scholarly journals Foucault, Borges, Heterotopia: Producing Knowledge in Other Spaces

2010 ◽  
pp. 54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Topinka

Arguably the most famous heterotopia that appears in Foucault’s work is the Chinese encyclopedia, which originates in the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges. Drawing on this citation of Borges, this article examines Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia as it relates to order and knowledge production. Frequently, heterotopias are understood as sites of resistance. This article argues that shifting the focus from resistance to order and knowledge production reveals how heterotopias make the spatiality of order legible. By juxtaposing and combining many spaces in one site, heterotopias problematize received knowledge by destabilizing the ground on which knowledge is built. Yet heterotopias always remain connected to the dominant order; thus as heterotopias clash with dominant orders, they simultaneously produce new ways of knowing. This article first explores the tensions between Foucault’s two definitions of heterotopias before connecting these definitions to Foucault’s distinctly spatial understanding of knowledge as emerging from a clash of forces. Finally, the paper ends by returning to the relationship between Foucault, Borges, and heterotopias.

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Smith

Based on ethnographic research at five Czech universities from 2011 to 2013, this article explores how academics make sense of and claims to three qualitatively distinct temporal regimes in which their activities as knowledge producers are inscribed: disciplinary time, career time and project time. This conceptual framework, a modification of Shinn’s distinction between disciplinary, transitory and transversal knowledge-production regimes, seeks to replace images of competition and succession between regimes with images of their recombination and intersection. It enables an interpretation of the empirical findings beyond the indigenous complaint that excessive speed is compromising the quality of knowledge production. The relationship between projects, careers and disciplines emerges from the study as problematic rather than synergistic. In this respect the paper does not contradict the claim by critical theorists that we are witnessing the disintegration of what used to be a functional relationship between the multiple temporalities of academic knowledge production based on standardized career scripts, nor the related claim that this may reflect a deeper crisis of modernity as a predictive regime for the production of futures. It proposes, however, that transversal projects can still be mediators of ‘disciplinary respiration’ insofar as their timeframes are available for variable calibration commensurate with the increasingly heteronomous ways of knowing and knowledge routines that academic researchers practise.


2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-96
Author(s):  
Isabel Dulfano

In this article, I explore the relationship between anti-globalization counter hegemonic discourse and Indigenous feminist alternative knowledge production. Although seemingly unrelated, the autoethnographic writing of some Indigenous feminists from Latin America questions the assumptions and presuppositions of Western development models and globalization, while asserting an identity as contemporary Indigenous activist women. Drawing on the central ideas developed in the book Indigenous Feminist Narratives: I/We: Wo(men) of An(Other) Way, I reflect on parallels and counterpoints between the voices from the global street movement, “other” epistemologies (identified hereafter), postcolonial theory, and contemporary Indigenous feminist theorization.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 263178772110203
Author(s):  
Yvonne Benschop

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Knowles ◽  
Dawn Allen ◽  
Ailsa Donnelly ◽  
Jackie Flynn ◽  
Kay Gallacher ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Knowledge mobilisation requires the effective elicitation and blending of different types of knowledge or ways of knowing, to produce hybrid knowledge outputs that are valuable to both knowledge producers (researchers) and knowledge users (health care stakeholders). Patients and service users are a neglected user group, and there is a need for transparent reporting and critical review of methods used to co-produce knowledge with patients. This study aimed to explore the potential of participatory codesign methods as a mechanism of supporting knowledge sharing, and to evaluate this from the perspective of both researchers and patients. Methods A knowledge mobilisation research project using participatory codesign workshops to explore patient involvement in using health data to improve services. To evaluate involvement in the project, multiple qualitative data sources were collected throughout, including a survey informed by the Generic Learning Outcomes framework, an evaluation focus group, and field notes. Analysis was a collective dialogic reflection on project processes and impacts, including comparing and contrasting the key issues from the researcher and contributor perspectives. Results Authentic involvement was seen as the result of “space to talk” and “space to change”. "Space to talk" refers to creating space for shared dialogue, including space for tension and disagreement, and recognising contributor and researcher expertise as equally valuable to the discussion. ‘Space to change’ refers to space to adapt in response to contributor feedback. These were partly facilitated by the use of codesign methods which emphasise visual and iterative working, but contributors emphasised that relational openness was more crucial, and that this needed to apply to the study overall (specifically, how contributors were reimbursed as a demonstration of how their input was valued) to build trust, not just to processes within the workshops. Conclusions Specific methods used within involvement are only one component of effective involvement practice. The relationship between researcher and contributors, and particularly researcher willingness to change their approach in response to feedback, were considered most important by contributors. Productive tension was emphasised as a key mechanism in leading to genuinely hybrid outputs that combined contributor insight and experience with academic knowledge and understanding.


