Politics Of Knowledge Production Research Articles

Empowerment or alienation? Teaching gender and development in postcolonial contexts

ABSTRACT This paper explores how culture, religion, gender, and the politics of knowledge production were entangled in the mission, policies, and practices of the Asian University for Women (AUW) in Bangladesh. The article contributes to documenting how decolonisation efforts in women’s education and empowerment play out in an institution located in the periphery and established with an explicit mission for women’s empowerment. The article critically looks at the (sometimes) contradictory discourses, desires, and agencies at the student, community, staff, and institutional levels, along with the power dynamics and reproduction of colonial and postcolonial practices and legacies in the context of operationalising gender and development (GAD), highlighting the paradoxes and challenges that arise from such endeavours. Finally, this case study highlights how pedagogies of community building at the institutional level become integral in responding to such tensions and conflicts and in countering the alienation from culture and religion that global practices of GAD often create.

What It Takes to Be Counted

Abstract In this interview, the publisher and author Ruby Hembrom speaks about being invisibilized and erased as an Adivasi, which led her to set up adivaani (“the first voices”), the first Indigenous-run platform for publishing and documenting Adivasi voices in English in India, in 2012. With a focus on both the ideological and practical aspects of running what Hembrom calls a “dependie” initiative, this interview explores adivaani’s—and Hembrom’s—journey in creating an Indigenous archive; the politics of knowledge production, language, and translation; and the platform’s role in landscapes marked by the cultural and material dispossession of Adivasis in India. Hembrom also provides insight into some of her publishing choices, the global platforms and collaborations she and adivaani have been part of, and her visions for Adivasi feminism and solidarities.

Cybersecurity and the politics of knowledge production: towards a reflexive practice

ABSTRACT How does a reflexive scholarly practice matter for producing useful cybersecurity knowledge and policy? We argue that staking relevance without engaging in reflexivity diminishes the usefulness of knowledge produced both in academia and in policy. To advance a reflexive research agenda in cybersecurity, this forum offers a collective interrogation of the liminal positionality of the cybersecurity scholar. We examine the politics of ‘the making of’ cybersecurity expertise as knowledge practitioners who are located across and in between the diverse and overlapping fields of academia, diplomacy and policy. Cybersecurity expertise, and the practices of the cybersecurity epistemic community more broadly, rely heavily on the perceived applicability and actionability of knowledge outputs, on the practical dependency on policy practitioners regarding access, and thus on the continuous negotiation of hierarchies of knowledge. Participants in this forum reflect on their research practice of negotiating such dilemmas. Collectively, we draw on these contributions to identify obstacles and opportunities towards realising a reflexive research practice in cybersecurity.

Timeline Game

What events get included in historical narratives? Which ones get left out? Why? How might we encourage students to consider and debate these decisions while simultaneously making arguments about causation, the politics of knowledge production, power, and perspective? This article explores the use of a “timeline game” to help students articulate and develop historical argumentation skills. Students’ main objective in the game is to convince their classmates to vote for their groups’ chosen events, nominating them onto a “Final Timeline,” which includes the most “significant” events of the course’s history. Students argue for the significance of their chosen events in various ways including (but not limited to): articulating how it caused other events, how it represented important course themes, how it challenged dominant Eurocentric narratives, or how it shed light on a perspective otherwise obscured or hidden by the timeline’s main events thus far. Though designed for college-level African and Global history survey courses, the game could be adapted for a number of different classroom contexts and grade levels.

The responsibility to remain silent? On the politics of knowledge production, expertise and (self-)reflection in Russia’s war against Ukraine

The responsibility to remain silent? On the politics of knowledge production, expertise and (self-)reflection in Russia’s war against Ukraine

Slaving and Slave Trading in Africa

Slavery in Africa dates to antiquity. Slave trading networks in Africa transported people across the Sahara and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, with significant numbers of people sent to the Middle East, India, central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia. Africa, however, was not only a source of export of people; enslaved persons were also imported into the continent. This article reviews scholarly research into the capture, trade, and use of enslaved men, women, and children in Africa, with a focus on Ghana. It suggests that the history and legacies of slavery and slave trading cannot be understood without reference to African historiography, the politics of knowledge production, and present-day heritage tourism. In reviewing the historical and anthropological research, it also introduces some of the possibilities, problems, and challenges of archaeological approaches to studying slavery and slave trading to demonstrate that archaeology is in conversation with—and of value to—those outside the discipline.

