Western Academy Research Articles

Pedagogy as care: Love, loss, and learning in the world politics classroom

In this article, we elaborate pedagogies of care, contemplating what it means to teach with and about care in the world politics classroom, situated within the neoliberal, colonial, heteropatriarchal, white western academy. Further, we actively reflect on what it means to work caringly and carefully in practice, exploring pedagogy as care. What are the dilemmas that arise for scholars and teachers, differently positioned in the academy, who seek to teach with and about care in the context of a world politics education? How can we teach with care in often uncaring educational institutions that are hostile to staff and students, particularly those from racialized and other oppressed and marginalized communities? How are our practices and methods of teaching also acts of care? Building on interdisciplinary feminist literature on care, we argue that caring pedagogies can disrupt academic hierarchies and foster intergenerational connection. We also position pedagogy as care, acknowledging that as we teach, we mourn and honor/care for antecedents (both human and more-than-human), nourish our present selves and those with whom we interact, and build community/care for (visions/versions of) the future. Our intervention contributes to ongoing conversations about opening our classrooms as spaces of radical possibility in contemporary higher education.

Decolonizing the New Testament Texts: A Postcolonial Task

This essay traces some of the major directions of New Testament interpretation, both in terms of a turn to empire and also specifically in India. Attention to the impact of empire in shaping the world and texts of the New Testament is argued to be a crucial development which provides an important foundation for postcolonial hermeneutics. Postcolonial hermeneutics is shown to be especially influential for interpreters in the Indian context, and various streams and trends within Indian biblical interpretation are presented. Decolonizing the New Testament texts will require such an empire-critical and postcolonial hermeneutic, as well as the incorporation of such concerns within the Western academy. Finally, a reading of Jude 23 is offered as an illustration of this postcolonial hermeneutic in practice. This text illustrates both the imperial context of the early Christian communities and also their efforts to develop a spirituality of resistance.

Sufi Commentaries on a Quranic Peace Verse

Abstract Qur’ān 41:33–35 instructs that believers should return the greater or greatest good for acts of evil, and the commentators recognize that it is a counsel to nonviolence on the part of individuals. It is one of a series of peace verses in the Muslim scripture. The place of these ethical commandments in Muslim traditions has been little studied in the Western academy. This article focuses on prominent thinkers of Nishapur and Shiraz who laid the foundations for classical Sufism. The indigenous Muslim roots of Sufism and its tie to formal Islamic texts are increasingly underlined by scholars. All three of the figures on which we concentrate authored substantial commentaries on the Qur’ān, and all three found this passage important for their ethical frameworks. For medieval Sufi thinkers Qur’ān 41:33–35 opened up the possibility of peace and reconciliation after conflict in society, whether within Sufi study circles or in wider urban environments, including both elite strata and that of urban artisans and youth.

Introduction: Falling Between Two Schools

Abstract This introductory article situates research into Islamic notions of pacifism and nonviolence by considering interpretive challenges that include the history of Eurocentrism and the challenge of interdisciplinarity. It argues that both academic Philosophers and Religious Studies specialists confront a range of disciplinary challenges in interpreting and explaining Islamic nonviolence and pacifism. Moreover, the paper argues that the neglect of Islamic nonviolence in the modern Western academy is also the result of residual Eurocentrism, reflected in the fact that Christian nonviolence is better known and more widely studied in the Anglo-American world than Islamic nonviolence. This introductory article proposes that paying attention to disciplinary silos and Eurocentric biases can help explain the neglect of Islamic pacifism. This neglect is a contingent result of historical, cultural, and disciplinary factors; and there is no valid reason to exclude Islamic nonviolence from academic study.

The Conundrum and Promise of Intercultural Theology in the Western Academy

Intercultural theology has a dual origin. On the one hand it derives from the development of diverse forms of theologizing in Christianity worldwide, while on the other hand it originates in the North Atlantic university where intercultural theology and world Christianity have developed as particular fields of study. With reference to two examples of spiritual possession and biblical interpretation, this article argues that its location within Western academic institutional settings presents obstacles to the ability of intercultural theologians in the West to do justice to the proper nature of various forms of theologizing in other contexts. In particular, attention is drawn to the fragmentation of theological disciplines, the secularization of academic discourse, the use of cultural analysis, and the power of the Western academy. The article concludes with some proposals regarding how an awareness of this dual origin can help intercultural theologians to be a critical presence within the Western academy beyond their discipline.

