Credibility contests: The contributions of experiential knowledge to radicalisation expertise

Radicalisation has become a highly influential idea in British policy making. It underpins and justifies Prevent, a core part of the UK's counter-terrorism strategy. Experts have theorised the radicalisation process, often beset by a weak evidence base and mired in fundamental contestation on definitions and explanatory factors. Experiential experts have been active contributors to these debates, presenting a challenge to the low-ranking role often given to experiential knowledge in evidence hierarchies and a contrast to policy areas in which it remains poorly valued. This paper draws on interviews with radicalisation experts to examine the dynamics of this pluralisation in practice. With a focus on credibility contests, it explains how experiential experts can claim authoritative knowledge and the challenges they face from those who prioritise theory-driven empirical data as the basis for contributions to knowledge. The paper draws out the implications for understandings of expertise of this newly conceptualised, evidence poor and highly applied topic area.

‘The System is Not Set up for the Benefit of Women’: Women’s Experiences of Decision-Making During Pregnancy and Birth in Ireland

In this article, I draw on in-depth qualitative interviews with 23 women, conducted in 2019/2020, focusing on their involvement in decision-making during pregnancy and birth. The study is located in Ireland, where comparably progressive national policies regarding informed choice in labour and birth clash with the day-to-day reality of a heavily medicalised, paternalistic maternity care system. I represent the subjective experiences of a diverse group of women through in-depth interview excerpts. In my analysis, I move beyond describing what is happening in the Irish maternity system to discussing why this is happening – relating the findings of the research to the international literature on authoritative knowledge, technocratic hospital cultures and risk-based discourses around birth. In the last section of the article, I offer concrete, empirically grounded and innovative recommendations how to enhance women’s involvement in decision-making.

Gateway Moments to Literate Identities

Drawing from theories of identity, language, and race, we conceptualize gateway moments to literate identities in high school English language arts classrooms enrolling language-minoritized youth. Gateways were interactions that afforded particular kinds of literate identities for youth. Deficit literate identities often invoked racialized language and literacy ideologies; authoritative literate identities engaged youths’ full cultural and linguistic repertoires to create and critique knowledge. Occasionally, youth enacted authoritative classroom literate identities alongside or in response to dominant deficit frames of their literate abilities during planned and spontaneous classroom interaction. We note in each type of gateway opportunities for teachers to open space for youths’ authoritative knowledge-producing literate identities. We aim to illustrate how a single instructional choice or classroom interaction ranges in effect from maintaining and reinforcing oppressive legacies and deficit literate identities to centering youth and their language and literacy repertoires in learning experiences for more socially just interactions and learning.

Indicators and Success Stories: The UN Sustaining Peace Agenda, Bureaucratic Power, and Knowledge Production in Post-War Settings

Most discussions on knowledge production in peacebuilding and conflict management have focused on the study of epistemic communities and strategic coalitions of global and local actors. This article shifts the focus away from who produces knowledge to the underexplored question of how knowledge is generated, repackaged, deployed, or ignored. Combining sociology of knowledge approaches with feminist governmentality scholarship, I critically interrogate the role of reports as knowledge production artifacts and report writing as bureaucratic practices that serve to design and implement UN Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) projects on Sustaining Peace. Specifically, I analyze the role of reports and reporting in four PBF projects on gender and reconciliation in Liberia, and I show how through the mechanisms of persuasion and homogenization, reports serve not only to measure success and failure and to produce contextualized knowledge, but also to exert symbolic power, (re)producing authoritative knowledge on women, gender and reconciliation, and giving legitimacy to external interventions. Studying how knowledge is produced instead of who produces it enables us to apprehend the entanglement of the local and the global and overcome simplistic binaries and oppositions, all while paying attention to how the production of knowledge, and its silences, remains embedded in global power relations.

Pandangan al-Nadwi Tentang Kepentingan al-Sirah al-Nabawiyyah dalam Pendidikan Kanak-Kanak

Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali al-Nadwi (later al-Nadwi) was a famous Islamic scholar during his life in the 90s. He is known for his efforts to solve the problems faced by Muslims. Among al-Nadwi’s approaches is the call for Muslims to reappreciate the sources of Islamic history, especially al-sirah al-nabawiyyah (biography of the prophet). Al-Nadwi’s efforts to produce literary works on al-sirah al-nabawiyyah highlighted his thought that al-sirah al-nabawiyyah should be considered as one of the important sources of knowledge. Al-Nadwi was not only produced the work of al-sirah al-nabawiyyah for adults but also wrote several works on the similar theme for children. Based on these facts, this article will unravel al-Nadwi’s views which highlights the importance of al-sirah al-nabawiyyah in the process of educating children. This article analyses al-Nadwi’s views on al-sirah al-nabawiyyah through textual analysis method. As a result, this article discovers that al-Nadwi’s views of al-sirah al-nabawiyyah is based on his stand that Muslims should utilize the source of authoritative knowledge in Islam. In addition, children should be kept away from reading materials that contain elements of superstitions. The content of reading material featuring the prophets as role models should be given priority in the effort to form a good personality for children. Therefore, al-sirah al-nabawiyyah needs to be exposed to children because it is an important requirement to educate them with Islamic education. Keywords: Prophetic Biography, al-Nadwi, Islamic Thought, The Story of Prophets, Islamic Personality Abstrak Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali al-Nadwi (seterusnya al-Nadwi) merupakan seorang sarjana Islam yang terkenal ketika hayatnya pada era 90-an. Beliau terkenal dengan usaha menyelesaikan masalah yang dihadapi umat Islam. Antara pendekatan al-Nadwi ialah seruan agar umat Islam kembali menghayati sumber sejarah Islam khususnya al-sirah al-nabawiyyah. Usaha al-Nadwi menghasilkan karya tentang al-sirah al-nabawiyyah menyerlahkan pemikirannya agar al-sirah al-nabawiyyah dijadikan sebagai salah satu sumber ilmu yang penting. Al-Nadwi bukan sahaja menghasilkan karya al-sirah al-nabawiyyah untuk golongan dewasa tetapi turut menulis karya seumpamanya untuk kanak-kanak. Berdasarkan fakta tersebut, makalah ini akan merungkai pandangan al-Nadwi tentang kepentingan al-sirah al-nabawiyyah dalam proses pendidikan kanak-kanak. Makalah ini menganalisis pandangan al-Nadwi berkaitan al-sirah al-nabawiyyah dengan menggunakan kaedah analisis teks. Hasilnya, makalah ini mendapati bahawa pandangan al-Nadwi terhadap al-sirah al-nabawiyyah berpaksikan pendirian agar umat Islam memanfaatkan sumber ilmu berautoriti dalam Islam. Selain itu, kanak-kanak perlu dijauhkan daripada bahan-bahan yang mengandungi unsur khurafat. Kandungan bahan bacaan yang menampilkan para nabi sebagai suri teladan perlu diutamakan dalam usaha membentuk keperibadian mulia bagi kanak-kanak. Justeru, al-sirah al-nabawiyyah perlu didedahkan kepada golongan kanak-kanak kerana ia adalah satu keperluan penting untuk mendidik mereka dengan didikan Islam. Kata kunci: al-Sirah al-Nabawiyyah, al-Nadwi, Pendidikan Kanak-Kanak, Kisah Para Nabi, Sahsiah Islamiah

