Western Knowledge Systems Research Articles

A Cross-cultural Evaluation Conversation in India: Benefits, Challenges, and Lessons Learned

Th rough a guided discussion, this article explores a five-year cross-cultural evaluation relationship comprising multiple projects involving an evaluator from Canada and a group of Indian colleagues working on educational reform in India. Th e initiative was funded through a multilateral consortium of donors and involved Western evaluation specialists working in collaboration with Indian colleagues to (a) develop evaluation capacity within the country and (b) produce evaluative knowledge about education quality initiatives associated with large-scale educational reform. This article is based on a conversation between the principal investigator from Canada and three Indian colleagues who had been involved in all phases of the work. It focuses on their respective perspectives and experiences, including the benefits obtained and the challenges encountered in the process of bridging Western and Indian knowledge systems. The article begins with background about the initiative and continues with a conversation among the participants about their cross-cultural evaluation experience. It concludes with an analysis of the issues that emerged and generation of lessons learned for evaluators interested in cross-cultural evaluation.

Constructing A Model Intellectual Property Policy for Development in Nigeria

The construction of a Model policy on intellectual property in Nigeria has become urgent due to the need for reform and advocacy for improvements in developing, protecting and enforcing intellectual property rights (IPRs) in Nigeria. This paper proposes a bottom up approach in adopting the appropriate Model policy. This approach prioritizes the needs of the people regarding intellectual properties based on western and traditional knowledge systems in Nigeria. The integration of intellectual property into the economic development plans of Nigeria through policies will indeed assist in reducing poverty, helping to combat diseases, improving health, enhancing access to education and contributing to sustainable development.

Promoting the persistence of Indigenous students through teaching at the Cultural Interface

The promise of higher education remains elusive for many Indigenous students in Australia. To date, institutional efforts to improve the persistence and retention of Indigenous students have been largely piecemeal, poorly integrated and designed to remediate skill deficits. Yet, market-led expansion of Australian higher education is driving curricular reform and demands for accountability and quality. Despite this, very little is known about how teaching and pedagogy can be used to support the learning and persistence of Indigenous students. In this context, the paper provides a reconceptualization of current debates and positions that are currently bound up within the limitations of questionable binary divides and oppositions, for example, educational psychology/sociology, transmission/critical or decolonial pedagogies and Indigenous/Western Knowledge. Nakata's concept of the Cultural Interface is mobilized to acknowledge some of the nuances and complexities that emerge when Indigenous and Western knowledge systems come into convergence within the higher education classroom.

Inheemse en Westerse tegnologiese kennisstelsels: Twee kante van dieselfde muntstuk?

Indigenous knowledge is often included artificially as an accessory by means of stereotypical examples in so-called Western, discipline-based school curricula for technology. The nature and tenets of indigenous technological knowledge have however not been investigated and documented thoroughly, creating difficulties and challenges for curriculum designers, especially including and integrating it in curricula that focus mainly on Western technology. The complementary nature of indigenous and Western knowledge systems allows for “border crossings” between these. The purpose of this article is to investigate and conceptualise the complementary nature of indigenous technology knowledge systems (ITKS) and Western technology knowledge systems by using Mitcham’s framework that is based on a Western technology knowledge system as point of departure. The findings indicate that it may be useful for curriculum designers to include indigenous technology in curricula with the purpose to illustrate the above-mentioned complementarity between ITKS and Western technology knowledge systems. Curriculum designers should focus on the common tenets of indigenous and Western technology from an ontological, epistemological, methodological and volitional perspective, rather than merely including clinical and sterile examples of indigenous knowledge in technology curricula artificially.

No one's discussing the elephant in the room: contemplating questions of research impact and benefit in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australian health research.

