Sites Of Knowledge Production Research Articles

Critical data studies with Latin America: Theorizing beyond data colonialism

The article aims to theorize about critical data studies with Latin America beyond the framework of data colonialism, arguing that the long history of social thought in the region can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the datafication. It discusses views around dependence, oppressions, and liberation, debating how Latin American authors can be useful for current critical data studies, in a more nuanced and complex vision. It presents the theoretical contributions of Lelia Gonzalez, dependency theorists and Enrique Dussel. Dependency theorists criticize evolutionary frameworks of development and can contribute to discussions around data sovereignty and overexploitation of labor. Gonzalez contributes to a complex vision of Amefrica Ladina, articulating multiple forms of oppression. Enrique Dussel presents a theory of technology considering totality and proposes an ethics of liberation that can be related to alternatives toward data justice and data commons. All theoretical frameworks contribute to thinking about datafication with Latin America not as an isolated phenomenon, but in relation to other countries in the world, and as an analytical key for the construction of alternatives. All perspectives are related to current debates on critical data studies and can make an important contribution to the construction of critical theories about data that consider Latin America also as a site of knowledge production.

Participatory practices and transforming environmental research in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene, the so-called Age of Humans, challenges the realm of environmental research to reflect on and ultimately change its premises and practices. As ecological change occurs asynchronously and unevenly, it has highly divergent consequences for different actors and communities depending on their social, cultural, geographical or economic backgrounds. To adequately deal with this disparity it is needed firstly to enter into new fields of research and secondly to alter scientific practices. Focusing on natural history museums as sites of knowledge production and environmental research, we look at past and ongoing inequalities in environmental collection practices, and propose a path of reform via participatory practices. In our paper, we identify three aspects of participatory research and collecting practices to stimulate an evolution of environmental research practices, and highlight current research projects that face these challenges in the following sections: 1. Rethinking and transforming language and naming practices, 2. Multiperspectival practices, 3. Entanglement and digital practices.

(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?

Endemic Goiter and El Salvador’s Battle Against Cretinismo

Abstract One concern for Salvadoran and other Latin American public health researchers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the purported link between goiter (bocio) and cretinism (cretinismo). Goiter is empirical medical condition that is inseparable from scenes of social and political inequality, neocolonialism, development, and war, however effectively the tools that measured it often obfuscated these factors. This article draws on more than a century of goiter research and representation in popular culture to argue that goiter research was part of broader health discourse that focused on poor and rural women and girls in an attempt to improve the productive and reproductive potential of El Salvador. It discusses how goiter research positioned El Salvador as a site of knowledge production for global health. It also proposes that goiter is best understood as a disability and uses insights from critical disability studies to understand how certain groups of people were constructed as problem populations. Over time, understandings of goiter shifted and new explanations came to the fore, but the lingering association of goiter with inheritable disability proved difficult to shake.

A Spectral Archive: Mona Kareem's Feminist Imaginary in Ināth al-Ashbāḥ (Femme Ghosts)

Abstract: In this article I explore Mona Kareem's visionary feminism in her trilingual poetry collection Ināth al-Ashbāḥ ( Femme Ghosts ) (2019). I intervene in the classist colonial logic embraced by contemporary liberal feminism in Kuwait by offering a critical alternative in Kareem's poetics of the body. The article examines Kareem's engagement with the gendered, classed, and racialized body as a site of knowledge production that proves illegible to the oil-producing state. It argues that Kareem expresses a "spectral archive" from the embodied knowledge of marginalization in her poems "Eulogies for Futures to Come/Marthiyāt al-'uyūn" ("Who Hide Their Eyes"). The spectral archive is a haunting literary site of knowledge which exposes the violence of systemic oppression and exceeds nativist narratives of subjectivity constructed by official national history. It emerges in her deployment of the speculative, emphasis on the tension between the corporeal and the spectral, experimentation with poetic form and translation practices, and positing queerness as a liminal process of detaching normative gender from sex assigned at birth. The spectral archive underscores the failure of sovereign standards of subjectivity to grasp the role of feminist poetics in creating transformative imaginaries, it represents a new ethical approach to feminist discourse on social justice in Kuwait.

