scholarly journals Rebalancing the Historical Narrative or Perpetuating Bias? Digitizing the Archives of the Mineworkers’ Union of Zambia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Duncan Money
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Significant Deterioration ◽  
The World ◽  
External Powers

Abstract This article examines the project to digitize and preserve the archives of the Mineworkers’ Union of Zambia and has two aims. The first aim is to discuss the process of cataloguing and digitizing an archive that has undergone significant deterioration, and the theoretical and practical challenges to achieving this. The second aim is to relate making this archive more accessible to questions of knowledge production. Despite its limitations, the value of this archive is that it is primarily composed of documents produced by Africans about the world as they saw it. These are not the records of external powers, colonial officials, or those studying African peoples.

Looking backward to the future: Counter-memory as oppositional knowledge-production in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

2016 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yifat Gutman
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Temporal Shift ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Justice ◽  
New Information ◽  
The Future ◽  
Peace Activism ◽  
Activist Groups

This article examines a strategy of peace activism that gained visibility in the last decades: memory activism. Memory activists manifest a temporal shift in transnational politics: first the past, then the future. Affiliated with the globally-circulating paradigm of historical justice, memory activist groups assume that a new understanding of the past could lead to a new perception of present problems and project alternative solutions for the future. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis among memory activists of the 1948 war in Israel since 2001, the article examines the activist production of counter-memory during active conflict. Using Coy et al.’s typology of oppositional knowledge-production, the article shows how the largest group of memory activism in Israel produced ‘new’ information on the war, critically assessed the dominant historical narrative, offered an alternative shared narrative, and began to envision practical solutions for Palestinian refugees. However, the analysis raises additional concerns that reach beyond the scope of the typology, primarily regarding the unequal power relations that exist not only between the dominant and activist production of oppositional knowledge, but also among activists.

scholarly journals A Venezuelan Position on the Bolivarian Revolution

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-13
Author(s):  
Douglas Amundaray
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Bolivarian Revolution ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact

My interest in politics started during my high school years. At 13 I got hooked on the Venezuelan political scenario with the same intensity as most adults. It is not usual for a teenager to be interested in politics, but the impact of the 1998 Venezuelan presidential election was so significant, the coverage by media so widespread, that it was practically inevitable that I would become enthralled in the outcome. “How does who you are and where you stand in relation to others shape what you know about the world?” By raising this question, David Takacs (2002) introduces the importance of positionality to knowledge production. Positionality provides a way to understand how objective or subjective researchers are during knowledge production (Lave & Wenger, 1991). I can firmly say that the representations portrayed in Venezuela’s mainstream media built up my character, and shaped the analytical approach that I follow today as a scholar.

scholarly journals The Environment Is Not A System

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-165
Author(s):  
Tega Brain
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Mass Extinction ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Rapid Climate Change ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of Ecology ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Control ◽  
Systems View ◽  
Manipulation And Control

This paper considers some of the limitations and possibilities of computational models in the context of environmental inquiry, specifically exploring the modes of knowledge production that it mobilizes. Historic computational attempts to model, simulate and make predictions about environmental assemblages, both emerge from and reinforce a systems view on the world. The word eco-system itself stands as a reminder that the history of ecology is enmeshed with systems theory and presup-poses that species entanglements are operational or functional. More surreptitiously, a systematic view of the environment connotes it as bounded, knowable and made up of components operating in chains of cause and effect. This framing strongly invokes possibilities of manipulation and control and implicitly asks: what should an ecosystem be optimized for? This question is particularly relevant at a time of rapid climate change, mass extinction and, conveniently, an unprecedented surplus of computing.

