Tag Archives epistemology

EADI ISS Conference 2021 | Questioning development: What lies ahead?

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Development Studies requires “an epistemological and ontological change”, write Elisabetta Basile and Isa Baud in the introduction to the recent EADI volume ‘Building Development Studies for a New Millennium’. The planned sequel of the book will take this analysis one step further and explore viable ways to build on both the critique of development as such and the growing demand to decolonise knowledge production. During a plenary session titled ‘Questioning Development – Towards Solidarity, Decoloniality, Conviviality’ that formed part of EADI’s recent #Solidarity2021 conference, four contributors discussed the upcoming book. Christiane Kliemann summarised the discussion.

The need to critique development has become urgent as global inequalities increase and the need for the decolonisation of knowledge to redress knowledge production asymmetries becomes greater. “We have been much better at critique than at changing things”, quipped Uma Kothari during a panel session titled ‘Questioning Development – Towards Solidarity, Decoloniality, Conviviality’ of EADI’s recent #Solidarity2021 conference that she recently chaired.

Kothari is also one of the editors of a forthcoming book with the working title ‘Questioning Development Studies: Towards Decolonial, Convivial and Solidaristic Approaches’ that will be a sequel to the already-published EADI volume titled ‘Building Development Studies for a New Millennium’. During the panel session she asked four panellists who contributed to the book to discuss their own practices towards challenging the classical ‘development’ paradigm and possible ways forward. Their diverse and insightful arguments are captured below.

Integrating indigenous understandings of relationality

Yvonne Te Ruki-Rangi-O-Tangaroa Underhill-Sem, Associate Professor in Pacific Studies, Te Wānanga o Waipapa, University of Auckland, New Zealand, started the discussion with an interesting example from New Zealand, or Aotearoa, as she calls it by its Maori name, where the Maori concept of Manaakitanga has even influenced the way in which research is done in the whole country. Manaakitanga, as Underhill-Sem explained, is all around caring for the ‘Mana’ of people we relate to – ‘Mana’ itself being understood as anything we relate to, be it other people, land, or whatever is meaningful to us. “We’ve been working very closely between New Zealand Maori and Pacific scholars to begin to infuse and embed this concept in one of the major research policy platforms in Aotearoa that control the funding of research and the definition of what is excellent research”, she explained.

As a very tangible example for encouraging research based on a much broader understanding of knowledge, she referred to the Toksave Research Portal which has drawn its name from one of the languages of Papua New Guinea and started as a “process inviting a whole range of different knowledge-makers around the region and the Pacific to submit their work”, be it a poem, a thesis, or an NGO report.

Lauren Tynan, Trawlwulwuy woman from Tebrakunna country in northeast Tasmania, who is currently doing her PhD on aboriginal burning practices at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, also views the issue of decolonising knowledge and knowledge production through a lens of relationality. She aspires to hold herself accountable to all relations she has; her recent paper ‘Thesis as kin: living relationality with research’ explored how she relates to her research.

At times, this understanding can be quite challenging to the concept of research she had been initially taught, which she finds “quite a colonising way of researching”. For example, it doesn’t take into account her responsibilities as a mother of small children, which prevent her from traveling back and forth for her research: “Part of that relationality is to see that I shouldn’t feel that as a limitation but as part my responsibilities and obligations to my family and my wider family which is also my research relationship”.

Migration as constitutive dimension of human existence

Samid Suliman, Lecturer on Migration and Security in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia, brought in another important, but much-overlooked perspective. As he focuses much of his work on the relationship between migration and development, he started from the point that “mobility has been and continues to be colonised through development”, with the “entrenchment and hegemony of the nation state as the primary organising framework of human existence”. Although we are now living in a ‘hyper-mobile world’, he pointed out that the “state-centred way of understanding human mobility continues to be reproduced”, and migrants are looked at with fear and trepidation. One of his research questions therefore is: “How can we better understand migration and mobility as a constitutive dimension of human existence, rather than just an outcome of human activity?”

As one step forward, Suliman suggested to “think critically about the way in which we normalise certain assumptions and certain normative dispositions about the movement of human beings and resist the impulse to settle everyone in their place”. This would require finding new mechanisms, institutions and possibilities for convivial relations and forms of justice that go “beyond the national as the frame of reference for decision making and action on the governance of the moving of people”.

Hospitality as basic principle for societies beyond development

For Aram Ziai, Heisenberg-Professor of the German Research Foundation (DFG) for Development Policy and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kassel, Germany, it all starts with questioning the term ‘development’. He considers a simple redefinition of the term insufficient, as this could produce misunderstandings and a “beyond-criticism gambit”. If the term development continues to bear different meanings, from democratic industrial capitalisms to any type of positive social change, he said, “we are in fact obstructing the critique of development organisations by saying, ‘if something bad happened out of a development project, it was not really development’”.