Who holds [educational] authority? Framing the authoritarian turn in the conservative “gag orders” in the United States

ABSTRACT Amid the democratic backsliding of the United States and other nations, this paper problematises how authoritarian policy trends complicate who holds educational authority over teacher pedagogy, the contested public education arena, and schools as knowledge production sites within a democratic society. This paper situates the entrenched war on the educated in the United States within a broader political context that has unearthed nationwide educational policies premised on anti-democratic tenets of authoritarian populism. Drawing upon language from enacted educational ‘gag orders’ in multiple states, this paper highlights how conservative policy language positions teachers as passive policy subjects and illustrates the aims of these educational orders to curtail academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and redefine what is true and worth knowing within the contested public education domain. Finally, this paper calls to attention the risks posed to democratic institutions and stakeholders in the wake of authoritarian turns occurring both nationally and globally.

“Politics of Plastic Nationhood”: Sokol Mass Gymnastics and Eugenics Between Empire and Nation-States

Abstract This article examines how mass gymnastics in East Central Europe became increasingly entangled with eugenics. It traces the proliferation of eugenic discourses alongside the medicalization of gymnastics within Sokol, a mass nationalist voluntary association. In this context, the bodies of gymnasts became crucial sites of knowledge production and ideological projection. The article introduces the “politics of plastic nationhood,” a concept that foregrounds the fierce debates within Sokol over strategies to shape the imagined body of the nation though physical exercise. It also highlights key actors in these discussions, including medical doctors, physical anthropologists, and gymnastics trainers. The article shows that four major themes shaped these biopolitical disputes: health, diversity, gender, and ability. Focusing specifically on Sokol associations in interwar Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and their prewar predecessors, the article outlines a chronology of the politics of plastic nationhood, which emerged in the Habsburg Empire and reached their zenith in the successor states. After imperial collapse, in particular, Sokol eugenicists sought to merge the diverse Slavic populations of the new states into a single “national body.” Owing to their perceived failure to achieve national unity, starting in the mid-1930s onward, eugenicists turned to rigid racial hierarchies, statism, and authoritarian politics.

Steering through Métis Feminism

Indigenous feminisms are concerned with addressing power imbalances particularly at the intersections of sexism, racism and colonialism. These lived, felt and flesh-based theories allow for more contextualized analyses of women’s lives and help us to dream and realize more just ways of being in relation. The experiences of Métis women, trans, and Two-Spirit people are not disconnected from the experiences of people in other Indigenous nations; however, how sexism, racism and colonialism intersect in Métis communities is distinct in many ways. This article celebrates diverse sites of knowledge production, contributing new ideas to the constellation of Métis feminist texts we live (and dream) daily. The article discusses the need for a Métis-specific articulation and actioning of feminism that responds to the patriarchal oppression taking place within settler societies and within our own communities.

A Call for Counter-Public Sociology

This paper seeks to decenter the academy as the gatekeeper of knowledge, while presenting a critique of ‘public sociology’ and ‘public-facing’ scholarship. I argue that public sociology’s aim to make research more ‘accessible to a wider audience’ presupposes that the university has something to offer to this audience in the first place. This not-so-tacit arrogance only further privileges the university as the primary site of knowledge production, while rendering invisible the many knowledge producers outside the academy. As public sociology continues to curry favor with mainstream media, politics, and policy institutes, it reveals a steadfast faith in the state and capital, while obscuring radical alternatives. In turn, public sociology functions as a counterinsurgency tool via professionalization. Conversely, a counter-public sociology refuses to comply with oppressive state protocols. Instead, it seeks to dismantle them. A counter-public sociology aims not to affirm the university, but to insist that this current academic enterprise remains untenable.

Co-producing knowledge in action: Reflecting from the Main Bhi Dilli campaign for equitable planning in Delhi