Indigenous Ecofeminism? Decolonial Practices and Indigenous Resurgence in Lee Maracle’s Works

Ecocritical and ecofeminist studies have frequently borrowed from Indigenous epistemologies to conform new approaches to human-nature relations, particularly now that the pressing climate crisis is making western societies contemplate the need for radical solutions. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson remarks, “the western academy is now becoming interested in certain aspects of Indigenous Knowledge” such as “Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)” (373). However, the scope of this interest is reduced and disconnects ecological knowledge from decolonial practices, such as land claims or Indigenous feminisms. Maile Arvin et al. emphatically support that “settler colonialism has been and continues to be a gendered process” (8) and thus its ramifications and effects (upon nature or Indigenous communities) cannot be detangled without an Indigenous feminist perspective. In this article, I focus on an ecocritical analysis of several works by Lee Maracle, who dedicated her career to the regeneration and revalorization of Indigenous systems of knowledge, in order to pinpoint the intersections between feminism, decolonization, and nonhuman ecological thinking that might develop into a potential Indigenous ecofeminism that truly recognizes Indigenous epistemologies in their full context. Basing myself off Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s theories on Indigenous radical resurgence, which assert that a cultural resurgence (such as a revalorization of Indigenous ecological knowledge) cannot take place without a political resurgence (such as the acknowledgement of Indigenous sovereignty), I argue that Maracle’s portrayal of natural elements and her imagining of human-nature relations is inextricably linked to a decolonizing perspective foregrounded on Indigenous feminism.

Refusal – opening otherwise forms of research

An increasing interest towards researching other forms of knowledges is taking place, expanding the boundaries of knowledge to include forms that have been historically marginalised, negated, and neglected by the Western academy. Parallel to this, we have identified a rising critique of how voices marginalized by colonial modes of academic knowledge production are included, through a single-sided focus on pain and suffering (Tuck & Yang 2014). Yet there are less discussions around the process of research itself and what it entails. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to challenge the concept of ‘discovery’ and the unproblematic and inherent right of knowing granted to the Western academy, to argue for a kind of research that refuses. Interrogating instances of refusal in different contexts of Indigenous sovereignty and migration studies, this collective work creates a dialogue across different disciplines and reveals that refusal turns the gaze at colonial modalities of knowing. The empirical analysis of our work also demonstrates that refusal is a generative process that redirects the attention to ideas otherwise unacknowledged, thus making space for relationality, reciprocity, solidarity, community, and care.

A Bridge Too Far? Ludovico Marracci's Translation of the Qurʾan and the Persistence of Medieval Biblicism

Abstract The medieval tendency to view Islam as a Christian heresy continues to influence Qurʾanic studies in the Western academy due to the academy's origins as a religious institution and the absence of systematic reckoning by contemporary scholars. Ludovico Marracci's 1698 Qurʾan commentary was both the culmination of the medieval polemic tradition and the blueprint for subsequent Western engagement with the Qurʾan. Though few Qurʾanic scholars have the proficiency in Latin necessary to read Marracci's work, Western Qurʾanic studies continues to overemphasize biblical “sources” for the Qurʾan because the field originated in a methodology that was fundamentally polemical rather than exegetical. This essay proposes models from within the Christian and Muslim traditions that can pave the way toward a break from Biblicist tropes toward an interfaith understanding based on the rich tradition of Muslim exegesis.

Growing pains in the field of Sikh Studies in the Western Academy

ABSTRACT The field of Sikh Studies has arrived in the Western Academy along with a rich experience of growing pains during the last three decades. The vocal opposition of ultra-conservative fringe groups in the Sikh diaspora frequently managed to gain a dominant voice in community media effectively trolling, harassing, and marginalizing progressive scholarly voices. There is an urgent need to understand this phenomenon in the context of the Punjab crisis.

We’ll see things they’ll never see: Sociological reflections on race, neurodiversity and higher education

This article offers sociological reflections on race and neurodiversity in UK higher education (UKHE). Using dialogical knowledge production and collaborative autoethnography, the authors discuss their lived experiences of navigating the politics of neurodiversity and neurotypical hegemony in UKHE as Black sociologists. The central argument explores how race and neurotypical hegemony overexposes Black neurodiverse scholars to a particular and pervasive form of double jeopardy. The authors’ reflexive accounts show how, as Black scholars, they must often negotiate the operation of race alongside the hegemonic practices of the white western academy. In this way, they grapple with racism and ableism in the context of value, meritocracy and elitism. The authors contend that drawing on the politics of neurodiversity in conjunction with Black subjectivities can generate routes into exposing and dismantling neurotypical hegemony. A key motive for discussing their own experiences as neurodivergent scholars in UKHE is that existing research and anecdotal reflections point to a pattern of general whitening of how we understand neurodiversity in academia. The authors indulge their personal, political and academic commitment to this subject as they contend that as Black neurodivergent sociologists, we’ll see things they’ll never see.