He also made clear that ‘development’ cannot be seen independent of its historical context: “Development came into being as a new programme to legitimise a capitalist world order in the Global South at a time when the colonial ideology was losing credibility and a new framing of North-South relations was needed to maintain access to the raw materials of the South and the corresponding division of labour. So, development thinking was a new frame, but it was still linked to colonialism, to the idea of transforming geo-cultural differences into historical stages, so that the self is the norm, and the other is the deviant, deficient, other”.

How to move on? Less data, more stories!

All panellists agreed that big changes don’t occur overnight and that it takes everyone’s efforts in their specific places and fields to contribute to a systemic change that might still take years or even decades to gain full ground. In Suliman’s words, “We need to do all we can within our various roles and positions to push back on the research monoculture imposed from above”.

As one important step in this direction, Underhill-Sem called on the older and more advanced scholars to be much more audacious in their engagement with policy: “Are we seeing that audacity with obligation? Are we seeing active engagement in these key structural places, in terms of reviewing the way in which we do and fund research, the way in which we build ethics around research? Are we reaching in those spaces and doing the work there, or are we leaving these spaces for others to populate them?” According to Ziai, we are already moving in the right direction by “talking more and more about these issues and less and less about economic growth, productivity and other things that are increasingly questioned”.

Suliman thinks that it all boils down to the question of making ourselves known to each other in ways that don’t colonise, and in creating space for multiple meanings and exchanges between us: “I think we need to keep moving towards other ways of seeing and listening and knowing, so in short: less data, more stories.” And, Tynan observes, these stories are already there: “Wherever we are in the world there are peoples who have story and belonging to the land, it’s about knowing these stories and their full implications on ourselves as individuals and communities”.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Christiane Kliemann Communications European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI)

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Are you oversimplifying? Research dilemmas, honesty and epistemological reductionism by Rodrigo Mena

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During a recent field trip to South Sudan, a question haunted me: How can I tell the story of this place accurately without reducing in my research the lived experiences of people I engaged with? Epistemological reductionism can be a challenge for scholars, and this post explains that the reasons for epistemological reductionism are complex and contextual, moving beyond just a personal limitation of doing research.

Last year, I was in the northern part of South Sudan researching how small villages cope with drought amidst the armed conflict affecting the country. The villagers taught me how to select (and treat) the best leaves of trees to prepare soup. This ‘soup’ of leaves would be their only meal for the day. They told me their stories; they shared their water and experiences. I had been trying to learn as much as possible about the country, its history, and its reality.

However, a question followed me around: How can I tell the story of this place accurately, doing justice to people’s everyday experiences? How can I answer any research question adequately without oversimplifying a large and complex reality? Inspired by a post of Andrew Quilty, I reflect here on reductionism and oversimplification in academia.

Aware of my blind spots, language barriers, cultural and historical ignorance, and positionality, I realised that despite my best efforts and intentions, there will always be there an epistemological reductionism: The way of knowing a reality and presenting it to others (through papers, reports, blogs) will always suffer from a methodological attempt to reduce its complexity into simpler and smaller parts.

Beyond insiders and outsiders

This reductionism does not only apply to me as a foreign researcher or outsider, but also to local people, researchers, and journalists. Discussing this concern with an Afghan colleague and friend in Kabul, he reflected that he feels the same in his own country. We talked about how each person has a position, positionality, and angle, and that our jobs (and that of journalists, too) entail the need for reduction.

Multiple processes and moments guide the reduction process. Our research questions and data collection instruments do their part. Before them, the decision of what to research often aligns with the funds available and politics of what can be funded, by whom, and for what. Supervisors and research groups also play a relevant role trimming what will be researched, presented, and how. By the end of the process, journals and book editors also influence what is said and how it is said.

The idea is not to address this complexity in depth, but to argue that this epistemological reductionism is contextual and more complicated than just a personal limitation of doing research.

collecting leaves 2

Collecting leaves in South Sudan

How to do research considering this reductionism?

These reductionisms and limitations do not discredit the relevance and value of research, but invites more reflective, humble, and honest research. We need to be careful of which discourses we are reproducing and from where we get our stories. South Sudan or Afghanistan, two countries mentioned here, are beautiful countries, with people living their lives in a way as normal as possible, like in every other place. They are also facing crises and war, but we cannot reduce their realities only to these last facts.

We also need to be humble, but at the same time confident. What we know about these places is not nothing, neither everything. Our research needs to be as focused as possible—clear on our angle and what we can achieve. Our positionality needs to be acknowledged, as it will change over time.

