, as no other institution of economics, has witnessed three radical ruptures in its history: in 1933, National Socialism replaced the pluralism prevailing in the Weimar Republic by imposing a “German economics”; after WWII, GDR authorities replaced this NS regime by imposing a Marxist imperative, which after the fall of the wall was replaced by the Western standards of neoclassical economics. In reconstructing these three reforms, institutional history can serve as a context in which questions about the political nature of economic knowledge can be answered that remain speculative in a conceptual context. I thus present a natural experiment in the political epistemology of economics: How do economists respond to, resist, and stabilize, changing political regimes? How do economists renegotiate the autonomy of economic knowledge given changing demands as of its social task? Among others, I show that contrary to Robert Merton's old, but still widely held thesis in political epistemology—that the values of science are compatible only with democratic regimes—the totalitarian and authoritarian regimes created better conditions for methodological pluralism in economics than democratic society.

UM GAME PARA A PSICOLOGIA ESCOLAR: PROPOSIÇÕES TEÓRICO-METODOLÓGICAS PARA A CONSTRUÇÃO DE UM ARTEFATO LÚDICO-EDUCATIVO

Este artigo apresenta proposições teórico-metodológicas para o desenvolvimento e o uso de um jogo eletrônico educativo no âmbito da formação do psicólogo escolar, como objeto de uma investigação na área da Informática na Educação. Como mais um instrumento de aprendizagem, o jogo poderá mediar negociações com a Psicologia Escolar, estabelecendo uma porta de entrada para esse campo de estudos. Articulando as orientações da Teoria Ator-Rede, a Teoria da Enação e da Autopoiese, tecemos considerações sobre como a aprendizagem mediada por um game poderá dissolver dicotomias como aluno-professor, sujeito-objeto no ato de aprender e ensinar. No intuito de passar ao largo da prescrição didática no desenvolvimento de um software educativo, refletimos sobre a manutenção de uma posição simétrica para o ato de conhecer com base na proposta de uma epistemologia política para o ensino e a pesquisa.

Uma proposta metodológica para a leitura de textos em avaliação educacional

O texto resulta de pesquisa que procurou identificar os modelos e regras adotados para a construção do conhecimento, os problemas considerados legítimos, os princípios básicos não problematizados e aqueles sobre os quais se busca consenso em textos considerados paradigmáticos para o campo da avaliação educacional no Brasil, que se encontram organizados em coletânea publicada em 1982, que focaliza a avaliação de programas educacionais. Utilizou-se, enquanto procedimento metodológico, a epistemologia política formulada por Rothen (2004). Da análise realizada é possível constatar que a definição do que seja avaliação é o ponto primordial para a compreensão de questões relacionadas ao seu alcance, aos seus métodos e mesmo as suas limitações. Os principais problemas apontados pelos autores enfocam, necessariamente, a questões de cunho metodológico, que acabam por incidir sobre os momentos nos quais se busca obter consenso.Palavras-chave: avaliação educacional, textos paradigmáticos, epistemologia política.

Prising open the 'black box': An epistemological critique of discursive constructions of scaling up the provision of mental health care in Africa.

Global mental health research is increasingly highlighting the high levels of untreated mental illness in Africa and calling for the scaling-up of services in order to redress this situation. A particular model of care is being strongly advocated for such scale-up, and a recent explosion of research is providing guidelines for its implementation. This article seeks to open up the 'black box' of international research on scaling up the provision of mental health care in Africa, unearthing the hidden assumptions and power dynamics underpinning the knowledge produced. It insists that gaining a better understanding of care provision demands that we not only fill the gaps in knowledge but also problematize the assumptions upon which existing knowledge is based. This article demonstrates how two interrelated paradigms are strongly mediating research in this area - those of 'scientific evidence' and 'human rights'. Drawing on recent research within the sociology of scientific knowledge, and strands of postcolonial thought, it demonstrates how these paradigms are both underpinned by several contentious epistemological assumptions, assumptions which are deeply inserted within the epistemological order of Western modernity. The main argument is that through their shared ideological undertones of 'objectivity', 'universalism' and 'rationalism', these paradigms are potentially marginalizing other possibly important ways of thinking about care in Africa, ways which might not originate from modernist forms of consciousness. This article makes a plea for a more inclusive and plural archive of knowledge on scaling up mental health care in Africa, one which is more hospitable to diverse epistemological politics and moral landscapes.

