scholarly journals Fixing Subjects, Fixing Outcomes: Civic Epistemologies and Epistemic Agency in Participatory Governance of Climate Risk

2021 ◽  
pp. 016224392110661
Author(s):  
Anna Bridel
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Participatory Governance ◽  
Atmospheric Gases ◽  
Epistemic Agency ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
The Face ◽  
Climatic Risks ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Matters Of Concern

Participatory forms of policy-making have often been criticized for insufficiently theorizing the coproduction of publics and matters of concern. This paper seeks to investigate this relationship further by analyzing how the concept of civic epistemologies (CEs) can provide insights for understanding how political contexts shape both publics and contestable debates. Presenting fieldwork on cyclone governance in Odisha, India, based on the analysis of interviews with vulnerable fishing communities and state actors, the article shows how CEs influence the interdependent formation of vulnerable fisher and state subjectivities on one hand with representations of risk located in external biophysical atmospheric gases on the other, thereby sustaining reductive roles and futures. At the same time, the paper develops the concept of CEs by examining them as performative acts carried out by marginalized communities and state actors at the subnational level of a nonindustrialized country, thereby indicating sites at which epistemic agency can be increased and governed. Participatory knowledge production needs to understand how it is affected by CEs if it is to generate effective expertise for transformative futures in the face of increasing climatic risks.

scholarly journals Naked in the Face of Contamination

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amelia Fiske
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Normal Forms ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Risk Assessments ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Chemical Exposures ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Ecuadorian Amazon ◽  
The Face ◽  
Material Process

While chemicals are often described and acted upon in technoscientific forums as isolated, discrete entities, vernacular experience points to possibilities of experiencing, speaking about, and imagining chemical exposures that have otherwise been rendered politically obsolete. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in the Ecuadorian Amazon, this article invokes accounts of daily life in order to argue that vernacular experience is necessary for understanding what it means to live in a place of environmental hazard, and for building a more inclusive politics of knowledge production in models and assessments of toxicity. Descriptions such as “naked in the face of contamination,” “swimming in oil,” “smoke thick like marmalade,” or exclamations of pain re-lived “tsaac!” refuse hegemonic assumptions about how chemicals alter and enable life. To take these descriptions of life seriously is to recognize the ways that chemical concentrations often far exceed the ‘normal’ forms and quantities modeled in risk assessments of standard oil operations. The chemically saturated present demands a reconfiguration of toxicity – as a socio-material process, epistemic concept, and embodied experience – in order to work towards political and environmental, as well as epistemological, justice.

Health

2018 ◽  
pp. 437-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Holzscheiter
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Polio Eradication ◽  
Global Health Governance ◽  
Health Governance ◽  
Policy Field ◽  
The Face ◽  
Core Areas ◽  
State Actors

This chapter will introduce health as a policy field and carve out the implications of limited statehood for health governance. It will discuss broader trends in the literature on health governance in areas of limited statehood and introduce major controversies revolving around the notions of effectiveness, legitimacy, and sustainability. The chapter starts by discussing different definitions of health governance, arguing that the differentiation between domestic and global health governance makes little sense in the face of contemporary developments. It further engages with the question of which actors are involved in health governance, their motivations, resources, and core areas of activity. The chapter goes on to discuss how limited statehood affects health governance—nationally and globally—using the case of polio eradication. The last part will introduce the reader to issues of effectiveness and legitimacy with a particular focus on contemporary debates about the legitimacy of non-state actors in global health.

Disidentification

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Elizabeth Morrissey
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Disciplinary Knowledge ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
The Social

Deriving from José Esteban Muñoz’s foundational 1999 text Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, disidentification is a theoretical heuristic and performative practice that is an essential framework for thinking through, and living in, intersecting sites of marginality and oppression. In particular, disidentification is a heuristic that provides critical scholars with a framework for theorizing the relationships between subject formation, ideology, politics, and power while also offering people from marginalized communities a way to navigate intersecting forms of oppression and enact agency. Scholars use disidentification to refer to performances that minoritarian subjects engage in to survive within inhospitable spaces, while nevertheless working to subvert them. Thus, as both a theoretical framework and a performative practice, disidentification is an antiracist tool that can be utilized to theorize and respond to normative power structures including Communication Studies’ modes of disciplinary knowledge production. Indeed, the discipline of Communication Studies is diverse, but in spite of this, what coheres this expansive body of scholarship is an investment in understanding how communication produces, scaffolds, organizes, and potentially revises our world. Disidentification, by foregrounding identities and experiences of difference, offers Communication Studies researchers a way to consider how one’s life can be understood in relation to others, within the social structures that govern daily life, and within the ideological commitments that organize our experiences.