Most importantly, we need to be honest. Sometimes the problem is not the ignorance of the epistemological reductionism, but the overcompensation of it by making our results more prominent or representative. The pressures to publish, to present results that fit with the theories and own ideas can also lead to not being honest. When we present results not totally aligned with our interviews, observations, sources, and sound analytical methods, we are harming by presenting to others a reality that is not—although always imperfect and limited—‘evidence-based’[1]. Our results might be used by policy makers, educators, and others, but by not being honest, any practice coming from it can be damaging. We need to be honest with our number of participants, research limitations, methods, analyses, and results. In other words, we need to be honest about what we can say, aware of the reductionism and the tendency to overcompensate for it. Interesting and necessary would also be a discussion over what are the structural forces in academia that make us dishonest sometimes.

This entails patience. Doing research in this way might mean having less comprehensive results; however, by being replicated or linked with other results, building a chain of “lesser” results, we start to get to know places and processes better. Overcoming the epistemological reductionism mentioned here is not a matter of not facing it, but how we through doing research become aware of it and of the consequences of not doing so. What do you think? How do you work around these reductionisms?

[1] Relevant for another discussion is the question on what is evidence based, which evidence, for what, and from where. The recent case of fake articles being published in relevant journals to show flaws in the system can lead to a further and relevant discussion (see more at: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-hoax/572212/)

Rod

About the author:

Rodrigo (Rod) Mena is a socio-environmental researcher and PhD – AIO at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. His current research project focuses on disaster response and humanitarian aid governance in complex and high-intensity conflict-affected scenarios, being South Sudan, Afghanistan and Yemen his main cases. Experience conducting fieldwork and researching in conflict and disaster zones from in Africa, Latin America, Europe, Oceania and Asia.

 

Epistemic Diversity| Understanding epistemic diversity: decoloniality as research strategy by Olivia U. Rutazibwa

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How do we make sure that our efforts to diversify knowledge production go beyond a window-dressing/Benetton operation? How can we move beyond merely adding some colour and other markers of ‘diversity’ to existing structures—a move that too neatly serves the neoliberal project embedded in our institutions, and their related unquenchable thirst for all that looks new, ‘shiny’ and exciting? I propose that an explicit decolonial engagement with epistemic diversity is one of the ways to productively address and navigate these challenges of co-optation and commodification.

A decolonial engagement[1] draws our attention to the need to foreground at least two important concerns. First, that epistemic diversification needs to explicitly speak to the issue of coloniality. Second, that we need to address the practical and institutional implications of anticolonial epistemic diversity.

The first concern invites us to understand that the (little) everyday institutional progress when it comes to more diversity in colour, gender, faith, ability, and sexuality, is merely the absolute minimal condition for a more just society. Hence, we should not mistake them for sufficient accomplishment. More importantly, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the ‘plussing-up’ exercise of the visible diversification is more damaging than simply not enough. We need to keep in mind that it is also a way through which coloniality can continue with a nicer face; and that that is the real and often most depressing danger.

The second concern points at the importance of moving beyond mere discursive deconstructions on what is wrong with our actual knowledge systems; the aim is to invest our efforts in material and immaterial (re)constructions of what and who has been erased or silenced.

In this regard, we could conceive of decoloniality as a research strategy consisting of three related sub-strategies: (1) the need to de-mythologize, pertaining to issues of ontology; (2) the need to de-silence, which more explicitly relates to epistemology; and (3) the need to anticolonially de-colonize, addressing both the tangible, material and the normative of knowledge production/cultivation.

De-mythologizing: where do we start the story?

In relation to the need de-mythologize, in International Relations and International Development Studies, this invites us to consider how we understand the world. A first question that arises is: where do we start the story? What is our point of departure? For example: many international development courses start with American President, Harry Truman, who in his inaugural address of 1949 declares that the USA will help the world and embark on a new program for the improvement and growth of the ‘underdeveloped areas’. It is a point of departure that systematically sustains the logic of development. If we instead start the story with how these areas became ‘underdeveloped’ to begin with, it becomes impossible to sidestep or minimise the constitutive force of transatlantic enslavement and colonialism in both International Development and International Relations thinking and practices. It becomes even more difficult to sustain the epistemic, technological and moral superiority of the West – the myth par excellence on which much of International Relations and International Development Studies is built.

A second consideration of de-mythology is that of Eurocentrism, be it geographic, imaginary or methodological. The question that arises from this is: what would our research questions or teaching look like if Europe, or the European experiences and knowledges were not the centre of our story? What would it look like when other places and experiences are centred? More importantly maybe, what if the European experiences were no longer cast as universal? It would again jeopardise the natural North-South capacity-building logic that is so central in much of our global knowledge systems and relations.