Practices of insurgent or bottom-up planning, of community-based organisations, networks and social movements are understood to be peripheral to the dominant paradigm of planning in southern contexts. Yet there is a lot of knowledge collectively held and coproduced within and through these practices, which are also sites of knowledge production. This paper reflects on the process of coproduction of knowledge within a campaign for equitable urban planning in Delhi – Main Bhi Dilli Campaign. The campaign brings together urban actors with diverse positionalities – informal worker’s and resident’s collectives, researchers and academic actors, social movements, and civil society organisations, across sectors and lived experiences. In this paper we ask: how does co-production of knowledge take place at the scale of the city, and within a campaign with diverse membership and priorities? We reflect on the role of academic actors in such coproduction of knowledge. We draw from the archival material of the campaign produced through prolonged dialogue and practice-based research. We focus on one particular knowledge product that the campaign has produced called the Factsheets. Factsheets are 4-page documents that simply provide an overview of the theme (such as informal livelihood, housing, gender), and what the Master Plan can do to address the gaps in planning that exist. We use the ‘factsheets’ produced through the campaign, as an artefact of co-production, as a site that holds the processes of coproducing knowledge together. We reflect upon the processes of holding, contesting and channeling multiple knowledges within the campaign, highlighting the value of these internal processes for coproduction of knowledge. While the exact format and material may not be translatable in contexts with different social and political realities, we argue that the processes of coproducing knowledge for action while in a diverse coalition are useful across contexts for more equitable urban planning.

Freedom, Democracy and Science

Abstract The development of democracy and the development of science are not in a simple causal relationship. Rather, history shows that science can also develop in non-democratic and autocratic societies. Given the production conditions of scientific knowledge, the natural and technical sciences, for example, need well-equipped laboratories and technical equipment. Scientists in many disciplines can only do their work in institutions that provide them with access to the facilities necessary for their research. The freedom of scientific research and its protection from political interference can only be guaranteed by democratic conditions. Universities continue tobe among the most important sites of knowledge production. In the humanities and social sciences in particular, the freedom of research is often threatened. The importance of freedom in the sciences can only be understood if it is related to the fundamental value of scientific freedom. It is the responsibility of universities to safeguard this value and to protect the freedom of research. They can only fulfill their task of generating and developing knowledge if the freedom of critical research is guaranteed.

Moving materialities: Oceanic epistemologies and embodied knowledge production in Pentecostal women's health mentorship in Samoa

AbstractThis article employs Oceanic epistemological theories to explore the body as a site of knowledge production among Samoan Pentecostal women as they dance in a church‐sponsored Zumba session, tracking foods, words, and feelings: I call thesemoving materialities. In their work together, these women contextualized health, sickness, and weight as generated from the circulation of these kinds of moving materialities. Their work theorizing health through material change is quite different from those imagined and circulated in the literatures on diabetes and obesity. The article orients critical studies of health toward an interrogation of the dynamic qualities of materiality, including both the moving body and materials that move between or within bodies. By expanding what might be considered material and movement in the context of health, this article offers an alternative to theories of metabolism that have come to dominate how we understand the body in terms energy expenditure. Ultimately, this approach calls for anthropologists to consider the circumstances in which theory is understood to be “culturally specific” or “generalizable.”

Queer Voids

Queer Voids

BetweenBacchaeandBahanalii—balkanizing classical reception

AbstractThis article sets Euripides’ Bacchae in dialogue with Goran Stefanovski’s Bahanalii, a play that was performed in the immediate aftermath of Yugoslavia’s break-up. Contrapuntal reading shows how the two plays problematize conservative epistemologies by imagining their borderlands as privileged sites of knowledge production. Euripides’ Bacchae opens with a Dionysus who arrives on stage from a faraway land where Greeks and non-Greeks live mixed together. My reading of this passage challenges Edward Said’s interpretation of the Bacchae as a play about the dangers of ‘what lies beyond familiar borders’. Instead, the Bacchae performs an exercise in literary imagination in which a border-minded worldview responds to Athens’ dwindling geopolitical prestige, resists narratives of Greek exceptionalism inherited in the aftermath of the Persian wars, and foresees a return to a kind of Hellenic balkanization avant la lettre. In Bahanalii, Stefanovski resists idealizing mindsets by staging a contradictory Dionis, one that focalizes the epistemological power of the border, while also embodying the uncanny poltergeist of the violence that plagued Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In juxtaposing the narratives of Yugoslav and ancient Athenian exceptionalism, this comparison unlocks a ‘balkanizing’ paradigm of classical reception which complements and complicates existing theoretical accounts of classical reception.