A pesquisa sobre o fazer pesquisa: uma análise de citação da literatura periódica em Ciência da Informação

Introdução: Considera que a literatura na área de Ciência da Informação (CI) compreende uma diversidade temática com baixo destaque para assuntos relacionados aos modos de fazer pesquisa. Analisa a produção científica dos autores que tratam da temática metodologia de pesquisa na literatura de Ciência da Informação (CI) e o referencial no qual se fundamentam as questões metodológicas relativas à área. Discute as posições metodológicas e epistemológicas dos pesquisadores destacados como mais produtivos nacionalmente na temática. Metodologia: Adota a modalidade de análise de conteúdo aliada aos estudos métricos para contextualizar os indicadores gerados referentes à produção, à colaboração relacionada aos tipos de autoria e à análise de citação. Considera o acoplamento bibliográfico como uma modalidade de análise em que são estudadas as citações concomitantes. Desenvolve referencial teórico sobre a importância da análise de produção científica nos domínios do conhecimento. Explora concepções teóricas sobre metodologia de pesquisa e a complementaridade desta com a epistemologia no fazer pesquisa. Resultados: Evidencia, na produção dos autores, a metodologia como foco temático aplicado a contextos da CI e também como objeto de pesquisa da referida área. Considera que a produtividade proeminente dos autores justifica-se especialmente pelo aprofundamento nos metaestudos sobre modos de fazer pesquisa em CI. Identifica a tendência aos estudos de autoria única sobre o tema. Conclusão: Considera que a realização de metaestudos e também de estudos aplicados e metodológicos é importante para que se reconheça, na área de CI, um núcleo teórico e prático consistente. Em relação às influências epistemológicas identificadas com a análise de acoplamento, observa que a epistemologia racionalista crítica e a epistemologia social e política são destacadas na construção do referencial teórico dos autores.

“They Just Know”: The epistemological politics of “evidence-based” non-formal education

Community education and outreach programs should be evidence-based. This dictum seems at once warranted, welcome, and slightly platitudinous. However, the “evidence-based” movement's more narrow definition of evidence—privileging randomized controlled trials as the “gold standard”—has fomented much debate. Such debate, though insightful, often lacks grounding in actual practice. To address that lack, the purpose of the study presented in this paper was to examine what actually happens, in practice, when people support the implementation of evidence-based programs (EBPs) or engage in related efforts to make non-formal education more “evidence-based.” Focusing on three cases—two adolescent sexual health projects (one in the United States and one in Kenya) and one more general youth development organization—I used qualitative methods to address the questions: (1) How is evidence-based program and evidence-based practice work actually practiced? (2) What perspectives and assumptions about what non-formal education is are manifested through that work? and (3) What conflicts and tensions emerge through that work related to those perspectives and assumptions? Informed by theoretical perspectives on the intersection of science, expertise, and democracy, I conclude that the current dominant approach to making non-formal education more evidence-based by way of EBPs is seriously flawed.

Democratic Reason, Democratic Faith, and the Problem of Expertise

ABSTRACTHélène Landemore's Democratic Reason develops one important line of research in political epistemology, which we can define as the study of the ways in which distributed knowledge is put together for the purposes of making political decisions. Landemore argues for the epistemic benefits of cognitive diversity in political decision procedures in a condition of epistemic equality—where there are no experts. Given this omission, her approach has undeveloped potential for a second line of research in political epistemology, on the problem of aggregating asymmetrically distributed knowledge, i.e., integrating democratic reason with expertise.

Political Epistemology

ABSTRACTNormative political epistemologists, such as epistemic democrats, study whether political decision makers can, in principle, be expected to know what they need to know if they are to make wise public policy. Empirical political epistemologists study the content and sources of real-world political actors' knowledge and interpretations of knowledge. In recent years, empirical political epistemologists have taken up the study of the ideas of political actors other than voters, such as bureaucrats and politicians. Normative political epistemologists could follow this lead if they were to focus on the technocratic orientation of nearly all political actors in the West: that is, on their desire to solve social and economic problems. Since most technocratic policy is made by political elites, the reliability of elites' knowledge of the causes of and cures for social and economic problems is a natural topic for normative political epistemology.

Epistemología antropológica como conocimiento del hombre: El papel de la antropología de la tecnociencia

The project of an epistemology of anthropological sustenance similar ideas akin to those who have expressed solidarity between epistemology and social theory. In the present case, the theory of knowledge is symbolized by an idea in the political epistemology, understood as political epistemology and a theory of human scale represented society, understood as anthropology. This article will visit the elements of this relationship conceptual and epistemological issues in some authors founders of anthropology and anthropological critics of the twentieth century epistemology, anthropology of technoscience and the proposal of a possible epistemology supported by the main dimensions matrix conceptual epistemological anthropology.