Social science as social action to address inequalities

AbstractIn its most recent report, the Academy of the Social Sciences Australia (ASSA, 2021: 10) identified social inequality as a “grand challenge” for the social sciences, arguing that social scientists have a pivotal role to play in “understanding, addressing and guiding us towards a narrowing of a two‐tier society.” Nevertheless, the social sciences continue to be regularly positioned as “soft” and esoteric in relation to the natural sciences, while also sustaining disproportionate funding cuts. In this article, we—a multidisciplinary group of social science researchers forming part of the Inequalities and Social Action Research Cluster based at The University of Queensland (Australia)—draw on the existing literature and our diverse experiences to reflexively consider how academic social scientists might play the active role that ASSA foresees to address social inequalities into the future. This includes by countering the inherent imperialism of the Western academy itself. We explore the roles, barriers and tensions that social scientists face and conclude by offering a framework of key strategies to improve the translational impacts of social science research for addressing social inequalities.

How Can Scholars from Formerly Colonizing Countries Assist in Decolonizing Burma Studies?

How Can Scholars from Formerly Colonizing Countries Assist in Decolonizing Burma Studies? Rosalie Metro (bio) In 2022, Htet Min Lwin, a graduate student at York University, became cochair of the Burma Studies Group (BSG), a subdivision of the United States-based scholarly organization, Association for Asian Studies. He’s the second person with heritage from Myanmar to hold this role (which Maitrii Aung-Thwin also did) since the group’s formation in the 1970s—and certainly the youngest. The colonial origins of studying “the East” are well known, as are the roots of “area studies” programs in the Cold War national security interests of the United States and Europe. Thus, the term “formerly” in my title only refers to the end of an official governing relationship; coloniality persists in economic, political, and academic dimensions. Therefore, hearing of this positive news about the BSG led me to reflect on my twenty years participating in this discipline—what has changed, and what has not, in terms of who holds power. When I attended my first Burma Studies Conference in 2008 in Dekalb, IL (home of the International Center for Burma Studies), the field was dominated by older white people from formerly colonizing countries including the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, North [End Page 171] America, and Australia. Many of them could not speak Burmese or another ethnic nationality’s language. There was a sprinkling of senior bama men. After decades of military rule that had made field research difficult for many international scholars, and a general lack of interest in a country perceived as not geopolitically significant to former colonizers, Myanmar was not a popular country to study in the United States. Cornell University, where I was pursuing a PhD, was one of a handful of places outside of Asia that taught Burmese language, and there was only one other person in my class. As a white woman with U.S. citizenship, I didn’t fully understand how privileged I was to be studying whatever country captured my interest at an Ivy League institution. I didn’t question why “area studies” institutes are so often located outside the “area” itself, and in former colonizing countries. Fast forward fifteen years: although the discipline, like so much of academia, still skews white, older, and male, important changes have been spurred by the post-2010 expansion of the discipline as well as by broader cultural shifts. Htet Min Lwin’s cochairship of BSG does not mean racism within Burma Studies is over, any more than Obama’s presidency meant that racism in the United States had ended. But it would be hard to get through a humanities or social sciences PhD program in the United States or Europe studying Myanmar these days without learning or already knowing at least one of its languages. One new venue, the Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship, is devoted to bilingual content and the cultivation of scholars from Myanmar. There are so many researchers and scholar-activists from Myanmar sharing their insights and doing crucial work. More nuanced discourses around race and power have made it possible to pull apart easily conflated yet distinct terms like “foreign,” “white,” “Western/Eastern,” “Global [End Page 172] North/South” (in ways that made me settle on “scholars from formerly colonizing countries” in my title to identify people with similar positionality to my own, even while acknowledging how much that category is striated by race, class, and gender). It feels to me like the balance of power has shifted in long-overdue ways toward the prioritization of local knowledge. It’s not enough, but it’s a start. These changes are evidenced in Tharaphi Than’s (2021) essay, “Why Does Area Studies Need Decolonization?” In it, she addresses her fellow academics from the Global South and directs them toward “freeing each other from coloniality,” or the colonial dynamics which outlast colonization (Tharaphi Than 2021). She describes her own journey into the Western academy, noting that “to be modern and be accepted in the world education scene is to act the way the masters did” (Tharaphi Than 2021). She describes “Orientals adopting Orientalism,” as those who accept the Western canon and choose research...