Cartographical Quandaries: the Limits of Knowledge Production in Burton's and Speke's Search for the Source of the Nile

2008 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 455-479 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian S. Wisnicki
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Lake Tanganyika ◽  
Lake Victoria ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
East African ◽  
Blue Nile ◽  
Historical Series ◽  
The World ◽  
Limits Of Knowledge ◽  
White Nile

When he sighted the southern end of Lake Victoria on 3 August 1858, John Hanning Speke (1859b:397) realized that he had discovered the “source” of the White Nile, the most important tributary of the Nile proper, and so had “almost, if not entirely, solved a problem which it has been the first geographical desideratum of many thousand years to ascertain, and the ambition of the first monarchs of the world to unravel.” That Speke was an unknown explorer and that he had made his discovery on a solo “flying trip” during the East African Expedition of 1856-59, which, under the command of the renowned explorer Richard Francis Burton, had already also discovered Lake Tanganyika, made Speke's accomplishment all the more remarkable.As contemporaries soon asserted, Speke's discovery culminated a historical series of excursions, real and imagined, into the interior of Africa and placed Speke at the pinnacle of a line of explorers and geographers that ran from Herodotus, Julius Caesar, and Ptolemy to, in more recent times, James Bruce (the Scotsman who “discovered” the source of the Blue Nile, the second most important tributary of the Nile, in 1770), the German missionaries Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann (who “discovered,” respectively, the snow-capped mountains of Kilimanjaro in 1848 and Kenya in 1849), and noted “armchair geographers” like W.D. Cooley, Charles Beke, and James M'Queen.

scholarly journals Zentrifugen des Wissens – Zur Enzyklopädik des Barockromans

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas B. Kilcher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Centrifugal Dispersion

AbstractEarly modern literature has high epistemological claims. In particular, the novel as the most innovative genre of the 16th and 17th centuries was expected to negotiate and transmit knowledge about the world in an extensive way. This epistemological optimism must be understood against the background of contemporary encyclopaedic models, which offered new possibilities of reaching out for universal and total knowledge. Two variants of encyclopaedic writing are most efficient for the novel: the logic of Lullism and the miscellaneous knowledge production of Polyhistorism. Both techniques were used in baroque novels of the 17th century: Polyhistorism produced a centrifugal dispersion of knowledge throughout the texts, whereas Lullism aimed at recollecting and ordering it. This interplay is evidently present in Daniel Casper von Lohenstein’s highly digressive 3,000 page novel „Arminius“ (1689/90), with its paratextual framework of prefaces, annotations, and indices. Moreover, the reception of „Arminius“ in 18th and 19th centuries is pertinent for the subsequent critique of encyclopaedic knowledge.

Cities and Countryside: An International Law Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-165
Author(s):  
Francesco Francioni
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
International Law ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Balanced Approach ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Economic Interaction

Cities, as spaces of socio-cultural organization and economic interaction among people, have always played a dominant role in the development and implementation of international law. Today, a new strand of legal scholarship focuses on cities and local communities as competitors and partners with the nation State in a new project of modernization and democratization of international law. This paper looks at this new trend against the background of the historical narrative of cities in the development of international law. At the same time, it calls attention to the fact that half of humanity still lives and works in rural areas, in the vast countryside of the world. Rural communities have been the servants of the city since the beginning of time. Today, their dignity and rights are beginning to be recognized by acts of the United Nations such as the 2007 Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the 2018 Declaration on the Rights of Peasants. Yet, these people remain a disadvantaged and vulnerable class. A true modernization and democratization of international law requires that we keep a balanced approach to the legal recognition of the voices and rights of urban communities and those of the people who work and live in the countryside of the world.

Coin Circulation in the Balkans in Late Antiquity

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. GUEST
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Careful Analysis ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Notable Feature ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Two Phases ◽  
Archaeological Excavations ◽  
Early Byzantine

The archaeological excavations carried out on late Roman and early Byzantine sites in the Balkans has revolutionized our knowledge of this part of the world in Late Antiquity. How these sites are dated is obviously important as, without accurate and reliable dating, it is difficult to understand how they fit into the wider historical narrative. This chapter takes the coins excavated at Dichin as its starting point and, by careful analysis, proposes a general dating scheme for the two phases of occupation at the settlement. The lack of coins struck during the years 474–518 is a notable feature of the assemblage from Dichin, a pattern that is repeated at most sites in the region where coins of the emperor Zeno are particularly rare. By looking at both site finds and hoards from the region, however, these explanations need to be revised as they are based on a numismatic mirage rather than archaeological fact.

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