The third de-mythology consideration has to do with fragmentation. Much of colonial knowledge production is built on chopping up parts of the story that fundamentally belong together. Modernity (with the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, i.e. epistemic and technological (re)discoveries) and Coloniality (with Enslavement and Colonialism, i.e. genocide, epistemicide and ecocide) are hardly ever brought to us as sides of the same coin. So is our understanding and study of the origins of wealth and poverty, which are institutionally fragmented into different departments and disciplines. This allows us to study poverty without systematically engaging with the fact that the wealth in the global North has literally been sourced from the poverty in global South. Consequently, when we seek to explain poverty in, let’s say ‘Africa’, our students and many of our colleagues turn to the issue of corruption; a locally contained phenomenon which becomes the lead character in a tale from which we – the global North – can mythologically write ourselves out.

De-silencing: who are the experts? What is expertise?

If we look at de-silencing, the two main questions that arise are: who are the experts, and what do we consider expertise? Who has the microphone, who has the megaphone, and why? Who/what type of knowledge is (not) around the table and why?

When it comes to types of knowledges, we see that in the hegemonic global Northern canon, rationality is put forward as the one legitimate (i.e. ‘objective’) way to know and understand the world. Both feminist and decolonial scholarship have challenged this, yet the empiricist, linearly incremental, competitive, zero-sum, logic of colonial knowledge production continues to dominate the field – be it in our classroom, what we value and mark, how we teach, or in our own research designs.

When it comes to the ‘who are the experts’ question, we can see the literal silencing of peoples that are supposed to be the protagonists; take for example the systematic absence as experts of Muslim women in debates on the headscarf in continental Europe. Silencing can also manifest itself in binary representation, hierarchized difference, whitewashing or overexposure; think for instance of how whenever crime or terrorism comes up, there is an almost automatic invocation of Muslim men. Silencing also bears on our use of languages, on how some of them (like English) are overrepresented in our systems of knowledge and more importantly, how we forget to remember how little we can actually know about a place when we do not know its languages. So, as a first and minimal step, de-silencing invites us revisit the implications of the incredibly limited pool from which we source our knowledges in our quest to understand the world. In practical terms, but in the classroom and in our own research, it invites us to revisit not only what we include or exclude, but also what we foreground, start with, where we theorize from.

De-colonizing: fighting coloniality through knowledge cultivation

The third and last strategy, to anticolonially de-colonize, invites us to be explicit about the purpose of our knowledge production endeavours and connect it to the material consequences of coloniality. Why am I researching this? Who does it empower? How does this serve or work against the colonial status quo? One way to look at this is by asking ourselves the extent to which our knowledges contribute to, or fight processes of epistemicide, ecocide and genocide. Put differently, we can ask ourselves whether we cultivate knowledges to address the quality or possibility of life (of those denied by coloniality) or feed the colonial status quo; knowledges at the service of the will to power or the will to life?

As such, a decolonial research strategy pushed to its logical implications, invites us to re-consider the purpose and contents of our syllabi, disciplines and departments. In the case of International Development Studies for instance, once we have discursively addressed the myth of white western superiority, colonial amnesia and re-/de-centred/pluralised the logic and voices of knowledges, the decolonial invitation is to revisit the institutions in which we do this. When the logic of ‘aid’ and linear development reveals itself as highly problematic, its will-to-life alternative would rather propose something like a Department of Global Justice and Reparations instead; for instance. It is in our embracing or resistance of such drastic engagements with the implications of diversification that our commitment to dismantling coloniality reveals itself. Maybe we should start the conversation of epistemic justice here.

[1] The ideas in this blog entry are further elaborated on in Rutazibwa, O. U. (forthcoming, September 2018), “On Babies and Bathwater: Decolonsing Development Studies”. In: de Jong, S., Icaza, R. and Rutazibwa, O.U. (eds.). Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning, London: Routledge.
With special thanks to Umbreen Salim for voluntarily transcribing this presentation that was recently presented at the ISS.
This poem forms part of a series on Epistemic Diversity. You can read the other articles here and here and here and here

IMG_2442.JPGAbout the author: 

Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa is senior lecturer in European and International Development Studies at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. Her research centres on ways to decolonise thinking and practices of International Solidarity by recovering and reconnecting philosophies and enactments of dignity and self-determination in the postcolony: autonomous recovery in Somaliland, Agaciro in Rwanda and Black Power in the US. She is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics (2018) and is associate editor of International Feminist Journal of Politics.