From the Archeology of Marxism and Communism: Two Essays in Political Epistemology

Of the two relatively independent parts here, Part 1. characterizes at length three phases (early, middle and late) of Marxisms, which were different and usually impoverished takes on Marx. Around 1990 the entire “scientific paradigm” of such Marxism from all three phases crumbled. Marx’s legacy can only be revived by reinstating his insistence on a full and mainly direct democracy. Part 2 deals with the concept and role of the communist party from Marx through Lenin, Stalin and others to Mao. A look backward at it poses the problem of the ossified vanguard, and possible alternative models from Gramsci and Brecht.

Who Are the Jews? New Formulations of an Age-Old Question

This commentary contrasts two recent scholarly works on the possibility of a biological basis for “Jewishness.” Harry Ostrer’s Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People claims a strong shared genetic component of Jewish ancestry tracing to the Levant, extending so far as to suggest a biological basis for Jewishness. Nadia Abu El-Haj’s The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology adopts a skeptical perspective on contemporary genetics and claims that genetic studies of the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA cannot be viewed as supporting a common Jewish ancestry. The disagreement is consequential, and the arguments can be understood in terms of differences in the audiences, styles of reasoning, and social and political perspectives for the two works. A synthesis is proposed for helping to articulate a space between the two opposing views.

Commentary: Who are the Jews? New formulations of an age-old question.

This commentary contrasts two recent scholarly works on the possibility of a biological basis for "Jewishness." Harry Ostrer's Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People claims a strong shared genetic component of Jewish ancestry tracing to the Levant, extending so far as to suggest a biological basis for Jewishness. Nadia Abu El-Haj's The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology adopts a skeptical perspective on contemporary genetics and claims that genetic studies of the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA cannot be viewed as supporting a common Jewish ancestry. The disagreement is consequential, and the arguments can be understood in terms of differences in the audiences, styles of reasoning, and social and political perspectives for the two works. A synthesis is proposed for helping to articulate a space between the two opposing views.

The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology

This book is brimming with insights about the complex ways in which ancestry and population genetics have informed Jewish identity making and seeking. The author knowingly steps into the highly charged arena of scientific, religious, and cultural claims about authentic or provable Jewish identity, and convincingly elucidates the many slippages that exist between genetic information and cultural, national, religious, and ethnic heritage. Instead of reading DNA as a script, El-Haj argues that “DNA evidence does not generate historical stories” (240), and that taking DNA evidence as proof is problematic because “the messiness and density of the social world is reduced to clean lines on phylogenetic trees” (241). The Genealogical Science explores this messiness and density in six chapters that delve into various dimensions of Jewish identity and ancestry genetics. El-Haj is interested in knowledge production, specifically how genetic sciences have generated new epistemologies that inform Jewish identity, historical narratives, and stories of origins and belonging. How are narratives crafted with the tools of anthropological, population, and ancestry genetics? How do these emplotments reinforce or trouble popular or emergent understandings of the Jewish people's long history of struggle, diaspora, and community?

The Epistemological Politics of Vernacular Scripture in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

The year 1577 was a watershed for linguistic politics in Mexico. After more than five decades in Mexico, the Spanish crown signaled a break from its previous tolerance of the use of indigenous language in catechesis and doctrinal publications. The landmark case is the crown's confiscation of Bernardino de Sahagún's Historia General in 1577. Simultaneously, the Mexican Inquisition pursued an assault on vernacular Scripture, confiscating dozens of Spanish scriptural editions, and culminating in the Inquisition's prohibition of Nahuatl and other indigenous-language translations of Scripture, in particular Ecclesiastes and the Epístolas y Evangelios (Epistles and Gospels). Also central was the second trial of a noted Erasmian, Alonso Cabello, who had spent much of the same year in house arrest in Tlatelolco. All this came on the heels of the establishment of the Holy Office in Mexico in November 1571 and its first full-scale purge of prohibited books, including well over 200 editions of Scripture—dozens of them in Spanish and a few in Nahuatl—that had circulated freely in Mexico. Prior to the 1570s exico had witnessed intense debates about the role of language in missionary projects, in catechesis, and in the education of indigenous Mexicans, alongside those regarding the proper language for Scripture and devotional works.