BackgroundThere remains a concern that Indigenous Australians have been over-researched without corresponding improvements in their health; this trend is applicable to most Indigenous populations globally. This debate article has a dual purpose: 1) to open a frank conversation about the value of research to Indigenous Australian populations; and 2) to stimulate ways of thinking about potential resolutions to the lack of progress made in the Indigenous research benefit debate.DiscussionCapturing the meaning of research benefit takes the form of ethical value-oriented methodological considerations in the decision-making processes of Indigenous research endeavours. Because research practices come from Western knowledge bases, attaining such positions in research means reconciling both Indigenous and Western knowledge systems to produce new methodologies that guide planning, evaluating and monitoring of research practices as necessary. Increasingly, more sophisticated performance measures have been implemented to ensure academic impact and benefits are captured. Assessing societal and other non-academic impacts and benefits however, has not been accorded corresponding attention. Research reform has only focussed on research translation in more recent years. The research impact debate must take account of the various standards of accountability (to whom), impact priorities (for whom), positive and negative impacts, and biases that operate in describing impact and measuring benefit.SummaryA perennial question in Indigenous research discourse is whether the abundance of research conducted; purportedly to improve health, is justified and benefits Indigenous people in ways that are meaningful and valued by them. Different research stakeholders have different conceptions of the value and nature of research, its conduct, what it should achieve and the kinds of benefits expected. We need to work collaboratively and listen more closely to the voice of Indigenous Australians to better understand, demonstrate and measure health research benefits. The authors conclude that as an imperative, a systematic benefit assessment strategy that includes identification of research priorities and planning, monitoring and evaluation components needs to be developed and implemented across research projects. In Indigenous health research, this will often mean adopting a benefit-led approach by changing the way research is done and preferencing alternative research methodologies. As a point of departure to improving impact and reaching mutually beneficial outcomes for researchers and partners in Indigenous health research, we need to routinise the assessment of benefit from outset of research as one of the standards toward which we work.

African Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Human Rights: Implications for Higher Education, Based on the South African Experience

ABSTRACTAfrica has rich traditions and knowledge systems founded on the principles of caring for one another and the spirit of mutual support embedded in the African philosophy of Ubuntu. These collective values tend to be marginalised in international human rights standards built on western values. The standards were developed without broad-based consultation of the different value systems in Africa. Therefore, in order to inspire sustainable implementation among diverse cultures, dialogue to develop universal human rights and obligations based on the diversity of cultures and ways of knowing is needed. Using South Africa's experience at two universities, the extent to which these institutions have attempted to incorporate African indigenous knowledge systems (AIKS) and human rights into the higher education curriculum is investigated. The implications for higher education and the human rights and development paradigms built on western knowledge systems are investigated. North-West University has been the pioneer of integrating AIKS into higher education in South Africa and is the only higher education institution in South Africa with an accredited IKS Teaching Programme at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels – which has been notably successful, albeit with some challenges. AIKS has also been integrated into research and teaching at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and has registered significant successes since 2012. The need to embed AIKS in the curriculum of higher education institutions is affirmed.

Restore the Truth: Traditional Chinese Law and Its Distortion by the Western Knowledge System

Traditional Chinese law has been described as a “stagnant” system, in contrast to the West's “progressive” formal-rational law. Two primary reasons for this perception are China's nineteenth century geopolitical descent and the Orientalist prejudices not only constructed by Westerners, but internalized by the non-Westerners that followed. Thus Chinese law came to be viewed as not worth learning. Admittedly, in traditional Chinese society, there was no consciousness of “rights,” but this does not mean that property rights, for example, have never been protected. Chinese society has long perceived itself as bound by duty. In the minds of emperors and the intelligentsia, an ideal society was a harmonious one, and therefore supposedly without lawsuits. However, conflicts and struggles do, of course, exist in Chinese society. In general, criminal cases (zhong'an) were judged by magistrates (difang fumuguan), while civil disputes (xishi) were usually settled through mediation. This is different from the adversary system of the West. This study argues that, although traditional Chinese law does indeed possess a substantive method for protecting individuals’ “rights”—a method that takes a moral and instructive approach to protecting “rights”, mainly through punishing wrongdoers—under the hegemony of the Western knowledge system, the progressive nature of traditional Chinese law has yet to be uncovered.