 

Epistemic Diversity | From ‘do no harm’ to making research useful: a conversation on ethics in development research by Karin Astrid Siegmann

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Ethical dilemmas are part and parcel of the research processes that researchers are engaged in. This article details a recent conversation between ISS students and staff in which they tried to make sense of some of the ethical issues that researchers face. While the ‘do no harm’ principle was emphasised as an overall yardstick, the discussion went beyond that, raising broader questions about epistemic and social justice.

With thanks to Andrea Tauta Hurtado, Zhiren Ye, Kristen Cheney, Roy Huijsmans and Andrew Fischer.

Scholars in Development Studies are quick to brag about how relevant their research is for the underdogs of society. The reality is that representatives of marginalised groups rarely knock at our office doors to ask for scholarly support. In fact, development research often does harm by justifying economic and social inequalities, reproducing stereotypes and stigma, and misrepresenting or even erasing knowledge about the lives of marginalised people.

How can scholars prevent such harm from being done through their research? This question was discussed by ISS students majoring in Social Policy for Development and staff members in a workshop on “ethical, integrity, and security challenges”. The discussion aimed to prepare ISS students for their fieldwork. While in our conversation the ‘do no harm’ principle was emphasised as an overall yardstick for our research, the discussion went beyond that, raising broader questions about epistemic and social justice.

Challenges to informed consent and ensuring anonymity

Roy Huijsmans’ example from his masters’ research on Dutch school-going children’s employment experiences illustrated that research participants’ informed consent is crucial, but also complicated by the power relations structuring the research arena. Teachers in his former school had facilitated meetings with their students. Several of these students, in turn, had expressed interest in and consented to participating in Roy’s study. When conducting telephone interviews with these children, however, in some cases parents became suspicious: who is that adult male calling their child? Roy’s experience raises the issue of whether it is adequate to understand informed consent individually. If not, what role do we give to the—in this case generational—power relations wherein consent is embedded? Can ethics protocols that require consent from parents or other gatekeepers alongside children’s own answer these questions?

In my own research, class-based power relations motivate special attention to research participants’ anonymity. Referring to a recent study on working conditions in South Asian tea plantations, I flagged that if workers’ and unionists’ statements could be identified, this could lead to their dismissal or worse outcomes. Our research team addressed this concern by not providing names—neither of people, nor of research locations. Andrew Fischer challenged me: would that really prevent identification? It is likely that few people are probably willing to stick their necks out as labour leaders, making those that do more easily recognisable.

One student followed up and asked how she could protect the identity of chemsex users— people having sex while using hard drugs—whose experiences she plans to investigate. Referring to the do no harm principle, Roy encouraged her to reflect on the consequences of research participants’ names leaking out: the Dutch government tolerates illegal drug consumption. Hence, in the current scenario, enforcement agencies are unlikely to arrest users. However, such political priorities can easily change over time. Andrew therefore recommended the anonymisation of transcripts, with their key to be stored outside the computer.

The quest for epistemic justice and diversity

In recent years, I have become increasingly concerned with the responsible representation of the lives, concerns and demands of the people who participate in my research, or, put differently, with epistemic justice. For instance, how will I represent the plantation workers who generously shared their experiences in our tea study? In a way that responds to the academic pressure to publish in highly-ranked journals with specific theoretical fancies? Or do research participants’ concerns guide my writing? This relates to questions that Marina Cadaval and Rosalba Icaza raise in their earlier post on this blog: ‘who generates and distributes knowledge, for which purposes, and how?’

Other participants in the discussion shared this concern for a fair representation. The student who engages with chemsex users’ experiences was acutely aware of the role of race in her research. In exploratory interviews, she learned how race shapes the exercise of power in chemsex users’ sexual relationships and how it either enables them to get support from or bars their access to the healthcare system. How to do justice to participants’ narratives without simultaneously repeating and reinforcing the underlying stereotypes?

For me, one way to deal with this quest for epistemic justice has been to engage in processes of activist scholarship, i.e. in collaboration and joint knowledge production with people who struggle for recognition and redistribution. Activist scholarship involves moves towards epistemic diversity, challenging the widely assumed supremacy of scientific knowledge heavily produced in Northern academic institutions. For instance, I have been involved in the campaign of a Florida-based farmworker organisation for making the Dutch retailer Ahold sign on to their programme for better working conditions in US agriculture. In dialogue with that organisation, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), I have written about lessons from that campaign for how precarious workers can effectively organise. Sruti Bala points out that this implies ‘to listen to articulations radically different from the frameworks that I may be trained in, but more than good listening is required in order for those articulations and insights to translate themselves into what we might call knowledge’. These processes of listening, dialoguing and learning didn’t lead to “consensus-based writing”, though. We had disagreements and I tried to make them visible in my writing.