The Epistemological Politics of Vernacular Scripture in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

The year 1577 was a watershed for linguistic politics in Mexico. After more than five decades in Mexico, the Spanish crown signaled a break from its previous tolerance of the use of indigenous language in catechesis and doctrinal publications. The landmark case is the crown's confiscation of Bernardino de Sahagún's Historia General in 1577. Simultaneously, the Mexican Inquisition pursued an assault on vernacular Scripture, confiscating dozens of Spanish scriptural editions, and culminating in the Inquisition's prohibition of Nahuatl and other indigenous-language translations of Scripture, in particular Ecclesiastes and the Epístolas y Evangelios (Epistles and Gospels). Also central was the second trial of a noted Erasmian, Alonso Cabello, who had spent much of the same year in house arrest in Tlatelolco. All this came on the heels of the establishment of the Holy Office in Mexico in November 1571 and its first full-scale purge of prohibited books, including well over 200 editions of Scripture—dozens of them in Spanish and a few in Nahuatl—that had circulated freely in Mexico. Prior to the 1570s exico had witnessed intense debates about the role of language in missionary projects, in catechesis, and in the education of indigenous Mexicans, alongside those regarding the proper language for Scripture and devotional works.

Double opening, split temporality, and new spatialities: an interview with Sandro Mezzadra on ‘militant research’

A militant research approach, Mezzadra suggests, should gesture towards a ‘double opening’: towards struggles on the one hand, and towards the production of concepts and theoretical innovation on the other. Mezzadra defines militant investigation as ‘the ability to localize and consolidate the possibility for ruptures’ and as a practice that does not take the meaning of ‘political struggle’ for granted. Building on the ‘within and against’ militant posture of the Italian Workerist tradition, Mezzadra reflects on the split temporality of militant investigations and on the contested spaces of a political epistemology of migrations.

Migration discipline hijacked: distances and interruptions of a research militancy

In this paper we reflect on some instruments to interrupt the governmentalization of knowledge production at play in migration studies – mainstream, critical, and radical alike. We take knowledge production as the struggle-field where confronting, resisting, and interrupting the disciplining of migrations that arises from their academic and governmental incorporation as objects (of research and of policies). In contrast, we sketch a political epistemology of migrations, asking: which knowledge practices and interventions account for the contestedness migrations spark, and for the turbulence, excess, and upheavals migrants trigger? The paper discusses two of such paths. First, we sketch an approach to research that works ‘within and against’ the distances that perform and define migration field-sites and their pristine subject positions; second, we argue for the development and deployment of interruptions against those unquestioned chains of equivalences that are embedded in migration knowledge. Building on our engagement with Libyan war refugees in Tunisia and in Italy, we reflect on how these instruments somehow bring scholarly knowledge to its limits while working within its premises.

The Epistemology of Fact Checking

ABSTRACTFact checking has become a prominent facet of political news coverage, but it employs a variety of objectionable methodological practices, such as treating a statement containing multiple facts as if it were a single fact and categorizing as accurate or inaccurate predictions of events yet to occur. These practices share the tacit presupposition that there cannot be genuine political debate about facts, because facts are unambiguous and not subject to interpretation. Therefore, when the black-and-white facts—as they appear to the fact checkers—conflict with the claims produced by politicians, the fact checkers are able to see only (to one degree or another) “lies.” The examples of dubious fact-checking practices that we discuss show the untenability of the naïve political epistemology at work in the fact-checking branch of journalism. They may also call into question the same epistemology in journalism at large, and in politics.

The biomedicalisation of war and military remains: US nuclear worker compensation in the ‘post-Cold War’

This paper analyses the recent legislation and administration of United States nuclear worker compensation – the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Programme Act (EEOICPA) – in order to show the domestic impacts of war and the social order that has been established to respond to the Cold War legacy of occupational exposures, illness, and death. Examining the epistemological politics and material effects of compensation, an insufficiently analysed aspect of the Cold War, I argue that the system designed to redress the occupational exposures of nuclear workers accomplishes something else: obscuring the ethical problem of misinformation and missing data from the Cold War era; mobilising an industry of knowledge and market–economic opportunities in the arena of biomedical exposure assessment and dose reconstruction for parts of the former US nuclear complex; and, lastly, dematerialising and depoliticising geographies of the Cold War and its differential impacts through an individualistic epidemiological reprocessing of radiation exposures. The paper shows how the general claims procedure, combined with two methods mandated by EEOICPA – dose reconstruction and the probability of causation – effectively de-link workers from each other, and worksites from homes, pin compensation to a cost–benefit logic, implicate genuine scientific complexity and uncertainty in an ongoing denial of the toxic legacies of war, and ethically undermine the social justice aims of the legislation. The article ends by considering some of the ways that US nuclear workers have responded to living as the remains of both US bomb production and the compensation system.