Indigenous ecological calendars define scales for climate change and sustainability assessments

Identifying appropriate temporal and spatial boundaries for assessments of human–environment systems continues to be a challenge in sustainability science. The livelihood of Indigenous peoples in the northwestern Brazilian Amazon are characterized by complex ecological management systems entwined with sociocultural practices and sophisticated astronomical and ecological calendars. Sustainability of fisheries and bitter manioc production, key elements of food systems and economic activities in this region, depend on cyclic high river levels for fish spawning as well as periods of dry days for preparation of agricultural fields. Since 2005, participatory research has been underway between Indigenous communities of the Tiquie River and the Brazilian Socio-environmental Institute (ISA). Indigenous agents of environmental management (AIMAs) keep notebooks of ethno-astronomical, ecological, and socio-economic observations of the annual cycles, and some of them have reported that river levels and dry periods have become more irregular in some years. To investigate how these possible climatic changes may impact the sustainability of resources, we share knowledge from the Tukano ecological calendar with methodology for examining changes in precipitation and river levels and their interactions at multiple timescales. Our collaboration indicates that high spatial and temporal variability in precipitation patterns and river levels may complicate climate change and sustainability analyses. However, combining results from participatory research with novel methods for climate analysis helps identify a 4-day trend in precipitation that may impact agroecosystem management. Indigenous participation in systematic data collection and interpretation of results is essential for distinguishing between socio-economic and climate forcings and evaluating climate impacts. Continued efforts to bridge Indigenous and Western knowledge systems are vital for sustainable environmental management in Indigenous territories and other regions where traditional management may be challenged in the context of global climate change.

Niching sustainability in an Indigenous community: protected areas, autonomous initiatives, and negotiating power in natural resource management

Although sustainability science has been developed within the Western knowledge system, and Indigenous science has been studied at the local level, these two streams of thought are premised on a common understanding of the relationship between humans and the environment. The practitioners of each, however, have not yet engaged in productive, practical dialog. This paper used cooperative game theory to better understand the choices and tradeoffs made by Indigenous Taiwanese villagers who were in a “competitive” situation with regard to Indigenous autonomy and government-led protected areas. The aim was to understand how interactions among different groups of local people could affect community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) processes that aim to balance environmental sustainability with Indigenous autonomy. Results show that the knowledge and rights of Indigenous people could be part of a compromising collaboration with legislation-supported protected areas, if this collaboration benefits Indigenous autonomy as well as sustainability of the local environment and livelihoods. Indigenous science can inform changing landscapes, while sustainability science can provide analytical approaches and planning schemes for resilience. We suggest, though, that the trade-off process should be open and include a well-communicated mechanism through which all parties can negotiate power in a mutually agreeable way, merging Indigenous and sustainability concerns into one actionable collaboration. The types of conflicts analyzed in this study are characteristic of the conflicts typically associated with sustainable development.

Inter-American Encounters in the Travel and Migration Narratives of Mayra Montero and Cristina García: Toward a Decolonial Hemispheric Feminism

This essay merges scholarship on coloniality and hemispheric theories to elaborate a hemispheric decolonial feminism. I adopt this approach to illustrate how two Cuban exile writers, Mayra Montero and Cristina García, located at different sites in the hemisphere, create narratives that expose and provide positive alternatives to Western knowledge systems and their mechanisms for reproducing asymmetrical power relations in the Americas. A comparative analysis of their work reveals that travel and migration narratives provide an oppositional ideological-discursive location from which feminists along the North-South axes combat the power that regimes based on coloniality exercise to alienate and exclude. Their narratives illustrate the dialectical permutations of historically continuous encounters between the Anglo-European and the American subaltern around conflictive ways of being and knowing—those based in Western scientific paradigms and those based in the Caribbean’s African-derived cosmologies of vodou and Santería.

Kulintja Nganampa Maa-kunpuntjaku (Strengthening Our Thinking): Place-Based Approaches to Mental Health and Wellbeing in Anangu Schools

MindMatters, implemented by Principals Australia Institute, is a resource and professional development initiative supporting Australian secondary schools in promoting and protecting the mental health and social and emotional wellbeing of members of school communities, preferring a proactive paradigm (Covey, 1989) to the position of ‘disaster response’. While the MindMatters national focus has continued, grown and become embedded in schools since its beginning in 2000, MindMatters staff have also specifically sought to establish localised mental health and wellbeing (MHWB) promotion in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities that empowers local school and community groups to build on community values and intergenerational capacities for supporting the MHWB of young people. This article outlines the processes for successful practice that have been developed in a very remote Aboriginal school context, and highlights the strengths and benefits of this approach from the perspectives of Anangu (Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara people of Central Australia) educators. Using a community development approach, Anangu educators, skilled linguists, community members and MindMatters trained staff formed learning communities that recontextualised MHWB curriculum to be taught in Anangu schools. While critically reflecting on the process MindMatters has adopted, this article draws on the voices of A nangu to privilege the cultural philosophical positions in the discourse. In so doing, important principles for translating what is fundamentally a western knowledge system's construct into corresponding Anangu knowledge systems is highlighted. Through building on the knowledge base that exists in the community context, Anangu educators, school staff and community members develop confidence, shared language and capacity to become the expert educators, taking their knowledge and resources to other Anangu school communities to begin their MindMatters journey ‘Anangu way’. This process supports students as they engage in the school-based activities and build a language for reflecting on MHWB concerns, leading them to learn and practice ‘better ways of thinking and acting’ (Kulintja Palyantja Palya —the Pitjantjatjara language title for the MindMatters, ‘Anangu Way’ program).