Besides, there may be internal power hierarchies within the movements with which we collaborate. My colleague Silke Heumann earlier warned that through our decision of who participates in our research and who doesn’t, we run the risk of reinforcing existing power relations and of legitimising an elite’s perspective of a movement.

This approach may not be feasible for a masters’ thesis. What is possible in most cases, though, is to get research participants’ feedback on, critique and validation of how they understood our conversations or my wider observations about their lives. Time is a key resource in this effort to respect their knowledge as experts on their own lives. Taking time for research participants—rather than racing from one respondent to the next—enables us to conduct research in a more responsible manner. I want to integrate this principle more and more in my research due to the belief that this not only helps to prevent harm. Over and above that, it enables me to treat my research participants and their concerns with care. The more time I plan and spend for engagement with those who participate in my research, the greater the likelihood that it will embody epistemic justice.

 

This article forms part of a series on Epistemic Diversity. You can read the other articles here and here

csm_5abd70057687ec5e3741252630d8cc66-karin-siegmann_60d4db99baAbout the author: 

Holding a PhD in Agricultural Economics, Dr Karin Astrid Siegmann works as a Senior Lecturer in Labour and Gender Economics at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Hague, the Netherlands. She is the convenor of the ISS Major in Social Policy for Development (SPD).

Epistemic Diversity | The challenge of epistemic poverty and how to think beyond what we know by Sruti Bala

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Researchers face the challenge of engaging with the topic of epistemic diversity. We know that we should consider diverse knowledges in our research, but how can this be operationalised? This blog post engages with this question and shows us that it first of all means calling into question what we hold dear—the very ground on which we stand as researchers and the means by which we distinguish knowledge from non-knowledge.

I am not sure if I can claim with any certainty that I practice epistemic diversity in my research. At first glance, following from epistêmê, the Greek word for knowledge, one could assume epistemic diversity to mean a diversity of knowledge. Sounds straightforward, for who would not seek a diversity of knowledge? Yet following Michel Foucault, the brilliant innovator of method, an episteme is not literally knowledge (connaissance)—something that is out there waiting to be known—but a historical set of relations or founding assumptions that unite, formalise, and systematise what comes to be regarded as knowledge.

An episteme tends to consist of unspoken, tacit modes of sensemaking that allow us to recognise something as knowledge, i.e. scientific, and therefore distinguish it from what is not knowledge, and call this by other names, like belief, ritual, gossip, superstition, crime. Epistemic diversity, in this Foucauldian sense, implies a diversity of ways of recognising knowledge and distinguishing it from non-knowledge. This is anything but straightforward!

What if my system of knowledge formation has taught me that knowledge must have a name, a language? Then I will try to acquire knowledge by naming the things I encounter, by making them enter an episteme through nomenclature, typology, or categorisation. If it cannot be named or ordered, then it must not be knowledge, but belonging to another realm—that of dreams or fantasies, for instance. What if my system of knowledge conceives of knowledge as something to be acquired, possessed, or accumulated? Then knowledge to which no ownership is attached will not count as knowledge. It may come to be regarded as folklore or rumour. What if the episteme I have been inserted into by way of education gives great importance to empirical verifiability or to linear progression? Then something that defies the rules of empirical verifiability and does not move in a straight line from simple to complex may come to be regarded as superstition or ritual or magic, but not as knowledge.

One might argue that epistemic diversity tends to come to our notice primarily when certain forms of knowledge production are in danger. Foucault’s conception of the episteme in The Order of Things (English translation 1970) points to such moments of rupture, and theorisations following from his, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of “epistemic violence” in her essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ (1988), reveal how certain types of practices and ways of life are criminalised and destroyed, not necessarily through physical violence, but through modes of knowledge production. The extinction of a language or of an art form are instances of epistemic violence. The silencing of certain aspects of history in public memory, such as the history of colonialism and resistance to slavery, is another. To some extent it feels simpler to say that we have to strive to preserve subjugated knowledge forms, because that is a charitable task, undertaken elsewhere, as it were. It is far more difficult to know how we should practice epistemic diversity within the four walls of our own edifices of research and study. It means calling into question what we hold dear, the very ground on which we stand as researchers and the means by which we distinguish knowledge from non-knowledge.

Where Spivak emphasises the issue of epistemic violence done to subjugated knowledges, the challenge I face in my research is better described as epistemic poverty, the loss that accompanies my set of epistemic assumptions and privileges. As a researcher I realise that it is important to listen to articulations radically different from the frameworks that I may be trained in, but more than good listening is required in order for those articulations and insights to translate themselves into what we might call knowledge. Just by desiring epistemic diversity, or proclaiming it, doesn’t mean it will have been accomplished.

