Postcolonial Epistemology Research Articles

Kerncurriculum und Migrationsgesellschaft. Zur Bedeutung von Migration in der Erziehungswissenschaft als Disziplin und in einer professionsorientierten Lehre

The relationship between migration and education is integrated into multiple discourses within educational science: the discussion surrounding learners’ “migration background” in performance comparisons; the incorporation of migration knowledge within post-colonial epistemologies; and the conceptualization of racism within the context of anti-feminism. Including this dimension in the core curriculum is innovative as it moves away from a pedagogical framework focused on adaptation and assimilation instead of addressing the educational conditions shaped by a migration society. This approach emphasizes that engaging with post-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-Semitic content is not merely a trend, but a crucial element in a core curriculum aimed at fostering professional development.

Language and Education: Ideologies of Correctness

This review illustrates how language ideologies about correctness, in speaking and writing, have been discussed in research on the role of language in education. Research illustrates a give-and-take between the interests of multilingual speakers and advocates of language diversity on the one hand and, on the other, the correctness ideologies embedded in institutional demands for correctness and standardization (in schools and language policies) and commodification (in the global educational marketplace). More subtle than ideologies of correctness, language ideologies about “appropriate” language emerge as related to race, ethnicity, gender, and other embodied biases, and the nuanced mechanisms of language socialization illuminate the persistent dynamics of these appropriateness ideologies. Finally, we discuss the relevance of postcolonial epistemologies, the collaborative participatory research methods that are reframing what counts as correct and appropriate for the study of language and education, and the emerging role of generative artificial intelligence for language in education.

Epistemologies of Domination: Colonial Encounters, Heterology, and Postcolonial Pedagogy

Abstract This article theorizes and establishes some of the outlines of an epistemology of domination. An epistemology of domination interpellates the question of “how/what does the oppressor know about the oppressed?” Drawing on several studies of cultural encounters such as Ibrahim Abu-Lughod's The Arab Rediscovery of Europe, Ashis Nandy's The Intimate Enemy, and Zeynep Çelik's Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient, the discussion explores epistemic tropes around colonial encounters: the power and politics of representation; the burden of belatedness/the denial of coevalness; the over-emphasizing of Western agency. Wlad Godzich states that “Western Thought has always thematized the other as a threat to be reduced, as a potential same-to-be, a yet-not-same.” My discussion here accepts this premise but only partially, and asks the question: does domination always entail the projection of alterity as a threat, or is there a wider spectrum of epistemic projections? How does the other encounter and experience the Western self, and does such encounter modify hegemonic epistemological paradigms? Following Michel de Certeau's assertion that “what is near masks a foreignness,” I seek to complicate the relation between selfhood and otherness in the colonial encounter, and its entanglements with colonial violence. What pedagogical moments emerge from such encounters? And how do such pedagogical moments structure postcolonial epistemologies?

Stretching the Temporal Boundaries of Postmemorial Fiction: Shades of Albert Camus’ Absurd in Biyi Bandele Thomas’ Burma Boy

Nigerian-British writer and playwright Biyi Bandele Thomas’ novel Burma Boy (2007) is inspired by his father’s combat experience in the Burma Campaign of World War Two. This postmemorial re-enactment not only commemorates his father but also the marginalised black African soldiers who participated in that campaign. Critical attention paid to Bandele’s work has noted his surrealistic and satirical style, usually in alignment with a post-colonial epistemology. This paper aims to show how the novel evokes the origins of a trauma and the futility of war within an African consciousness, alongside broader ontologies concerning the modern condition. I contend that through an aesthetics of the Absurd, as outlined by Albert Camus, Burma Boy not only evokes the absurdity of war but transcends its temporal wartime boundaries by offering a broad reflection on the fundamental cause of the author’s father’s wartime trauma: the divorce of humankind from the reality of existence. Thus, I conclude that this post-generational novel leverages an aesthetics of the Absurd to address contemporary political and environmental concerns.