Caste(d) knowledges: (Self)-problematising epistemic impunity and caste-privilege in academia

How can socially privileged researchers engage with as well as analyse marginalising discourses without co-opting the experiences and knowledges of marginalised communities? This inquiry forms the focus of the present article. I discuss the lack of accountability for ‘upper’ caste academics and the resulting impunity for us as ‘knowledge’ producers. I explain how I acknowledge(ed) my complicity in maintaining and reproducing the caste-system and worked towards evolving ethical research practices. A form of inquiry called ‘self-problematisation’ is invoked herein as a ‘practice of the self’, in which researchers must ask ourselves what we come to problematise and what is left unproblematic in our work? This analysis has relevance for questions of ethics and the politics of knowledge production. I appeal to the researchers pondering on questions of positionality and privilege to ask – what can we ‘speak’ about when we speak of (caste) privilege and how must we confront the assumptions of ‘superiority’ in the ‘knowledge’ produced through us?

‘Whispered in corridors’: Intra‐national politics and practices of knowledge production in South African Human Geography

AbstractReflections on the state of Geography around the globe have noted multiple challenges and opportunities—including a call for the reconfiguring of the discipline as a critical space of care and praxis (Daya, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 47, 9, 2022). Such a call is indelibly connected to broader conversations on the politics of knowledge production and critical engagements with cultures of knowledge production. In order to realise the reconfiguring of the discipline, it is imperative to engage with the multi‐scalar politics and practices of knowledge production, to look beyond global inequalities and critically examine the intra‐national inequities and structural biases of knowledge production. Through a focus on South African Human Geography and detailed analysis of publication data and interviews with staff at universities across the country, we critically examine how the ‘haunting’ of apartheid legacies contributes to a double‐peripheralisation of staff at historically disadvantaged institutions while critical conversations remain ‘whispered in corridors’. This more granular engagement with the politics and practices of knowledge production highlights the entwining of intra‐ and inter‐national privilege which produces a mosaic of ‘cores’ and ‘peripheries’ in the uneven landscape of knowledge production that requires critical scholars to engage with on multiple scales in order to realise a more just and equitable knowledge economy.

The ethical challenges of diversifying genomic data: A qualitative evidence synthesis.

This article aims to explore the ethical issues arising from attempts to diversify genomic data and include individuals from underserved groups in studies exploring the relationship between genomics and health. We employed a qualitative synthesis design, combining data from three sources: 1) a rapid review of empirical articles published between 2000 and 2022 with a primary or secondary focus on diversifying genomic data, or the inclusion of underserved groups and ethical issues arising from this, 2) an expert workshop and 3) a narrative review. Using these three sources we found that ethical issues are interconnected across structural factors and research practices. Structural issues include failing to engage with the politics of knowledge production, existing inequities, and their effects on how harms and benefits of genomics are distributed. Issues related to research practices include a lack of reflexivity, exploitative dynamics and the failure to prioritise meaningful co-production. Ethical issues arise from both the structure and the practice of research, which can inhibit researcher and participant opportunities to diversify data in an ethical way. Diverse data are not ethical in and of themselves, and without being attentive to the social, historical and political contexts that shape the lives of potential participants, endeavours to diversify genomic data run the risk of worsening existing inequities. Efforts to construct more representative genomic datasets need to develop ethical approaches that are situated within wider attempts to make the enterprise of genomics more equitable.