Itinerario ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 263-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Laura Stoler

This essay takes as its subject how intimate domains - sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement and child rearing - figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. For some two decades my work on Indonesia's Dutch colonial history has addressed patterns of governance that were particular to that time and place but resonant with practices in a wider global field. My perspective thus is that of an outsider to, but an acquisitive consumer of comparative historical studies, one long struck with the disparate and congruent imperial projects in Asia, Africa and the Americas. This essay invites reflection on those domains of overlap and difference. My interest is more specifically in what Albert Hurtado refers to as ‘the intimate frontiers’ of empire, a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between coloniser and colonised could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule. Some two decades ago, Sylvia van Kirk urged a focus on such ‘tender ties’ as a way to explore the ‘human dimension’ of the colonial encounter.’ As she showed so well, what Michel Foucault has called these ‘dense transfer point[s]’ of power that generate such ties were sites of production of colonial inequities and, therefore, of tense ties as well. Among students of colonialisms in the last decade, the intimacies of empire have been a rich and well-articulated research domain. A more sustained focus on the relationship between what Foucault refers to as ‘the regimes of truth’ of imperial systems (the ways of knowing and establishing truth claims about race and difference on which macro polities rely) and those micro sites of governance may reveal how these colonial empires compare and converge.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph P. Gone

Within the domain of academic inquiry by Indigenous scholars, it is increasingly common to encounter enthusiasm surrounding Indigenous Research Methodologies (IRMs). IRMs are designated approaches and procedures for conducting research that are said to reflect long-subjugated Indigenous epistemologies (or ways of knowing). A common claim within this nascent movement is that IRMs express logics that are unique and distinctive from academic knowledge production in “Western” university settings, and that IRMs can result in innovative contributions to knowledge if and when they are appreciated in their own right and on their own terms. The purpose of this article is to stimulate exchange and dialogue about the present and future prospects of IRMs relative to university-based academic knowledge production. To that end, I enter a critical voice to an ongoing conversation about these matters that is still taking shape within Indigenous studies circles.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Sissons

Van Meijl is right to insist that epistemology must be about active, socially contested ‘ways of knowing’ and that understanding the relationship between such ways and their products is as much an ethnographic problem as it is a philosophical one. Ways of knowing, as social practices, are also, more generally, ways of being or becoming and so are not, in my view, radically distinct from the ontologies they produce and reproduce. Phillipe Descola argues strongly that his four ‘ontologies’ are also schemas of practice, fundamental ways that people know, experience and inhabit the world. I think Van Meijl is mistaken, therefore, when he characterises the ontological turn in anthropology as being about different relations between mind and matter. For me, it is most significantly about the different ways that personhood or subjectivity can be understood and embodied.<br>


Author(s):  
Michael B. Lax

The occupational safety and health movement has been transformed from a struggle emphasizing workplace democracy to a de-politicized technical debate. Professionals involved in occupational safety and health (OSH) are continuously urged to keep “politics” out of their work. However, “politics,” defined as the participation in knowledge production and decision-making that profoundly affects working life, is inherent to the work of OSH professionals. These professionals function within specified roles largely created and shaped to meet the needs of the corporate class. In this context, there is a need for professionals who are explicitly allied to workers struggling for health and safety. However, there are powerful constraints to the development of this alliance, including professionals’ need for jobs, job security, and credibility. Additionally, many professionals seeking an alliance with workers remain under the sway of hegemonic myths that limit their ability to function as worker allies. These myths include non-recognition of class power and its effects on workplace health, a view of OSH as purely a technical issue, and a failure to recognize how OSH knowledge is shaped by its political/economic context. Ideas for developing an alternative praxis are offered.


2018 ◽  
pp. 259-271
Author(s):  
Philipp Erchinger

The book concludes with a reading of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. For this work can be characterised, the chapter suggests, as a performance of, and meditation on, what the foregoing sections were meant to examine: namely the bridge-building activities or ways of knowing through which personal experiences of the material world come to be dressed in recognisable social or ideal forms. The chapter ends with an attempt to situate the practice-based approach developed in Artful Experiments within a wider theoretical debate about the relationship between literary work and scientific knowledge.


2014 ◽  
pp. 737-757
Author(s):  
Diversity Divas

This chapter describes a Collaborative Inquiry (CI) process as experienced by six diverse female participants in a doctoral program. The focus of the inquiry was to deepen individual and group cross-cultural understanding, and to show how holistic learning can be promoted through integrating multiple ways of knowing and spirituality within a multicultural context. The purpose of this chapter is to provide the readers with sufficient information to apply CI in their practice and build on the research presented here. To meet this goal, the authors describe how CI has the potential to foster transformational learning and discuss the relationship between transformational learning, informational learning, global competencies, developmental capacity, and the paradoxical nature of diversity work. Lastly, the chapter ends with recommendations for creating a CI process that supports deep learning and change, and potential topics for future research.


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