‘Unhiding’ women: Decolonising the mind of a female systematic theologian

This article will consider the parameters of systematic theological-‘knowledge’ today by examining the contribution of women’s theology to the field. This examination takes place in the context of debates about knowledge-construction within institutes of higher learning, and context of increased numbers of women theology students, as well as international emphasis on achieving gender equality, such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. With regard to curriculums of systematic theology, it is noted that a proverbial ‘canon within a canon’ exists with regard to including a diversity of voices in prescribed study material, specifically the contributions of women’s perspectives and women’s history as subject-content. This ‘data-gap’ is problematic with regard to epistemology and hermeneutics, which are instrumental in constructing a grammar of faith – that is, ‘church doctrine’ (which is traditionally the main component of systematic theology). This implies that a type of decolonisation, or unlearning is necessary. If a next generation of women systematic theologians are to be nurtured, approaches to teaching systematic theology and the methodology of systematic theology itself requires deconstruction.Contribution: This research aims to contribute to the fields of systematic theology, women’s studies, women’s theology and gender studies. It will also contribute to the fields of postcolonial epistemology and hermeneutics, as well as the study of the methodology of systematic theology.

A critique of transnational research on subjectivation from the perspective of postcolonial epistemology

The article shows how modern subject constitutions and postcolonial relations of white dominance are systematically reproduced in school contexts. Postcolonial critique is thus revealed as an analytical strategy to focus on processes of transnationalization in schools (through internationalization and immigration). The empirical foundation of this article is formed by two qualitative research projects that show different variants of interactive and performative entanglement of school actors in colonial knowledge orders and their subjectivizing logics of production in relations of power and recognition. Two case analyses illuminate different dimensions of how racialized subjects are produced and of postcolonial orders. These different projects illustrate the multi-perspectival complexity of how structures of differences are reproduced. The article also underlines the importance of an educational perspective on the dynamics of power, recognition, and subjectification in school orders. It concludes by briefly touching on possibilities for future reflection on perspectives of knowledge within orders characterized by the dominance of one culture and their relationality.

Relendo a teoria sociológica brasileira à luz da crítica pós-colonial

Abstract The article discusses to what extent sociological theories produced in the Brazilian academic field dialogue with a global intellectual movement criticizing coloniality and the Eurocentric foundations of the social sciences. Initially, we analyze the challenges regarding the attempts to define two theoretical approaches, Brazilian sociology, and Postcolonial Thought, without overlooking their internal heterogeneities. Then, we address the tensions between these approaches as conditions for research agendas that bring both contributions into proximity. Finally, we explore the epistemological potential of one of these agendas, which corresponds to a rereading of Brazilian sociological theory in light of postcolonial criticism. This exercise in rereading the canon is based on the methodological program of sociological reduction of Guerreiro Ramos, which indicates a reciprocal interrogation between Brazilian sociology and postcolonial thought, i.e., a decentered look at our sociological tradition that also reveals contributions from this tradition for the future of postcolonial epistemologies.

Men and masculinities studies in Vietnam: A brief review

AbstractIn recent years, men and masculinities in Southeast Asia has begun to receive more attention from scholars as the result of increasing attention to intersections of race, gender space, colonialism, and place in countries such as Vietnam. This article provides an overview of current research on men and masculinities in Vietnam. It finds research on Vietnamese masculinities is predominantly understood through (i) concepts of Confucianism, with a particular focus on traditional ideas about gender and gender relations in kinship structures; (ii) considerations of Vietnamese masculinities post Đổi Mới (Renovation) and the impact of women's engagement in the labor market; and (iii) a focus on men as “at risk” or vulnerable, including a focus on alcohol consumption and engagement in domestic violence. We highlight limited focus in areas of sexuality and sexual practices, reflexive engagements with concepts of masculinity, focus on men residing in urban centres, considerations of bodywork and body project practices, and an overall Western approach to the study of masculinity in Vietnam. We conclude with a call for further research on men and masculinities in Vietnam framed through postcolonial epistemologies and research methodologies.