Birth Matters

This chapter outlines the medical and midwifery models of childbirth. In most developed nations, the medical model of childbirth dominates maternity care and obstetricians have authoritative knowledge. This chapter defines the medicalization schema as a deep, largely unconscious conceptual framework that organizes beliefs about pregnancy and birth. The medicalization schema contains three key components: the pathologization of normal pregnancy and childbirth, scienciness, and technology fetishism. This chapter defines the concepts of scienciness and technology fetishism with respect to common obstetric practices and technologies that lack the support of scientific evidence. Lackluster public health results and critiques from women’s health movements challenge the validity of medicalization.

The Shape of Agency

In this book Shepherd offers a perspective on the shape of agency by offering interlinked explanations of the basic building blocks of agency, as well as its exemplary instances. In the book’s first part, he offers accounts of phenomena that have long troubled philosophers of action: control over behavior, non-deviant causation, and intentional action. These accounts build on earlier work in the causalist tradition and undermine the claims of many that causalism cannot offer a satisfying account of non-deviant causation, and therefore intentional action. In the book’s second part, he turns to modes of agentive excellence—ways that agents display quality of form. He offers a novel account of skill, including an account of the ways that agents display more or less skill. He discusses the role of knowledge in skill and concludes that while knowledge is often important, it is inessential. This leads to a discussion of knowledge of action—of the way that knowledge of action and knowledge of how to act informs action execution. Shepherd argues that knowledgeable action includes a unique epistemic underpinning. For in knowledgeable action, the agent has authoritative knowledge of what she is doing and how she is doing it when and because she is poised to control her action by way of practical reasoning.

Authoritative knowledge of childbirth and obstetrics: analysis of discursive practices of Russian perinatal specialists

The article discusses discursive practices of official and alternative perinatal specialists: obstetricians and gynecologists, midwives of maternity hospitals, domestic midwives and doulas. To analyze these practices, the author uses the notion of authoritative knowledge proposed by Brigitte Jordan and dating back to the power-knowledge concept by Michel Foucault. The author focuses on controversial but widely used concepts such as obstetric violence and natural childbirth. Additionally, the author regards such relatively new for the Russian community concepts as humanization of childbirth, obstetric model, demedicalization of childbirth, etc. The study is based on the materials of the founding conference of the professional non-profit association Obstetric Union, which was held at Moscow Perinatal Medical Center Mother and Child on November 30 – December 1, 2019.

Incorporating Space: Protestant Fundamentalism and Astronomical Authorization

The problem of authority is vital for understanding the development of Protestant creationism. Two discursive fields have figured centrally in this religious movement’s claims to authoritative knowledge: The Bible and science. The former has been remarkably stable over a century with a continuing emphasis on inerrancy and literalism, while the latter has been more mutable. Creationism’s rejection of scientific evolution has endured, but its orientation to a range of scientific models, technologies, and disciplines has changed. Astronomy is a prime example; once relatively absent in creationist cultural production, it emerged as yet another arena where creationists seek to corrode scientific authority and bolster biblical fundamentalism. Drawing on archival documents of creationist publications and the ongoing media production of an influential creationist ministry based in Kentucky, this article illustrates how creationism has sought to incorporate astronomy into their orbit of religious authorization. Ultimately, the case of incorporating space helps clarify fundamentalism’s machinations of power.

Deference and decision-making in science and society: How deference to scientific authority goes beyond confidence in science and scientists to become authoritarianism

Deference to scientific authority theoretically captures the belief that scientists and not publics should make decisions on science in society. Few studies examine deference, however, and none test this central theoretical claim. The result is deference is often conflated with concepts such as trust in scientists and belief in the authority of science. This study examines two claims key to conceptualizing deference: that deference (1) predicts anti-democratic views of decision-making and (2) relates to but is distinct from beliefs of science as authoritative knowledge. Analyzing US nationally representative data, we find deference to scientific authority does predict anti-democratic views, and this is its distinct conceptual value: trust in scientists and belief in science as authoritative knowledge strongly relate to deference, but both predict pro-democratic views, unlike deference. We discuss how these findings highlight deference as vital for understanding perceptions of science and societal decision-making and how we can better develop the concept.