Nightmare Knowledges: Epistemologies of Disappearance

2019 ◽  
pp. 253-272
Author(s):  
Ege Selin Islekel
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
Epistemic Agency ◽  
Political Technology

This chapter develops a conception of necropolitics as a power/knowledge assemblage by focusing on the games of truth and regimes of knowledge produced around death in the cases of mass graves and disappearance in Turkey. In particular, I am interested in the relations drawn between death, memory, and knowledge in necropolitical spaces, in spaces where life and the living are subsumed under the active production, regulation, and optimisation of death. The chapter consists of three parts: the first part analyses the relation between necropolitics and knowledge production, in order to establish necropolitics not only as a political technology, but also an epistemic one. The second section investigates the specific techniques of knowledge deployed in necropolitics, i.e., necro-epistemic methods, which target the temporal and logical coherence of memory in necropolitical spaces. The last section focuses on the practices of epistemic resistance, which work through mobilising perplexing realities in order to instigate counter-discourses. Overall, I argue that these counter-discourses, which I call ‘nightmare-knowledges,’ constitute necropolitical spaces as spaces of epistemic agency.

Political Epistemology in Gender Policy-Making: The German Democratization of Expertise

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Kulawik
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
Gender Policy ◽  
Formative Time ◽  
Knowledge Regime ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
Political Epistemology ◽  
The 1960S

Abstract This article proposes the concept of feminist political epistemology to examine the changing modalities of knowledge production in Germany. The article examines how German gender equality policies have been embedded in and shaped by the shifting modalities of knowledge production and the remaking of the science expertise–politics nexus. The two formative time periods investigated—the 1960s–1970s and 1998 to the present—account for major shifts in the gender and political knowledge regime in Germany. The findings provide insights into the contradictory dynamics involved in transformations of political and epistemic authority.

scholarly journals Terrorism as war by other means: national security and state support for terrorism

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faruk Ekmekci
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
National Security ◽  
Conventional Approach ◽  
State Support ◽  
Terrorist Organizations ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Face ◽  
State Actors

The conventional approach in the discipline of International Relations is to treat terrorist organizations as "non-state" actors of international relations. However, this approach is problematic due to the fact that most terrorist organizations are backed or exploited by some states. In this article, I take issue with the non-stateness of terrorist organizations and seek to answer the question of why so many states, at times, support terrorist organizations. I argue that in the face of rising threats to national security in an age of devastating wars, modern nation states tend to provide support to foreign terrorist organizations that work against their present and imminent enemies. I elaborate on my argument studying three cases of state support for terrorism: Iranian support for Hamas, Syrian support for the PKK, and American support for the MEK. The analyses suggest that, for many states, terror is nothing but war by other means.

scholarly journals Minority Community Resilience and Cultural Heritage Preservation: A Case Study of the Gullah Geechee Community

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 2266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ladan Ghahramani ◽  
Katelin McArdle ◽  
Sandra Fatorić
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
Community Resilience ◽  
Eastern United States ◽  
Heritage Preservation ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Minority Community ◽  
The Face ◽  
New Research

The Gullah Geechee community of the south-eastern United States endures today as a minority group with a significant cultural heritage. However, little research has been conducted to explore this community’s resilience in the face of climate change and other environmental impacts. The database Web of Science was searched and 109 publications on the Gullah Geechee community were identified. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, we analyzed the publications to identify patterns and primary research themes related to the Gullah Geechee community’s resilience. Findings revealed that Gullah Geechee‘s cultural heritage is vulnerable to climatic and societal changes, but can also be a source for enhancing community resilience and promoting more sustainable community-led heritage and tourism developments. A framework is proposed for building community resilience in the context of minority and/or marginalized communities (e.g., Gullah Geechee). This study highlights the urgent need to not only better understand and incorporate a community’s economic dimensions and losses in various decision- and policy-making processes but also their cultural and social dimensions and losses. This systematic analysis can help inform both heritage preservation and community-led tourism practices and policies related to the Gullah Geechee community, as well as help direct new research efforts focusing on minority and/or marginalized community resilience.

The increasing role of non-State actors in education policy-making. Evidence from Uruguay

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauro Moschetti ◽  
Marc Martínez Pons ◽  
Eloísa Bordoli ◽  
Pablo Martinis
Keyword(s):  
Education Policy ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
State Actors

scholarly journals “Nothing About Us Without Us”: Reading Protests against Oppressive Knowledge Production as Guidelines for Solidarity Research

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dilara Yarbrough
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Relevant Research ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Sex Worker ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Ethical Policy ◽  
Production Practice ◽  
Academic Researchers

Drawing from my analysis of sex worker and homeless protests as well as my experience doing ethnographic research with people experiencing homelessness and people in the sex trade, I put forth recommendations for ethical, policy-relevant research with groups of people who experience routine, normalized violence, and who are frequently silenced and misrepresented by academics and policy makers. This article analyzes protests against what activists identify as oppressive knowledge production by “outsiders” who are not sex workers or homeless. Protest events against research “about us without us” occurred between 2012 and 2015, and targeted academic researchers and policymakers. I draw lessons from marginalized groups’ protests against knowledge production by outsider “experts” to present three problems with traditional poverty research: pathologization, paternalism, and extractive exotification. I use my observations of protests and service provision to develop guidelines for solidarity research, a knowledge production practice that prioritizes the needs and perspectives of marginalized communities.

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