Queer Korea

Queer Korea

Sub-disciplining science in sociology: Bridges and barriers between environmental STS and environmental sociology

ABSTRACT It is inarguable that the natural sciences, from chemistry to ecology, are indispensable if sociologists are to address environmental change. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how, exactly, sociologists incorporate natural science into their work. In other words, what might a sociologist mean if they say that natural science is a vital part of their research? Here we examine this question through a comparative history of environmental science and technology studies (eSTS) and environmental sociology (ES), arguably the two sociological subdisciplines to which the inclusion of natural science is most important. Our results show a complicated picture, one in which eSTS and ES, at times, influence one another’s approach to natural science, yet at most other times diverge completely. In the first half of our analysis we detail how they have diverged, showing how most eSTS scholars have treated natural science as an object of analysis while most ES scholars, in turn, have treated natural science as a resource for analysis. Then, in the second half, we discuss where and how they have converged, focusing on three shared concerns: ignorance, democratizing environmental knowledge, and postcolonial epistemologies.

Data capitalism and the counter futures of ethics in artificial intelligence

Ethics in data science and artificial intelligence have gained broader prominence in both scholarly and public discourse. Much of the scholarly engagements have often been based on perspectives of transparency, politics of representation, moral ethical norms, and refusal. In this article, while the authors agree that there is a problem with the universal model of technology, they argue that what these perspectives do not address is the postcolonial epistemology of the machine. Drawing from Mark Fisher’s science fiction capital, it is posited that data capitalism doesn’t rely on data as a given, but on what data can become; it operates in the future as much as the calculation of probabilities coincides with the predictive extraction of surplus value. The authors argue that in order to address ethical and sociopolitical concerns in artificial intelligence, technosocial systems must be understood in data capitalism. After discussing what they characterize as the three paradigms of prediction, the authors point toward the transformative potential of temporal structures and indeterminacies in automated self-regulating systems. They argue therefore that assumptions of technological determinism that are found in debates about the reproduction of biases in systems of predictive intelligence has nothing to do with the technical machine, but is rather the result of a continuous re-territorialization of the technosocial possibilities of re-inventing epistemological paradigms outside the framework of colonial capital.

Intersectionality in Talent Management: Broadening our Sight for More Inclusive Theorizing

The extant work on talent management has largely promoted neoliberal agendas concerned with ranking, rating, and recording employees’ talent, or indeed lack of talent. While there are emerging insights that unravel the gendered, racialized, and classed logics underpinning dominant TM writings, there is largely an acceptance of TM as a philosophy, and there has been limited work that challenges the epistemological foundations of TM. We argue that talent management philosophies that have strengthened instrumentalism are conceived as a managerial tool that showed a commitment to capitalistic frameworks, and ignored critical management studies, which stress the importance of resistance, and the power relations that shape, constrain, and may hinder opportunities for all employees. In line with this year’s AOM theme “Broadening our Sight”, this presenter symposium aims to broaden our sight for more inclusive TM theorizing by including five papers that bring intersectionality to the forefront. The collection of papers documents the voices of the silenced talent from the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, New Zealand, Finland, and Ghana, and draws on feminist, critical, transnational and postcolonial epistemologies to challenge the dominance of masculinist and neo-liberal logics in TM theorizing and open up opportunities to review TM systems that stress inclusion and equity. This is a timely endeavor to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what and who is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented in much of the current TM literature with the aim of broadening our sight in TM theorizing. Talent Management: Re-Imagining Transnational, Intersectional, and Post-Colonial Agendas Presenter: Beverly Dawn Metcalfe; American U. of Beirut Presenter: Yasmeen Makarem; American U. of Beirut Presenter: Fida Afiouni; American U. of Beirut For Whom Does Talent Management Make Sense? Presenter: Sanne Nijs; Human Resource Studies, Tilburg U. Presenter: Edina Dóci; Vrije U. Amsterdam, School of Business and Economics Presenter: Joost Luyckx; KU Leuven Tapping into Marginalized Talent: Examining the Work and Career Experiences of LGBTQ Employees Presenter: Caroline Straub; Bern U. of Applied Sciences Presenter: Pamela Lirio; U. of Montreal Presenter: Barbara Beham; Berlin School of Economics and Law Talent Management Theory & Practice in Public Organizations Presenter: Alma M. McCarthy; National U. of Ireland - Galway Presenter: Katerina Bohle Carbonell; National U. of Ireland Presenter: Turo Virtanen; U. of Helsinki Presenter: Paula Marie O'Kane; U. of Otago Presenter: Denise Holland; National U. of Ireland Presenter: Monty Van Wart; California State U. San Bernardino Presenter: John Burns; U. of hong kong Unfolding the Existence of the Colonial System in TM Practices – A Theoretical Perspective Presenter: Zinabu Shaibu; zinabu Presenter: Mustafa B Ozturk; Queen Mary U. of London Presenter: Ahu Tatli; U. of London