Placing ourselves in others’ shoes

The task of epistemic diversity could perhaps begin with persistently training ourselves to recognise how certain epistemic privileges are ingrained in our disciplinary histories, and train ourselves to challenge and revise them. It is about learning to imagine the conditions of knowledge formation differently. One must be able to first imagine that something might be valuable, even if it does not appear valuable to oneself at all. One must be able to break the habitual rejection of something because it appears distant and irrelevant at face value. The absent potential of what one does not yet know can only be recognised when its possible presence can be imagined.

There is a specifically gendered and sexual politics at play when epistemic diversity becomes a matter of accumulation and possession of difference. I regularly encounter public declarations of the idea that the intimate encounter with difference, especially with minoritised, primitivised others, is full of pleasure and has the capacity to transform and redeem the dominant self. Authoritative claims, for instance, of intimacy with a certain culture on the grounds of one’s spouse or sexual partner being from that culture, are indicative of this stance. Bell Hooks brilliantly reflects the underlying desire for pleasure and their erotic connotations in popular cultural expressions and fantasies in Black Looks (1992). Under which conditions is the longing for and affective appreciation of otherness a move of acknowledgement, when is it a form of ‘imperialist nostalgia’ or primitivism, or fantasy of possessing and claiming the other?

It is my strong belief that the quest for epistemic diversity must be accompanied and guided by what Rolando Vazquez and Rosalba Icaza, following Maria Lugones, call a ‘politics of coalition building’ (Pilgrimages/peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions, 2003). I am acutely aware that appropriation, theft, erasure, blind spots, equivocation and over-simplification are real problems in research in the humanities and social sciences. The relationships between researcher and researched or between disciplinary formations continue to remain painfully asymmetrical when it comes to the life worlds of the Global South or of those marked as minorities. Yet we cannot overcome these asymmetries without reaching out and learning from and with each other. Epistemic diversity calls upon us to engage critically with all kinds of bodies of knowledge, even and especially if we don’t (fully) agree with them.

This article forms part of a series on Epistemic Diversity. You can read the other article in this series here

About the author: 

Sruti BalaDr Sruti Bala is Associate Professor at the Theatre Studies Department of the University of Amsterdam and Research Affiliate with the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies and Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. Her research interests are at the crossroads of theatre and performance studies, cultural analysis, post- and decolonial thinking and feminist theory.

Epistemic Diversity | “I am where I think”: research and the task of epistemic diversity by Marina Cadaval and Rosalba Icaza

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Epistemic diversity in research is sorely needed in the academia. But what is epistemic diversity and why is it so important? This post—the first of a series on epistemic diversity— introduces the topic and illustrates the importance of discussions on the political economy of knowledge production taking place in our universities. 

On Monday 7 May, the ISS Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Team organised the first of four Research Seminars taking place at the ISS that will focus on epistemic diversity in research. The main objective of these seminars is to provide a different angle to ongoing discussions about the appalling state of diversity at universities. Often these have remained focused on demographic diversity and the absence of women in higher ranks of academia. [1] To redress this absence we have seen the implementation of individually-based ‘solutions’ in universities (e.g. bias trainings).

But these interventions rarely consider structural and institutional elements behind the lack of demographic diversity in positions of leadership in universities. On the other hand, these interventions remain silent about the intersectional conditions of knowledge production in universities along axes of differentiation based on race, class and gender.[2]

Unfortunately, the emphasis on demographic diversity—who is at the university—also tends to render invisible the political economy of knowledge production at universities: who generates and distributes knowledge, for which purposes, and how?[3] Bringing epistemic diversity to the discussion means opening critical conversations on the geo-politics and body-politics of knowledge at universities. This angle emerges from an understanding of knowledge as contextual and situated: “I am where I think”, as decolonial feminist thinkers insist.

But, of course, we are aware that across time and place, the different models of knowledge generation at universities have responded to a diversity of social, cultural and ecological contexts, and to diverse aspirations. For example, let’s think about the foundation of the first universities in the Americas in the 16th Century. These institutions were founded—literally—over conquered First Nations people’s lands and with the exploitation of the labour of enslaved African peoples.[4] What kinds of aspirations were driving these violent interventions and who has benefited from this?

Another example that we can think of is the 1910 creation of the journal Foreign Affairs—which has a higher impact index in the field of international relations (IR)—under the name Journal of Race Development. Despite this, IR has been considered a “colourblind” discipline due to the neglect of “race” as a critical theoretical lens and research agenda and the absence of women and people of colour in IR curricula.[5] This neglect has been widely documented[6] in current efforts to decolonise IR canons. We wonder in which ways the present context that pushes universities’ regulation and normalisation through international ranking systems produces and reproduces neglect and silencing in our disciplines?