25 Years of Civil Wars: Identifying Key Developments Through the Reviews Section

ABSTRACT This introductory essay to the Reviews Section of Civil Wars 25th Anniversary Special Issue explores key paradigms in the field of conflict studies, and how they have evolved, ranging from new and critical approaches to knowledge production; to conceptualisations of political violence and civil war as dynamic, relational, and potentially order-making and a new demand to centre research ethics in our work. Among other things, this introduction calls on scholars of civil wars to cultivate and maintain spaces for critical dialogue and reflection – not just on methods and findings but also on broader questions of the processes and politics of knowledge production – to ensure the health and advancement of our sub-field.

From crisis to sustainability: The politics of knowledge production on rural Europe

AbstractWhat does it mean to study places in ‘crisis’ and how does that affect the research done on the ‘rural’? To be considered to be in crisis is not really new as any literature review of rural studies indicates. And yet, we live now in a new context, with new challenges for ‘rural’ research, in particular that of sustainability. Sustainability is the new policy focus and is increasingly reflected in research on rural Europe. Although scholars are beginning to theorize on what is sustainable in and for rural areas, our intention is to take this further. We theorize on what the focus on crisis and, increasingly on sustainability, means for the research we do and the knowledge we produce on rural Europe. Our aim is to bring attention to the politics of past and present knowledge production on the rural to be able to imagine just and sustainable futures. In an analysis of literature primarily from Sweden and the UK, we argue that two construals, that of a rural crisis and that of rural–urban polarization, have set the tone for rural studies and may have overshadowed a more plural approach. We outline what might be needed from rural research to meet future challenges and what the notion of sustainability, with its emphasis on the entanglements of the social, economic and environmental, might mean for the future of rural research.

Publishing Nationally or Internationally in the Humanities and Social Sciences: What Do Journal Websites Say about the Divide?

As scholarly publishing continues to expand its international dimension in the globalizing era, authors in non-Anglophone contexts today are increasingly confronted with the decision to publish nationally or internationally. Linguistic challenges aside, such a decision is complicated by the tension between local interests and international solidarity with changing conventions of scholarly publishing in the national context. This study investigated one facet of this tension by comparing national and international publishing activities in the humanities and social sciences based on the data collected from the websites of sixty Chinese-medium national journals and sixty English-medium international journals. The findings point to a complex interplay between local and international traditions, norms, and politics of knowledge production. What these changes mean and how they may bear on author choice is discussed with implications for understanding the dynamic landscape of scholarly publishing in non-Anglophone systems of knowledge production.

Introduction: Counter-stories from the Arctic Contact Zone

This special issue of Interventions presents essays from twelve scholars from the field of Arctic Humanities that collect, contextualize, and theorize micro-histories of encounters between Arctic Indigenous people or Arctic animals and European, Russian, and North American agents of empire in the long nineteenth century. In bringing out from Arctic archives Indigenous agencies, voices and aesthetic productions, animal presences and fates, the essays collected here contribute to ongoing academic efforts to decolonize knowledge on the region. This, in our case, means to (1) document the impact Euro-American and Russian imperialism had on human and animal life in the Arctic region; (2) foreground the knowledge, creative expressions, experience, resilience, and resistance of Indigenous individuals, peoples, and communities; and (3) expose the illusions of modern progress narratives (scientific, material, moral) that accompanied colonial ventures in the Arctic region. The Introduction to this special issue on “Counter-stories from the Arctic Contact Zone” presents a broad overview of the history of colonization in the areas of the Arctic (today’s Canada, Inuit Nunangat, Alaska, Kalaallit Nunaat [Greenland], Svalbard and Sápmi) that the essays address. It then sets the methodological framework for the essays through a discussion of postcolonial theory concerned with the politics of knowledge production and the possibilities and challenges of contrapuntal re-readings of the cultural archive. Central here is a discussion of how Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the contact zone aids the discovery and documentation of counter-narratives that challenge and disrupt the colonialist meta-narratives that then supported empire and today continue to impact how dominant, capitalist cultures relate to, exploit, and extract from the Arctic region and its peoples.