Writing the biofictive: Caryl Phillips andThe Lost Child

This article is an exploration of the biofictive in Caryl Phillips’s writing, in particular in his novel The Lost Child (2015). The term “biofiction” has been in critical use for some 20 years, but is in general under-theorized. The article intends to help fill that gap by considering the biofictive in Phillips’s work as a form of postcolonial epistemology. It also introduces a new but logical dimension by setting the biofictive in conversation with biopolitics. However, whereas the dominant focus in discussions of the biopolitical (formulations from Foucault to Agamben and beyond) concerns the structures and dispositions of power, the role of the biofictive is inflected differently insofar as it both acknowledges a history of power but also creates a space of narrative alterity and resistance. In Phillips’s work this is revealed both in his nonfiction and fiction, not least where the two are combined; and it is especially evident in the multimodal operations of his fiction, dispersed across time and space in the aftermath of slavery, migration, and empire. We see all this in The Lost Child, which also introduces a complex rereading of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Overall, Phillips’s version of the postcolonial is capacious, intersecting with other forms of post-traumatic and fugitive experience. The biofictive becomes a bona fide form of knowledge in our postcolonial, post-imperial moment.

Desafios das epistemologias decoloniais e do paradigma ecológico para os Estudos de Religião

Este artigo foi produzido no contexto do V Colóquio do Grupo de Pesquisa Religião e Cultura, do Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciências da Religião da PUC Minas, em outubro de 2017, que tratou do tema “A epistemologia das Ciências da Religião: pressupostos, questões e desafios”. Discutiu-se numa das mesas-redondas, os desafios das “Epistemologia pós-coloniais e os Estudos de Religião”. A partir de pesquisa bibliográfica, este texto começa por tratar de questões básicas da epistemologia e a seguir apresenta, de forma panorâmica, o paradigma ecológico e as origens e ideias principais das teorias críticas pós-coloniais: o pensamento pós-colonial, os estudos subalternos, o pensamento descolonial e decolonial. As conclusões apontam que os Estudos de Religião têm muito a ganhar com essas epistemologias críticas e podem exercitar de modo criativo formas diversificadas e coletivas de fazer ciência, enfrentando, através da qualidade de suas produções, a desconfiança que outras áreas têm sobre as “Ciências da Religião”. E, por ser multidisciplinar e estar em processo de construção epistemológica, devem entrar no debate duro da teoria da ciência. E, pela própria natureza de sua área, deve considerar o diálogo com os saberes religiosos, reconhecendo-lhes a dignidade de conhecimento, contribuindo para ecologizar e descolonizar ciências e saberes.

An Opportunity for Healing and Holistic Care: Exploring the Roles of Health Care Providers Working Within Northern Canadian Aboriginal Communities.

The purpose of this qualitative study was exploring what the roles and challenges of health care providers working within Northern Canadian Aboriginal communities are and what resources can help support or impede their efforts in working toward addressing health inequities within these communities. The qualitative research conducted was influenced by a postcolonial epistemology. The works of theorists Fanon on colonization and racial construction, Kristeva on semiotics and abjection, and Foucault on power/knowledge, governmentality, and biopower were used in providing a theoretical framework. Critical discourse analysis of 25 semistructured interviews with health care providers was used to gain a better understanding of their roles and challenges while working within Northern Canadian Aboriginal communities. Within this research study, three significant findings emerged from the data. First, the Aboriginal person's identity was constructed in relation to the health care provider's role of delivering essential health services. Second, health care providers were not treating the "ill" patient, but rather treating the patient for being "ill." Third, health care providers were treating the Aboriginal person for being "Aboriginal" by separating the patient from his or her identity. The treatment involved reforming the Aboriginal patient from the condition of being "Aboriginal."