How we fuck: assembling intimacy-as-method to research trans sex practices

In this paper I present my methodological approach to researching the sex practices of trans people developed during my PhD project How we Fuck. Using my body as both a fertile site of knowledge production (Bain and Nash, 2006), and an instrument for intimate analysis, I articulate an approach to ‘intimacy-as-method’ within an assemblage framework (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) to provide new ways of engaging in empirical sex research. Intimacy-as-method draws attention to how senses, bodies, affects, human and more-than-human agents (‘things’) coalesce to produce both trans sex, and trans sex research(ers) (Fox and Alldred, 2015). If ontologically unstable ‘things’ gain their stability by assembling relationally, then how can we create the conditions that liberate both trans sex from dominant narratives of suffering, and (trans) sex research from its conventions of squeamishness? I argue that considering the dynamic and mutable ways in which trans sex (and trans sex research) is produced expands the capacities and limitations of what trans bodies can ‘do’, making space for novel assemblages, new embodied knowledges, and expansive possibilities of How we Fuck.

Decolonising spaces of knowledge production: Mpala research centre in Laikipia County, Kenya

In this article we discuss Mpala Research Centre in Laikipia County, Kenya as a distinctly colonial space. Drawing on historical materials, fieldwork observations and in-depth interviews, we build an account of British colonial expropriation of land, European and American modes of enclosure, and the development of a prominent site of knowledge production in the fields of ecology, conservation and evolutionary biology. Mpala is product and productive of colonial relations, ones where land use serves mainly Western interests in ways that sustain and entrench categories of coloniser/colonised. We support this claim by identifying three ways in which colonial legacies endure at Mpala in terms of (i) ontology, or the particular ways in which land is made landscape; (ii) race and the organisation of space and labour and (iii) silence (and silencing) as a mechanism that sustains colonial power relations. We further argue that turning to such a nameable site of contemporary academic extraction enables a shift from postcolonial critique to decolonial praxis. By naming Mpala in specific terms, the possibility of politics opens out from critical analysis towards a project of undoing the epistemological and material legacies of colonialism.

The trouble with maternal death narratives: Race, representation, and reproduction

ABSTRACTThe high risk of maternal death in Africa has cast a shadow over representations and experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. In the 1980s, amid new awareness of disparities in maternal mortality rates between high and low-income countries, tragic anecdotes of women dying during childbirth emerged as a tool to garner political and economic support for global health interventions aimed at women. While successfully raising public concern and billions of dollars in aid, given that these stories are some of the few stories of African women so widely circulated, it is important to ask: what else does the genre of maternal death narrative do? How might discursive practices around childbirth structure the care offered to African women? What power relations are revealed in this form of knowledge production and promotion? This article examines how maternal death narratives function, circulate, and structure potential solutions to the problem of maternal mortality. In focusing on the pathways to death, women’s bodies are foregrounded as sites of knowledge production over their experiences. I use fieldwork with pregnant and birthing women in southwest Nigeria to explore the ways that women piece together different sources of care in an effort to ensure successful deliveries amidst considerable uncertainty.

Beyond the Lab and the Field: Infrastructures as Places of Knowledge Production since the Late Nineteenth Century ed. by Eike-Christian Heine and Martin Meiske

