scholarly journals Care, Concern, and Advocacy: Is There a Place for Epistemic Responsibility?

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorraine Code

Departing from an epistemological tradition for which knowledge properly achieved must be objective, especially in eschewing affect and/or special interests; and against a backdrop of my thinking about epistemic responsibility, I focus on two situations where care informs and enables good knowing. The implicit purpose of this reclamation of care as epistemically vital is to show emphatically that standard alignments of care with femininity—the female—are simply misguided. Proposing that the efficacy of epistemic practices is often enhanced when would-be knowers care about the outcomes of investigation, I suggest that epistemic responsibility need not be compromised when caring motivates and animates research. Indeed, the background inspiration comes from the thought, integral to feminist and post-colonial theory and practice that, despite often-justified condemnations of research that serves "special interests," particularities do matter, epistemically. Such thoughts, variously articulated, are integral to enacting a shift in epistemology away from formal abstraction and toward engaging with the specificities of real-world, situated knowledge projects. They are not unequivocally benign, for villains too care about the outcomes of their projects. Hence multi-faceted engagements with epistemic practices and processes are urgently required across the social-political world.

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 355-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Windle

ABSTRACT A key challenge for applied linguistics is how to deal with the historical power imbalance in knowledge production between the global north and south. A central objective of critical applied linguistics has been to provide new epistemological foundations that address this problem, through the lenses of post-colonial theory, for example. This article shows how the structure of academic writing, even within critical traditions, can reinforce unequal transnational relations of knowledge. Analysis of Brazilian theses and publications that draw on the multiliteracies framework identifies a series of discursive moves that constitute “hidden features” (STREET, 2009), positioning “northern” theory as universal and “southern” empirical applications as locally bounded. The article offers a set of questions for critical reflection during the writing process, contributing to the literature on academic literacies.


Author(s):  
Dervla Shannahan

The task of imagining a world where everyone is queer has been taken up by Jeanette Winterson in The Stone Gods. Aside from the texts' value as an absorbing, eloquent piece of contemporary fiction, The Stone Gods can be read in engagement with many current debates; indeed it seemingly draws much of its content from queer and literary theories. The recent anti-social turn in queer theory has recast the meaning of queerness; works such as Edelman's No Future have raised questions about the social role(s) of queerness, of queering as strategy, and of queer futurities. The thorough work of theorists drawing on post-colonial theory has further underlined how homonormativities can overlap and be strengthened by affirming existing lines of inequality, functioning as ''contingent upon the segregation and disqualification of racial and sexual others from the national imaginary'' (Puar 2). This article discusses Jeanette Winterson's contribution to this debate. It argues that The Stone Gods answers the call to imagine a world where everyone is queer (along particular, delineated lines) and thrusts us forwards into a social futurity where there really is no future. Whilst the text responds to multiple other themes and concerns - most notably the ecological disasters lingering in current global destructive practices, the rise of surveillance culture and corporate sponsored biopolitical agendas - the textual toying with sexual identities and ethics are the main foci of this paper. As this issue of InterAlia is devoted to exploring the anti-social thesis or turn within queer studies, I suggest that Winterson's text ultimately answers many of the questions that it poses.


2021 ◽  
pp. 37-66
Author(s):  
Quill R. Kukla

A great deal of contemporary epistemology is driven by a kind of moral panic over the worry that there are no “pure” epistemic practices, perspectives, or standards detachable from the social situation of knowers. Kukla argues that we cannot do epistemology without fundamental, central attention to social identities, power relations, and the social institutions and structures within which epistemic practices happen. But this result is of no threat to our usable notions of objectivity, justification, and the like. The quest for purity is unnecessary. We should recognize it as a product of ideology and become comfortable with situatedness as an everyday phenomenon. Kukla ends by arguing that a proper naturalized, non-ideal epistemology—one more continuous with the empirical sciences—will treat situatedness not as something spooky or epistemologically threatening, but just as an empirical fact about our epistemic practices.


1988 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-139
Author(s):  
Linda Delgado

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-31
Author(s):  
N. N. Khomutova ◽  
K. A. Vizner ◽  
S. A. Makhortova ◽  
S. N. Chudievich

The problem of the discrimination of people with disabilities remains being an urgent social problem. Misunderstanding of the meaning of this problem by others results in a situation when invalid’s level of life cannot be equal to a healthy person’s level of life. This article raises the issue of ableism in order to explore the idea of barrier-free environment integration. The results of a social survey are demonstrating a good level of respondent’s awareness concerning this problem and their will to participate in a discussion and taking of measures for the integration of a barrier-free environment with the intention to raise the invalid’s level of life.


Author(s):  
Nisha P R

Jumbos and Jumping Devils is an original and pioneering exploration of not only the social history of the subcontinent but also of performance and popular culture. The domain of analysis is entirely novel and opens up a bolder approach of laying a new field of historical enquiry of South Asia. Trawling through an extraordinary set of sources such as colonial and post-colonial records, newspaper reports, unpublished autobiographies, private papers, photographs, and oral interviews, the author brings out a fascinating account of the transnational landscape of physical cultures, human and animal performers, and the circus industry. This book should be of interest to a wide range of readers from history, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies to analysts of history of performance and sports in the subcontinent.


1957 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 326-327
Author(s):  
Lloyd Allen Cook

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-594
Author(s):  
Simon Deakin ◽  
Gaofeng Meng

Abstract We consider the implications of the Covid-19 crisis for the theory and practice of governance. We define ‘governance’ as the process through which, in the case of a given entity or polity, resources are allocated, decisions made and policies implemented, with a view to ensuring the effectiveness of its operations in the face of risks in its environment. Core to this, we argue, is the organisation of knowledge through public institutions, including the legal system. Covid-19 poses a particular type of ‘Anthropogenic’ risk, which arises when organised human activity triggers feedback effects from the natural environment. As such it requires the concerted mobilisation of knowledge and a directed response from governments and international agencies. In this context, neoliberal theories and practices, which emphasise the self-adjusting properties of systems of governance in response to external shocks, are going to be put to the test. In states’ varied responses to Covid-19 to date, it is already possible to observe some trends. One of them is the widespread mischaracterisation of the measures taken to address the epidemic at the point of its emergence in the Chinese city of Wuhan in January and February 2020. Public health measures of this kind, rather than constituting a ‘state of exception’ in which legality is set aside, are informed by practices which originated in the welfare or social states of industrialised countries, and which were successful in achieving a ‘mortality revolution’ in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Relearning this history would seem to be essential for the future control of pandemics and other Anthropogenic risks.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Hannes Peltonen ◽  
Knut Traisbach

Abstract This foreword frames the Symposium in two ways. It summarises the core themes running through the nine ‘meditations’ in The Status of Law in World Society. Moreover, it places these themes in the wider context of Kratochwil's critical engagement with how we pursue knowledge of and in the social world and translate this knowledge into action. Ultimately, also his pragmatic approach cannot escape the tensions between theory and practice. Instead, we are in the midst of both.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
MIMI HADDON

Abstract This article uses Joan Baez's impersonations of Bob Dylan from the mid-1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century as performances where multiple fields of complementary discourse converge. The article is organized in three parts. The first part addresses the musical details of Baez's acts of mimicry and their uncanny ability to summon Dylan's predecessors. The second considers mimicry in the context of identity, specifically race and asymmetrical power relations in the history of American popular music. The third and final section analyses her imitations in the context of gender and reproductive labour, focusing on the way various media have shaped her persona and her relationship to Dylan. The article engages critical theoretical work informed by psychoanalysis, post-colonial theory, and Marxist feminism.


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