Planning to change the world? Questioning the normative ethics of planning theories

We begin with the assertion that epistemological standpoints shape – and are shaped by – ethical principles and that epistemologies of action are constantly evolving. Yet, while many contemporary planning theories are influenced by post-structural and postcolonial epistemologies that recognise the value of subjective and situated knowledge, work on planning ethics tends to retain a focus on normative ethical theories. This focus precludes further explorations of the nature and meaning of adopted ethical values. By means of a case example, we suggest that some engagement with meta-ethical questions might offer scholars of the global South-East an alternative basis for developing knowledge.

Composing postcolonial geographies: Postconstructivism, ecology and overcoming ontologies of critique

This paper seeks to bridge postcolonialism's turn to the environment with postconstructivist ecology and political ontology. Recent critiques by Chakrabarty, Spivak, and associated postcolonial theorists seek to expand the remit of postcolonialism and progressive politics to planetary imperatives, nonhumans, and anthropogenic environmental change. While the more‐than‐human and collective human environmental impacts are problematic for postcolonialism, they suggest ways to reorient postcolonial epistemology, critique, and progressive politics for the Anthropocene. In so doing, however, they unwittingly assume and reproduce Eurocentric and colonialist ontologies of nature and culture. This paper explains how. By revealing the inner tensions and contradictions within such accounts, I argue for the need to overcome the conceptual reticence within postcolonial studies to making ontological claims. Instead, I advocate a turn to postconstructivist ecology and political ontology. My argument extends tentative turns to materiality in recent postcolonial theory to suggest that postcolonial epistemologies need, increasingly, to attend much more radically to collective ontologies of immanence and ontogenesis. Postconstructivist currents in wider cultural and political geographies may be especially suited to composing and advancing these new postcolonial ecologies. The paper contextualizes examples of ontological approaches to ecology and politics through recent anthropological theory, critical indigeneity scholarship and Amazonian ethnography.

The Other Black Ocean: Indo-Portuguese Slavery and Africanness Elsewhere in Margaret Mascarenhas's <em>Skin</em>

By attending to race and gender as archives of disprivileged experiential knowledge that lie within and beyond the dermis, Margaret Mascarenhas’s novel Skin questions the bounded geographic limits of racialized histories. Skin enmeshes its participants within designs of native and colonial power, wherein violence and displacement are evidenced as pervasive elements of modernity’s onset. Furthermore, because of its inclusion of Africans who are dislocated to Goa, Skin allows for a consideration of Asian and black subjectivities under the influence of Portuguese colonization, moving away from the primacy of British colonialism in postcolonial epistemologies. Skin brings attention to one of the world’s longest colonial histories and a history of African slavery outside of the Atlantic by incorporating the arena of the Indian Ocean as part of that trade. Within this, gendered legacies of racialization are proven to be more than skin deep in accounting for resistance and survival.

Confounding light: subversion and transnational sympathy

This essay proposes the concept of ‘transnational sympathy’ aligned with decoloniality and the Philippine social value of kapwa as reflected in Merlinda Bobis's novel The Solemn Lantern Maker, which is about the neo-colonial forces of globalisation and the post-9/11 war on terror. Transnational sympathy is discussed in relation to the architectonics of the novel in which story, art, and social design evoke each other, and embody an alternative design to colonial and postcolonial paradigms. This essay raises the possibility that, in its sometimes reductive and prescriptive tendency, postcolonial epistemology can also turn paradoxically neo-colonial. Thus, it needs to be decolonised by relocating its attention from the globalised theoretical discourse of the academy to the particular lived experience and its own storytelling. This local storytelling is an embodied ‘grassroots theorising.’

John Knox Bokwe, Colonial Composer: Tales about Race and Music

This article intervenes in debates on the status of ‘race’ in ethno/musicological writings. It does so through an examination of the compositional discourse of colonial black South African choral music, particularly detailed analyses of the work of John Knox Bokwe (1855–1922) and their metropolitan sources such as late nineteenth-century gospel hymnody, exploring both how Bokwe's compositional practice enacted a politics that became anticolonial and how early black choral music became ‘black’ in its receptions. The article concludes that ethno/musicological claims that colonial black choral music contains ‘African’ musical content conflate race and culture under a double imperative: in the names of a decolonizing politics and a postcolonial epistemology in which hybridity as resistance is racialized.