Reviewed by: Beyond the Lab and the Field: Infrastructures as Places of Knowledge Production since the Late Nineteenth Century ed. by Eike-Christian Heine and Martin Meiske Thomas Kaiserfeld (bio) Beyond the Lab and the Field: Infrastructures as Places of Knowledge Production since the Late Nineteenth Century Edited by Eike-Christian Heine and Martin Meiske. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022. Pp. 292. The contributors to this anthology, comprising an introduction and ten empirical chapters, argue that infrastructures have been an overlooked site for knowledge production. New knowledge, they claim, has traditionally been traced back to spaces like labs and field studies. In these environments, control has to a varying degree been exercised over conditions and elements. Not in this volume, where instead infrastructures—characterized as a second nature—are branded as a hitherto ignored arena for the generation of knowledge. Beyond the Lab and the Field examines projects characterized as "scientific bonanzas," a metaphor for infrastructures as junctions for opportunities as well as distress. The cases include the Panama Canal; dam constructions in Germany, the United States, and Spain; the German autobahns during the Third Reich; Siberian oil extraction and irrigation in the Caucasus during the Soviet regime; European and Dutch power lines; a highway in Tel Aviv, Israel; and an airstrip in Antarctica. Timewise, the empirical examples stretch from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth. The different chapters constitute a range of relations between infrastructures and knowledge, including social sciences and the humanities. Most straightforward are probably examples of how construction of infrastructures such as the Panama Canal led to the emergence of tropical medicine and to the further development of geology and paleontology. But infrastructures, such as waterscapes exploited for hydropower, can also exhibit more complicated patterns of knowledge management, including the coexistence of different knowledge traditions. In addition, the monograph includes examples of how new knowledge may constitute formative elements of infrastructure projects. In the case of autobahn construction in the Third Reich, archaeological excavations pointed backward to an imagined glorious Germanic past while the new road system under construction pointed forward to modernization and motorization. Ethnographical research was mobilized in Siberia in order to understand how indigenous people could be transformed to contribute to the extraction of oil, resulting in new knowledge about indigenous Siberian lifestyles. Related to this are examples of counterexpertise knowledge opposing new infrastructures by introducing alternative value scales for the assessment of their impact, such as accessibility or the preservation of cultural and natural heritage. Taken together, the different contributions make up a heterogenous collection in which the theme is analyzed from a number of perspectives. One drawback is that the concept of infrastructure becomes a bit stretched. [End Page 268] Although briefly discussed in the introduction, where it is characterized by "profound interdependencies" (p. 5), and in a chapter on the European electrical system as arrangements that enable "flows of energy, information, people, and goods" (p. 163), many of the chapters focus on isolated parts of infrastructures. The resulting impression is that the common denominator for the sites of knowledge production analyzed is more ambitious construction projects than infrastructures. For instance, an Antarctic airstrip is certainly a project that is part of an infrastructure. But when the analysis is focused on ecological knowledge mobilized in opposition to the exploration of Antarctica, the infrastructural aspects are easily lost. Another concern is the choice of analytical concepts. Although Thomas P. Hughes's notion of technological momentum is employed to elucidate the suitability of infrastructures for the study of knowledge production as they often involve substantial investments in order to mobilize extensive resources to be managed by numerous stakeholders (p. 8), his ideas regarding reverse salients are never put to work despite their relevance to knowledge production in the contexts of infrastructures and large technical systems alike. In fact, many of the contributions could easily be brought together as examples of how reverse salients are handled by the production or engagement of knowledge—or, alternatively, how knowledge may create reverse salients where there were none due to ignorance. Still, the different contributions make a strong, albeit somewhat less concerted, effort to highlight infrastructures as an important space for knowledge production and...

Cross-Cultural Museum Bias: Undoing Legacies of Whiteness in Art Histories

Abstract When museums are used as sites of knowledge production and research, what are their responsibilities for anti-racist public education? Examining the racial logics that govern, organize, and fund museums, this essay focuses on institutional bias within knowledge production and argues that locating racial logics within museums can be an act of radical pedagogy. Museums are being challenged to become sites of social change, making it vital to study their power structures and the ways in which they organize and study other cultures, illuminating imperial and colonial biases existing at their foundations. The Canadian Museum of Civilization’s exhibition The Lands within Me: Expressions by Canadian Artists of Arab Origin, is a relevant case study as it opened within weeks of September 11, 2001. The moral panic surrounding the show provides a powerful glimpse of the ways in which certain narratives are excluded from Canadian national projects and how these racial projects exist within museums. Works by Camille Zakharia, an artist included in the exhibition, will be analyzed and the fragmented forms of his photo collages will be used as an organizing metaphor to discuss Canadian multiculturalism, racialization, and citizenship.

Teaching gender in and through uncertainty

Where higher education classrooms can be sites of both cultural contestation and epistemic violence, this article examines the critical and ethical value of building uncertainty into our teaching of gender. The reflective piece draws on my own experience in a new subject at Monash University, and situates this one very small site of knowledge production within the wider processes that shape the (neoliberal) Australian university, and the discipline of sociology. I elaborate a theoretical framework for embracing epistemic uncertainty that is informed by feminist pedagogies and begins with a feminist provocation, and present my practical strategies for organizing knowledge within this framework, as well as the strategies of the students themselves. An analysis of the students’ project work (collaborative virtual exhibitions) reveals their capacity to navigate uncertainty through an interpersonal and contextualized approach to knowledge, and produce new learning spaces which unsettle harmful truths and make material new realities.