Against coloniality: Toward an epistemically insurgent curriculum

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raúl Olmo Fregoso Bailón ◽  
Noah De Lissovoy
Keyword(s):  
Western Culture ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
Pablo Neruda ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Epistemological Challenge ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
Border Thinking ◽  
Eduardo Galeano ◽  
Literature Curricula

This study interrogates the colonial and Western epistemology underlying mainstream curricula and proposes a decolonial approach that can build an epistemically insurgent curriculum that takes into account non-Western epistemologies. We begin with an analysis of coloniality in Western culture and knowledge systems, including in education. Then, building on the epistemological challenge proposed within decolonial literary works by Pablo Neruda, Eduardo Galeano, and Josías López Gómez, we describe how history and literature curricula can foreground non-dominant saberes (ways of knowing) that call into question the monopoly on understanding claimed by Western modes of reason, and how they can participate in the ethical and analectical project of attending to the being and agency of those who have been marginalized. This approach can help teachers and students to participate in building a sophisticated global border thinking and can provide them with new conceptual tools to make sense of their own realities.

Cultural Diversity and Critical Dietetics: A Scholarship of Cross-Cultural Engagement

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-31
Author(s):  
Craig Alan Hassel
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Health Issues ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
Cultural Perspectives ◽  
Culturally Different ◽  
Classical Chinese Medicine

As every human society has developed its own ways of knowing nature in order to survive, dietitians can benefit from an emerging scholarship of “cross-cultural engagement” (CCE).  CCE asks dietitians to move beyond the orthodoxy of their academic training by temporarily experiencing culturally diverse knowledge systems, inhabiting different background assumptions and presuppositions of how the world works.  Although this practice may seem de- stabilizing, it allows for significant outcomes not afforded by conventional dietetics scholarship.  First, culturally different knowledge systems including those of Africa, Ayurveda, classical Chinese medicine and indigenous societies become more empathetically understood, minimizing the distortions created when forcing conformity with biomedical paradigms.  This lessens potential for erroneous interpretations.  Second, implicit background assumptions of the dietetics profession become more apparent, enabling a more critical appraisal of its underlying epistemology.  Third, new forms of post-colonial intercultural inquiry can begin to develop over time as dietetics professionals develop capacities to reframe food and health issues from different cultural perspectives.  CCE scholarship offers dietetics professionals a means to more fully appreciate knowledge assets that lie beyond professionally maintained parameters of truth, and a practice for challenging and moving boundaries of credibility.

Track 2.a Introduction

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sucharita BENIWAL ◽  
Sahil MATHUR ◽  
Lesley-Ann NOEL ◽  
Cilla PEMBERTON ◽  
Suchitra BALASUBRAHMANYAN ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Native Communities ◽  
Cultural Systems ◽  
Local Practices

The aim of this track was to question the divide between the nature of knowledge understood as experiential in indigenous contexts and science as an objective transferable knowledge. However, these can co-exist and inform design practices within transforming social contexts. The track aimed to challenge the hegemony of dominant knowledge systems, and demonstrate co-existence. The track also hoped to make a case for other systems of knowledges and ways of knowing through examples from native communities. The track was particularly interested in, first, how innovators use indigenous and cultural systems and frameworks to manage or promote innovation and second, the role of local knowledge and culture in transforming innovation as well as the form of local practices inspired innovation. The contributions also aspired to challenge through examples, case studies, theoretical frameworks and methodologies the hegemony of dominant knowledge systems, the divides of ‘academic’ vs ‘non-academic’ and ‘traditional’ vs ‘non-traditional’.

scholarly journals Grand Challenges, Feminist Answers

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 263178772110203
Author(s):  
Yvonne Benschop
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Situated Knowledge ◽  
Feminist Ethics ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Grand Challenges ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Feminist Organization

Feminist organization theories develop knowledge about how organizations and processes of organizing shape and are shaped by gender, in intersection with race, class and other forms of social inequality. The politics of knowledge within management and organization studies tend to marginalize and silence feminist theorizing on organizations, and so the field misses out on the interdisciplinary, sophisticated conceptualizations and reflexive modes of situated knowledge production provided by feminist work. To highlight the contributions of feminist organization theories, I discuss the feminist answers to three of the grand challenges that contemporary organizations face: inequality, technology and climate change. These answers entail a systematic critique of dominant capitalist and patriarchal forms of organizing that perpetuate complex intersectional inequalities. Importantly, feminist theorizing goes beyond mere critique, offering alternative value systems and unorthodox approaches to organizational change, and providing the radically different ways of knowing that are necessary to tackle the grand challenges. The paper develops an aspirational ideal by sketching the contours of how we can organize for intersectional equality, develop emancipatory technologies and enact a feminist ethics of care for the human and the natural world.