Philosophy and History, Customs and Ethics

Philosophy and History, Customs and Ethics Hui-Chieh Loy (bio) Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China: Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom. By Tao Jiang. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Tao Jiang's Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China is a serious tour de force of a study. In many ways, I am reminded of Angus Graham's Disputers of the Tao and Benjamin Schwartz' The World of Thought in Ancient China—but updated. A signal difference is that it is more constrained in its coverage of figures, texts, and especially in having the topical focus upon moral-political philosophy. At the same time and within the chosen (narrower) confines, it often examines its subject in greater detail and draws on more recent discussions. One neat thing that Jiang does is to deliberately weave in explicit discussions of how each subsequent thinker or text incorporated or criticized ideas associated with earlier thinkers. (I formulated it this way since there isn't enough historical evidence about who-actually-read-what in the ancient world, citation practices being what they were.) In this regard, I am especially heartened to read, for example, the sections on "Traces of Mohist Elements in the Laozi" (3.3.2), and "Mohist Elements in Han Feizi's Thought" (7.3.3). By no means should the desultory remarks below be counted as a full review or assessment (impressionistically, this is the sort of book I will recommend that my grad students read—there, I've said it). Think of them as humble shards of pottery thrown in the hope for some jade in response. To make my task more focused, I will comment on the Sinology versus Philosophy distinction, and Jiang's treatment of the Mohists. I. Philosophy and History of Philosophy An important part of Jiang's Introduction is devoted to discussing the situation of Chinese Philosophy as a field in the Western Academy, caught between Sinology on the one hand and academic Philosophy on the other. Due to the different scholarly objectives and norms in the two disciplines, scholars working on Chinese Philosophy often find themselves caught [End Page 420] between two distinct audiences who demand different things. Jiang's aim is to propose an "interpretive model to distinguish two sets of scholarly objects operative in Sinology and philosophy. These objects are related and at times overlap, but they are also often irreducibly distinct, i.e., original text versus inherited text, historical author versus textual author, and authorial intent versus textual intent, with the former in the pairs belonging to Sinologists and the latter to philosophers" (p. 7). In general, I am highly sympathetic to the distinctions Jiang draws. But I do wonder if we need to step back and start from a wider context involving what is potentially a deeper divide. Now, it is entirely a caricature but the joke around the water cooler is that philosophers—especially those of a more "analytic" bent—often exude the attitude that they are not in the business of reading old books. Their project is one focused on issues and problems and puzzles that are ultimately about the natural and human world, rather than about texts and their interpretation, or even the historical thinkers themselves. To give some obvious examples, the intellectual questions they see themselves as answering are the likes of: • Can we know that God exists, if God exists at all? • What is the nature of moral claims? Do they admit of truth and falsity? • How is causation related to possibility? • Is a logic that dispenses with the law of non-contradiction viable? • What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? • Is abortion morally justifiable? Sometimes the questions they ask even infringe on the results and insights from nearby fields, for instance linguistics and the natural and empirical sciences: • What is time? • Can a presentist conception of time be made consistent with contemporary physics? • What is the nature of consciousness? How is it related to physical neural states or informational computational processes? • Can computers be sentient? • How is morality related to the passions? • In what sense is a political order that does justice to diversity of moral beliefs...

Unearthing the Time/Space/Matter of Multispecies Justice

Abstract Multispecies justice is a developing field—or perhaps more accurately, a set of fields. It draws together a range of academic disciplines to examine human and nonhuman relationships. These include relationships of respect, responsibility, and, to some, reciprocity. The extent of those relationships and the range of species, forms, and being to be included, however, remains indistinct and variable. Whereas within traditional theories of justice concern for other beings remains tied to the desire to enhance human experience, life opportunities, goods, and virtues, the call to multispecies justice is motivated by the recognition that the nonhuman realm has intrinsic value and values. This article's argument is that given the relative infancy of multispecies justice as a field of study in the Western academy, there is an opportunity to ensure that it examines not only how to avoid damaging domination of the nonhuman realm but also the ongoing colonial domination of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. The article does not suggest an appropriation of Indigenous knowledge but rather an exploration of ways in which the field may remain sufficiently nuanced and open to accommodate multiple epistemological and ontological framings of theory. Drawing from Mātauranga Māori the article discusses an aspect of that decolonial project—why the scope of multispecies justice needs to be open to all planetary being and all time.

Be/longing: forever Par/des(i)

In the western academy, scholarly research is pre-dominantly informed by Euro-western philosophical understandings which in turn influence methodologies, and methods used. Assumptions made that researchers categorized as the Other apply similar paradigmatic lenses create tensions for these researchers whose ways of being, doing and viewing the world diverge from the mainstream. Using narrative and poetic reflections, a Par/des(i) approach to qualitative inquiry provides an onto-epistomological lens for those existing in liminal spaces whose experiences have been influenced by geographical, spiritual, histo-political, emotional, familial, and spiritual disruptions and dislocations.