Independence, Dominance, and Power: (Re)Examining the Impact of School Policies On the Academic Development of Indigenous Youth

This article explores how school policies framed by Western knowledge systems legitimize assimilationist socialization and learning practices that distance school leaders and teachers from American Indian students and their educational process. By deconstructing school rules, microaggressions are revealed, illuminating the inherent tension between academic knowledge and Indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) in schools. When IKS are validated and incorporated into academic knowledge systems, Indigenous youth are constructed as knowledge producers and active agents in schools. Likewise, educational processes are informed by social and cultural contexts, and educators are encouraged to rethink educational policies and school learning.

Methodology-21: what do we do in the afterward?

This paper asks “after what” and situates qualitative research in the present moment in the midst of various “deaths” and “returns.” With a focus on fleshing out post-qualitative research, it first sketches efforts to discipline qualitative research via standards and rubrics as a part of neoliberal govenmentality and then elaborates what post-qualitative might mean via four exemplars. The first is from Sweden, a focus on relational entangled data analysis in the feminist classroom; the next two exemplars are collaborative studies from Australia at the intersection of Western and Aboriginal knowledge systems; the final exemplar is from Egypt, a feminist post-colonial study of the women’s mosque movement. The paper concludes with a call to “imagine forward” out of troubling a narrow scientificity and enacting an “after” of neoliberalism.

Misunderstanding the “Nature” of Co-Management: A Geography of Regulatory Science and Indigenous Knowledges (IK)

Governments, NGOs, and natural scientists have increased research and policy-making collaborations with Indigenous peoples for governing natural resources, including official co-management regimes. However, there is continuing dissatisfaction with such collaborations, and calls for better communication and mutual learning to create more ‘‘adaptive’’ co-management regimes. This, however, requires that both Western and Indigenous knowledge systems be equal participants in the ‘‘co-production’’ of regulatory data. In this article, I examine the power dynamics of one co-management regulatory regime, conducting a multi-sited ethnography of the practices of researching and managing one transnational migratory species, greater white-fronted geese (Anser albifrons frontalis), who nest where Koyukon Athabascans in Alaska, USA, practice subsistence. Analyzing the ethnographic data through the literatures of critical geography, science studies and Indigenous Studies, I describe how the practice of researching for co-management can produce conflict. ‘‘Scaling’’ the data for the co-management regime can marginalize Indigenous understandings of human– environment relations. While Enlightenment-based practices in wildlife biology avoid ‘‘anthropomorphism,’’ Indigenous Studies describes identities that operate through non-modern, deeply imbricated human–nonhuman identities that do not separate ‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘society’’ in making knowledge. Thus, misunderstanding the ‘‘nature’’ of their collaborations causes biologists and managers to measure and research the system in ways that erase how subsistence- based Indigenous groups already ‘‘manage’’ wildlife: by living through their ethical commitments to their fellow beings. At the end of the article, I discuss how managers might learn from these ontological and epistemologicaldifferences to better ‘‘co-produce’’ data for co-management.

The Islamization of English Literary Studies

In today’s world where the former colonized are reshaping their relation with the colonizer, the concept of decolonizing or indigenizing education is widely discussed in postcolonial studies. Decolonizing/indigenizing education counters the western systems of knowledge’s hegemony over those of non-western systems of thought and requires the development of a new approach to education that keeps in view the indigenous societies’ socio-cultural and religious values and traditions. The Islamization of Knowledge undertaking maintains a similar approach, but additionally requires an Islamic perspective on knowledge. Among all western disciplines, English literature is arguably the most culturally charged and carries western value-laden ideas. This reality points to the need to look at it from Islamic perspectives. Based on this theoretical concept, this study seeks to establish the urgency and feasibility of Islamizing English (British) literary studies.