Editors’ Note

Editors’ Note Darius Bost, Wanda S. Pillow, and Kimberly M. Jew This issue—consisting of general essays and a special section on “Pandemic Time”—addresses in various ways the politics of knowledge production. From former President Trump’s promotion of “alternative facts” that continue to pose a threat to US democracy to the post-pandemic “misinformation” that has impacted health outcomes, the politics of knowledge production and distortion has become a pressing political matter. Feminist scholars have made significant contributions to the politics of knowledge production in times of crisis, and this issue continues this important work. Angela Towne’s essay, “A Feminist Sexology Perspective on the Multifunctional Clitoris: Dispelling the Sole Purpose Myth,” demonstrates how progressive efforts to celebrate the clitoris’s functional role in sexual pleasure have inadvertently foreclosed its multifunctionality. Meg Perret’s “‘Transgender Frogs Turn Your Son Gay’: Endangered Amphibians, Estrogenic Pollution, and Male Extinction” tracks the scientific rhetoric and attendant moral panic regarding the effects of the herbicide Atrazine on the gender and sex of frogs. While inflammatory rhetoric claiming that the drug “feminizes” frogs may at first appear to reify binary notions of gender and sex, Perret demonstrates how it might also affirm gender and sexual diversity. In “Gender and Race in John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women,” Aurélie Knüfer revisits this canonical philosophical text to argue that Mill uses the comparison of enslaved women and English married women not to draw connections between the causes of racism and sexism, but to dissociate them. Alison Kibler recovers three television shows in the mid-1970s that engage Black feminist issues. Kibler argues that recovering and analyzing these shows broadens our understanding of feminist television activism by privileging Black women’s perspectives. The special section, “Pandemic Time,” continues the issue’s emphasis on the politics of knowledge production by engaging the question, how has the [End Page ix] coronavirus pandemic altered our perceptions of time? The scholars and artists included in this special section draw from feminist, queer, Indigenous, Black diasporic, Latinx, and other epistemologies to challenge universalist conceptions of time. While they acknowledge that the coronavirus pandemic occasioned a monumental shift in how time is experienced, they foreground alternative ways of knowing that might enrich our understanding of what it means to live in pandemic time. In so doing, they expose the forms of marginalization and violence that have occurred through normative logics of time. “Pandemic Time” begins with a critical introduction by Darius Bost, who invited the contributors to participate in this special section. The introduction is followed by the roundtable, “When We’re Coming From: What Would an HIV Doula Do? On Pandemic Time(s).” The What Would an HIV Doula Do? Collective is a group of activists, scholars, and artists who are committed to responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic. Approaching HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 from a range of perspectives, the eight members of the collective included here place the categories “pandemic” and “time” in productive tension and provide novel ways to approach the question of how the pandemic has altered our senses of time. We learn from this collective how pandemics move in and out of time; that time is bent, flickering, syndemic. Because global health crises overlap with capitalism’s crises, time-is-money. Though we may be in pandemic time for the long haul, they illustrate how marginalized communities possess historical knowledge of crises through which we might survive and thrive in pandemic time—what one collective member calls palimpsesting. The roundtable is followed by the Somali-Canadian artist Abdi Osman’s series of drawings, Modern Primitive. Osman’s series of color drawings extend the public health practice of social distancing to consider the broader social divisions that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Osman’s character studies prompt us to reflect on what it means to live together when existing social hierarchies and the discourse that maintain them have forced us apart. The following essays ask, how we come to know what it means to live in pandemic time, and how we convey that knowledge. Will Mosley’s “On the Lateness of Pandemic Time” deploys the Black queer vernacular term “late” as...

Embodied Participation

Our paper centers embodiment as a theme and a process in research through describing the fine-grained practices and everyday interactions that shape collaborative research in the contexts of watershed restoration and environmental monitoring. We focus on embodiment because it offers a means for attending to the process and politics of knowledge production within and across boundaries. We offer two case studies that focus on embodiment to structure research processes and shape ongoing, emergent, and collaborative research practices. We argue technical communication as a field is well positioned to include embodied practices in research design and writing.