For an African elenchus: colonial and postcolonial misprisions and Classics in Africa

Abstract This paper reflects on the god Dionysus in the context of African explorations of the role and meaning of Classical traditions in and for Africa. The problem of decolonization entails the creative challenge to conceive an African modernity, but how we shall recognize what that is to mean remains open. Knowledge as claim and contestation are foregrounded with Dionysus and in his presence. He is a figure who is chronically misprised, so that misprision itself becomes a feature of his experience and meaning. Offering examples of two kinds of popular interpretive stances and arguing that they represent typical but weak readings, the idea is developed that Africa requires elenchus as hermeneutic ideal, an epistemic pessimism and commitment to seeking as it finds its own way. It ought not, from a peripheral position, to adopt or reject the popular and low-yielding misprisions and cultural contestations that obtain in the Western academy and offer little to a flowering African Humanities.

Analyzing social wrongs

Analyzing social wrongs

“We Cannot Write About Complicity Together”: Limits of Cross-Caste Collaborations in Western Academy

Grounded in a friendship that began in the academy, we write together to problematize collaborative writing across our distinct caste positionalities. Writing as caste-oppressed Pakistani Muslim settler (Patel) and dominant caste Indian settler (Da Costa), we write primarily across caste power lines to focus on the failure in our own efforts at collaborative writing. This article, initially meant to focus on our complicities in white settler colonialism in its present form, reflects on the detours we undertook to arrive at this place of certainty that “we cannot write about our complicity together.” Specifically, we reconsider some assumptions underlining prominent methodological commitments of transnational collaborative writing across uneven locations in, for, and beyond the academy. Collaborative writing has been championed for its capacity to generate dialogue across disagreements, praxis grounded in social change, a challenge to the academy’s notions of individual knowledge-production and merit, and as a means of holding people across hierarchies accountable to structures of violence that remain at work within social movements and collective struggles. Considering the contours of what Sara Ahmed (2019) calls structural “usefulness” of collaborative writing to the colonial and neoliberal academy, we use historical and life-writing approaches to make caste violence legible in order to refuse the cover that collaborative writing provides to dominant caste South Asians engaged in research with Indigenous, Black, Muslim, caste-oppressed and multiply and differentially colonized communities. Our purpose is to foreground the historical and ordinary violence of caste as it shapes North American academic relationships, intimacies, and scholarship, in order to challenge the assumption that caste-privileged South Asian scholars of postcolonial and transnational studies in western academia are best poised to collaborate with Indigenous, Black, other racialized, and Dalit scholars and actors toward a decolonial, abolitionist, and anti-casteist feminist praxis. While focusing on writing across caste lines, our analysis can also be read as offering a space to engage ethically with complexities informing collaborative projects across differential horizontal and vertical power relations informed by race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, north/south and other differences. In the process of writing this article, we have also paid particular attention to our citational practices.

Kwe As Resurgent Method

Like Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back and “Land as Pedagogy,” this book was generated from within Nishnaabeg intelligence — Nishnaabeg intellectual practices or, more broadly, Nishnaabewin — rather than the traditional theoretical and methodological orientations of the Western academy (Simpson 2014; 2013; 2011). It is anchored theoretically within the ways my people generate knowledge, through deep reciprocal embodied engagement with Aki, and by participating with full presence in embedded practices — inherent processes that occur within a series of ethical frameworks that, when adhered to, continually generate consent.

Academic association through overseas visits: a multiple-case study of Chinese doctoral students from the perspectives of A(N)T

ABSTRACT Studies of Chinese (visiting) international doctoral students typically focus on how students are socialized into the Western academy. Not only does the literature reinforce Western institutions as ‘the academic centre’, but it also conjures a unidirectional image of academic learning and knowledge transfer from the West to the rest of the world. This paper complexifies these images by proposing academic association as an alternative image to understand students’ experiences. Inspired by assemblage thinking and actor network theory, academic association directs attention to the processes through which students translate themselves within research and knowledge practices and become researchers and knowledge producers. Empirically, drawing on a multiple-case study, this paper traces how 18 short-term Chinese visiting doctoral students built pathways to overseas studies, became enrolled within academic networks and practices, and assembled research and knowledge projects. It also highlights how the students’ subjectivities shifted as they knotted themselves into various relations with others, both human and non-human, in the academy. It is argued that as students articulated themselves to ‘the academic highways’ during their visits, they also multiplied the highways and became, simultaneously, the subjects of academic ‘freedom’ and ‘control’.