The Islamization of English Literary Studies

In today’s world where the former colonized are reshaping their relation with the colonizer, the concept of decolonizing or indigenizing education is widely discussed in postcolonial studies. Decolonizing/indigenizing education counters the western systems of knowledge’s hegemony over those of non-western systems of thought and requires the development of a new approach to education that keeps in view the indigenous societies’ socio-cultural and religious values and traditions. The Islamization of Knowledge undertaking maintains a similar approach, but additionally requires an Islamic perspective on knowledge. Among all western disciplines, English literature is arguably the most culturally charged and carries western value-laden ideas. This reality points to the need to look at it from Islamic perspectives. Based on this theoretical concept, this study seeks to establish the urgency and feasibility of Islamizing English (British) literary studies.

Enabling hybrid space: epistemological diversity in socio-ecological problem-solving

Although it can be challenging, engagement with diverse knowledges and knowledge systems can lead to better decisions. The purpose of this paper is to open a dialog about transrational (spiritual) knowing within socio-ecological decision-making with two common interest goals in mind: (1) making better decisions for long-term sustainability for all beings, including those who are human and those who are not, and (2) animating processes for decision-making that are inclusive of ways of knowing of all peoples. I suggest that serious consideration of transrational knowing is critical to addressing the incommensurability of Western and Indigenous knowledge systems, and meeting the identified goals.

A ‘subordinate’ genre in the voice of the ‘subordinate’ gender: the storytelling tradition in post-colonial Botswana

My study demonstrates how the Setswana storytelling tradition and its executors – illiterate women in rural areas – occupy subordinate positions in Western knowledge systems, colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy. In this article I extend black feminist propositions of ‘subjugated knowledge’ to propose a reconsideration of storytelling as alternative knowledge as I excavate and reclaim this suppressed, ignored and excluded knowledge. Through ethnographic research I seek to reveal storytelling as a highly important cultural practice, as embodied oppositional knowledge, as a place where Batswana rural women's voices can be found. The article further investigates the voicelessness of rural Batswana women by arguing that although they are marginalised, they do not succumb to their positions of powerlessness if we care to search for and listen to their voices in the right places. As storytelling is an art that was/is privately enjoyed by families in the comfort of their homes, I contend that perhaps this private space of women's performance is accountable for the exclusion and dismissal of women as mute. I therefore invoke and complicate hooks' argument of the ‘homeplace’ as a site of resistance to dominant discourses.

Promoting African indigenous knowledge in the knowledge economy

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore why Africa's indigenous knowledge is not playing a more active and visible role in the knowledge economy and to the roles that academia and librarians must play for it to be so.Design/methodology/approachThe paper's approach is to combine a literature review and discussion of the issues.FindingsThe importance of indigenous knowledge to development has been established over the years. Calls have been made for African universities to take indigenous knowledge into account in their teaching and research, and to view indigenous knowledge as valuable and as a way of addressing the view of Africa as a consumer of knowledge rather than a generator and contributor of knowledge. However, whilst there have been some initiatives in academia and in libraries to integrate indigenous knowledge into their activities, it has not been enough. The reasons are many and varied and stem largely from the globalizing and unifying nature of the world education system. However, this system does also offer an opportunity for African universities to distinguish themselves as African universities that have something different to offer the world.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper focuses on universities and libraries in Africa in general although Africa is a vast continent and there are differences in context.Practical implicationsUniversities and libraries should look inward and find creative ways of integrating Western and indigenous knowledge systems in their teaching, research, engagement and information management.Originality/valueThe paper explores concrete ways that academia and libraries can address the matter of integrating indigenous knowledge into their activities to ensure recognition as being distinctively African.

The Good, the Better, and the Beautiful

This coperformed autoethnographic inquiry explores “the West” as both a seductive and a subjugating narrative terrain on which betweener identities must navigate the colonizing structures of Western epistemologies. On this terrain, we collaboratively engage the metaphors and tropes of “Cowboys” and “Indians” within a broader critique of knowledge production in the Western academy. As a decolonizing performance, our journey invites a collective turning of the academic gaze away from objectifying the Other and toward making Western systems of knowledge themselves the objects of inquiry.