The climate of counterinsurgency and the future of security in the Sahel

The Sahel is regularly conceived as a space where the interaction between climate and conflict can be observed. With a high-dependence on rain-fed agriculture and livestock, climate variability leaves pastoralists and smallholders particularly vulnerable. Moreover, the region remains fragile, embodied by factors such as weak capacity of the state, inter-group inequality and a history of violent conflict; as well as a decade of regional French-led military operations. As such, it is an important case study for the question of whose security is threatened by global warming. Discussions about climate security in the Sahel are not happening in a vacuum, but during a crisis-ridden moment. This article seeks to reframe the debate by grasping all these things at once: wrestling with the historical legacies of environmental interventionism, the politics of pragmatic crisis management, and the uncertainties of a climate-change future yet to be born. It develops an argument about the need to engage with a politics of the future via the politics of knowledge production.

(Re)imagining research, activism, and rights at the intersections of sexuality, health, and social justice

ABSTRACT The Covid-19 pandemic inaugurated a new global order of public life and health marked by death, despair and alienation. As a crisis of a global scale, it made the task of (re)imagination simultaneously necessary and extremely difficult. It is this double bind of the difficulty and imminence of imagination that motivates the curation of this special issue. In this introduction, we map the connections between the theme of this volume and the key ideas that constitute its varied contributions, which we organised under three broad mobilising ideas: Rights and Resilience; Sexuality, Health and Justice; and Politics of Knowledge Production and Collaborations. Contributions cover myriad issues, engage in methodological innovations and play with diverse genres. Alongside more traditional academic writings, there are community-based research papers, activist conversations, visual essays, reflective pieces and interviews. The geographical span of the contributions brings insights from around the world and the number of topics covered in this issue are equally vast including, among others, mental health, disability, environment, sex work, violence, queerness, LGBTQ+ experiences, love and anger. The aim of this special issue, then, is to challenge the Manichean distinctions that are often drawn between research and activism, and by extension, between theory and practice.

The Politics of Knowledge Production: Training and Practice of Archaeological Science in Africa.

Numerous doctoral degree holders were trained in African archaeometallurgy in the Global North as well as on the African continent. African archaeometallurgy continues to attract a significant number of researchers from Europe and North America. This paper is based on our lived experiences as resident African archaeometallurgists. We argue that out of frustration because of unequal power relations and lack of access to archaeological science laboratories and funding, most African archaeometallurgists are now pursuing other research areas and careers altogether. We propose some solutions to ensure sustainability in the training and practice of archaeological scientists on the African continent. We conclude that African scholars need to develop home-grown and long-term research capacities and strategies.

Solidarity, Knowledge and Social Hope

The paper investigates the ideas of solidarity and social hope textured in critiquing western epistemology and politics of knowledge production. Richard Rorty’s anti-foundationalist, anti-representationalist critique argues for the de-hierarchization of knowledge-claims. The cultural-conversational turn to knowledge and social hope in the creation of democratic community finds its rationale in the conception of human solidarity, in the most praiseworthy human abilities of trust and cooperation. The idea of social hope, a critical engagement of the knower with knowledge production in the feminist discourse, however, is another anti-essentialist stance that illuminates the various axes of domination, which the pragmatization of knowledge and methods does not account for. It is in this context, that the paper examines the politics of solidarity vis-à-vis knowledge construction in Donna Haraway, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Marnia Lazreg and argues that solidarity as dissent provides the knower a chance to articulate hope in the transformative goals of knowledge and education. Keywords: critique of epistemology, Rorty, politics of knowledge, politics of solidarity, social hope

Researching inside police custody in four jurisdictions: ‘Getting in’, ‘getting on’, ‘getting your hands dirty’ and ‘getting through it’

As a unique criminal justice organisation, the police present challenges, but also opportunities for those who research them. These are examined, in terms of getting in, getting on, getting your hands dirty and getting through it, using data collected as part of a comparative multi-method study of police custody in large cities in Australia, England, Ireland and the United States in 2007 and 2009. As this research took place on the cusp of the proliferation of research with the police, retrospective examination of field notes is used to reflect on how the research process is influenced not just by one’s social origins but also by the culture of academia and the politics of knowledge production. It is argued that while research with the police is becoming the norm, research on the police is still of value as part of a diverse police research agenda.