Between epistemic poverty and the decolonisation of knowledge

 In our first D&I research seminar, we ask to our keynote speakers—Dr Olivia Rutazibwa (University of Porthsmouth, UK) and Dr Sruti Bala (University of Amsterdam, NL)—to engage with the following questions:

What does academic research in the social sciences and humanities look like when epistemic diversity is considered? 

Which kinds of questions emerge? 

Which kinds of ethical and methodological challenges are opened?

Dr Bala started her presentation by sharing what epistemic diversity has meant for her in research and teaching. She shared a powerful reflection regarding academia as characterised by epistemic violence, injustice, and epistemic poverty when a translation of embodied experiences and their exposure in academic languages occurs. Bala invited us to think about practices in knowledge production that are critically attentive to the translations we carried on and that encourages coalitional ethics.

Meanwhile, Dr Rutazibwa spoke about the absence(s) and silence(s) in academic research in international development and its articulations with eurocentrism and colonialism. She introduced a decolonial-anticolonial methodology centred on integrity, dignity, intellectual curiosity, and generosity. Their arguments will be presented in future blog entries on Bliss.

For us, one of the most interesting quotes was the statement by Olivia Rutazibwa: “Being in the academy, not of the academy’. Rutazibwa mentioned this when one ISS student asked her how to navigate universities as institutions that do not welcome black women and people of colour in general.

“I am where I think”

 Our title is not accidental, but is rather an invitation to think critically about the implications of positioning our thinking when addressing epistemic diversity in research. This means for us not to suppress the epistemic, political and body locations from where we generate knowledge, but, on the contrary, to consider this as a possibility for enriching our learning experiences. This also means to locate—historically, epistemically and politically—this discussion in the Netherlands, where the ISS is based.

So, how is Dutch society rethought throughout its transatlantic kingdom?

How do decolonial efforts in the academia, the streets, in theory, and anti-colonial consciousness contribute to this rethinking?

Why does this rethinking matter for the study and practice of International Development?

In our next D&I Seminar on June 26th, we will have the opportunity to address these questions with Dr Melissa F. Weiner, Associate Professor of Sociology at The College of the Holy Cross, and Dr Antonio Carmona , President of the University of St. Martin, at Philipsburg, Sint Maarten. They are the editors of the book “Smash the Pillars: Decoloniality and the Imaginary of Colour in the Dutch Kingdom” (Rowman and Littlefield), which will be launched at the ISS on this date.

About the book, Professor Nelson Maldonado Torres (Rutgers University) has commented the following:

“For too long the Netherlands has been considered an innocent and benevolent country, without apparently a significant colonial past or a racist present. This volume not only completely shatters this illusion, but also demonstrates the significance of multiple contemporary efforts to critically engage and decolonize Dutch society, culture, and political life.”

At the book launch Dr Carmona and Dr Weiner will be joined by two contributors to the book: Dr Patricia Schor from Amsterdam University College and an ISS alumnus, and Egbert Alejandro Martina, Queer Activist and Anti-Racist Intellectual and creator of the blog “Processed Life”.

 The event is open to the public and we warmly invite you to attend.

This article forms part of a series on Epistemic Diversity. You can read the other article in this series here
[1] Read, for example, the Bliss article ‘The university of paleness’ by Willem Schinkel, which discusses the author’s discontent following the Erasmus University’s decision not to appoint women professors despite possessing adequate funds to do so.
[2] See: Icaza, Rosalba and Rolando Vazquez “Diversity or Decolonization? Researching Diversity at the University of Amsterdam” Decolonising the University. Pluto Press, 2018 with Rolando Vazquez
[3] “Let’s do Diversity”. University of Amsterdam Diversity Commission Report. Wekker, Gloria; Marieke Slootman; Rosalba Icaza, Hans Jansen, Rolando Vazquez, UvA: Amsterdam, October 2016.
[4] http://www.harvardandslavery.com/
[5] Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line Edited by Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda and Robbie Shilliam, London and New York: Routledge, 2015.
[6] ibid

About the authors: 

MarinaMarina Cadaval is currently a PhD student at the ISS, where she also completed her Masters’ in Development Studies in the major of Social Policies for Development (2015-2017). She works on topics of inclusion of indigenous women in graduate education in Mexico, analysing the processes of formation of educational policies that have taken place in the last twenty years. Before returning to the academia, she worked for more than 10 years in the implementation of the first policy to promote graduate education for Mexican indigenous peoples.Rosalba2.jpg

Dr Rosalba Icaza is Associate Professor in Global Politics, Gender and Diversity at the ISS and Chair of the ISS Diversity and Inclusion Team. Her publications can be accessed at https://ricaza.academia.edu/research