Exploring the place of spirituality in Canadian health promotion

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karina Gerhardt-Strachan
Keyword(s):  
Health Promotion ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Sampling Frame ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Canadian Health ◽  
Commission Report ◽  
Social Environmental

Abstract The field of health promotion advocates a socioecological approach to health that addresses a variety of physical, social, environmental, political and cultural factors. Encouraging a holistic approach, health promotion examines many aspects of health and wellbeing, including physical, mental, sexual, community, social and ecological health. Despite this holism, there is a noticeable absence of discussion surrounding spirituality and spiritual health. This research study explored how leading scholars in Canadian health promotion understand the place of spirituality in health promotion. Using the fourth edition of Health Promotion in Canada (Rootman et al., 2017) as the sampling frame of recognized leaders in the field, 13 semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with authors from the book. This study is situated within a critical health promotion approach that utilizes methodologies aiming for social justice, equity and ecological sustainability. I argue that by avoiding spirituality within health promotion frameworks and education, the secularism of health promotion and its underlying values of Eurocentric knowledge production and science remain invisible and rarely critiqued. This study intends to open up possibilities for centering spiritual and non-Western epistemologies and ways of knowing that have been marginalized, such as Indigenous understandings of health and wellbeing. Restoring right relations with Indigenous peoples in Canada has taken on new urgency with the calls to action of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission report (NCTR, 2015). This is one important way that health promotion can fulfill its promise of being inclusive, relevant and effective for human and planetary wellbeing.

A personal perspective on pedagogical structures and strategies that uphold Indigenous ways of knowing

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-140
Author(s):  
Justine Nabaggala
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
Personal Perspective ◽  
Effect Change ◽  
Art Educator ◽  
Indigenous Knowledge Systems ◽  
Indigenous Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Learning Development

This article gives a brief background of where I come from and how my experiences in Africa and North America have framed the ‘philosophy of teaching’ that defines me as a visual art educator. I reflect on the postcolonial concept of ‘decolonization’ as a means to identifying possible pedagogical alternatives of practice. Acknowledging that my knowledge embraces both ‘western’ and ‘Indigenous’ ways of knowing, poses a question for me as an art educator about ways to design and implement pedagogies that embrace contextualized experiences in order to achieve meaningful learning within formal education. I conclude by stating that nothing will effect change within Uganda’s education sector, particularly in reference to visual art education and practice, without educators having a firmer grasp of their scholarly standpoint on knowledge and learning. Development of concrete ways of bringing together diverse ontological, epistemological and axiological positions of western and Indigenous knowledge systems as well as art pedagogies to facilitate learning, will require educators to develop structures and strategies that progress from the bottom up in order to benefit from the values, beliefs and ways of knowing within diverse local communities.

Toward ‘Our Ways of Knowing’ in the Age of Standardization

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 327-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lourdes Diaz Soto ◽  
Simone Tuinhof De Moed
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Educational Policies ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
Educational Transformation ◽  
Knowing That

Current neoliberal educational policies are impacting young children and their teachers in the United States in many ways. Young children and teachers find themselves in vulnerable positions within a framework of an imperialist education in the age of standardization. Part of the struggle is to open spaces of decolonization that include home languages and cultures. This article calls for an educational transformation toward ‘our ways of knowing’ that includes liberation and emancipation.

scholarly journals Decolonizing the Intercultural: A Call for Decolonizing Consciousness in Settler-Colonial Australia

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 469
Author(s):  
Abraham Bradfield
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
Intercultural Dialogue ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
Indigenous Knowledge Systems ◽  
Border Thinking ◽  
Deep Listening

Throughout this article I make a case for decolonizing consciousness as a reflexive orientation that reforms the ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous life-worlds are navigated and mutually apprehended in a settler colonial context. I consider how through decolonizing dominant habits of thought and action an intercultural dialogue responsive of diverse and mutually informing realities may be cultivated. This article aims to first introduce the key characteristics of ‘decolonizing consciousness’, this being reflexivity, deep listening, and border thinking. Using the Darling River in New South Wales, Australia, as a backdrop, I consider how place and environment are agents and facilitators of a contested intercultural dialogue where Indigenous and non-Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies often come to head. Drawing on fieldwork conducted with Aboriginal residents in far western New South Wales, as well as literature on decolonizing theory and Indigenous knowledge systems from different socio-cultural contexts, I argue that intercultural dialogue begins with reflexive contemplation of how one’s lived experiences is embedded in the realities of others.

Information, Beliefs, and Ways of Knowing in the Post-Truth Era

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tami Oliphant
Keyword(s):  
Belief System ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
System Change ◽  
Preventable Death ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Conceptual Paper

In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries claimed “post-truth” as word of the year. Post-truth is the supremacy of belief, emotion, and worldviews over information and facts. While post-truth is nothing new, it invites reconsideration of information, disinformation, misinformation, and knowledge from an understudied perspective: the internal conditions and different ways of knowing that shape and influence information interactions. This conceptual paper explores the relationships among beliefs, emotion, and faith, internal conditions, information, and different ways of knowing by drawing upon two recent events: the preventable death of a toddler and the fundamental belief system change of a white supremacist.

Researching Indigenous Ways of Knowing-and-Being

2017 ◽  
pp. 22-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norma Ruth Arlene Romm
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Indigenous Knowledge ◽  
Ecological Niche ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
Relational Thinking ◽  
Indigenous Knowledge Systems ◽  
Socio Economic Development ◽  
Indigenous Ways Of Knowing

This chapter focuses on exploring the contributions of indigenous-oriented relational thinking-and-being in terms of implications for the quality of social living and for sustaining relationships with everything in our ecological niche. It offers an account of how we can treat Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) as envisaging socio-economic development differently from economic models of growth which thus far can be said to govern processes of globalization. The chapter attempts to demonstrate that resuscitating IKS is not so much a matter of researchers' documenting and respecting the content of indigenous knowledge that has been created to date. More important is to direct research with the aim of drawing out and revitalizing the styles of knowing and living that can be interpreted as characterizing indigeneity. Examples are provided of how research can be directed with this in mind.

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