Investigating Cultures of Equality

Dorota Golańska, Aleksandra M. Różalska, Suzanne Clisby, Suzanne Clisby, Dorota Golańska, Aleksandra M. Różalska

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032138183
• eBook ISBN: 9781000571356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume explores the processes of investigating cultures of equality and sets out an epistemological framework for generating a more just and response-able knowledge. It offers a tapestry of inventive, self-reflexive, collective, and situated praxis of conducting politically informed research. Such efforts contest—or occasionally reinvent—the social and cultural worlds that we currently inhabit, in an attempt at building cultures of equality across different locations and contexts. The book engages with the idea of producing knowledge with others, indicating the political potential of scientific practice and offering a view of knowledge as a collective affective-intellectual effort. It provides an inventory of creative engagements with concepts and methodologies enabling production of socially responsible knowledges. By critically exploring new possibilities of scientific inquiry, the contributors reflect on how knowledge can be generated to serve the political agenda of movements for equality and social justice. The chapters also elucidate different conceptualisations of and approaches to who the researcher is and how they interact with cultural and social worlds.

1 Investigating Cultures of Equality Relationality at Work in Situated Research

Dorota Golańska, Aleksandra M. Różalska and Suzanne Clisby

DOI: 10.4324/9781003230922-1

Knowing as a Relation

In her compelling analysis of the relational and situated character of knowledge production processes, María Puig de la Bellacasa (2012) pays attention to how knowing draws on and emerges from the worlds in which it is embedded, and how it is always co-shaped by the different contexts in which it is located. By pointing to these deeply contingent aspects of the procedures of generating knowledge, she reaffirms its necessarily ‘partial’ (Haraway 1988) and located nature and calls for recognition of its situational ontology. ‘That knowledge is situated means that knowing and thinking are inconceivable without a multitude of relations that also make possible the worlds we think with’ (2012, 198), she notices, exposing that knowing and relating seem to be closely interwoven, as well as accentuating that the relational character of knowing corresponds to the relational character of the world in which knowing happens. Such a view pleas for a self-reflexive awareness of emotional and affective, or indeed ‘caring’, involvement in both research processes and the world, as much as postulates admitting that knowledge is produced collectively—or interdependently—and is always embedded in its specific ‘material-semiotic’ (Haraway 1988) circumstances, or ‘its world’ (Haraway 1997, 137).

Importantly, while developing her postulates for more attentive research practices, Puig de la Bellacasa also urges us to realise that the fact that we think ‘in the world’ often means that we might be unintentionally involved ‘in perpetuating dominant values, rather than retreating into the secure position of an enlightened outsider who knows better’ (2012, 197). Such understanding clearly challenges the assumptions about the value-neutral nature of scientific ‘truths’ manufactured by a supposedly disembodied and disinterested subject of knowledge. This is by no means a novel revelation. The non-innocent character of knowledge production processes has already been unveiled by other philosophers, most notably Michel Foucault, who exposed the co-constitutive enmeshment of knowledge and power (1980 [1976], 1982, 1995 [1975], 1998 [1976]), revealing how practices of knowing actively participate in sustaining of the dominant systems of thinking, often legitimising exploitative social relations. These claims have been further elaborated upon by a great number of feminist philosophers, disclosing in their rich analyses the masculine bias inherent in the dominant science and the ways in which the overall construction of scientific cultures translates in the almost unnoticeable maintenance of a hierarchically organised system of discrimination and exclusion.¹ Depicting the mechanisms of symbolic violence, Pierre Bourdieu—in Masculine Domination (2002 [1998])—indicates that it is not possible to dismantle the naturalised social order with the tools created by the very system. Of course, Bourdieu’s analysis builds on strong feminist foundations, and particularly Black feminist theory, notably exemplified by Audre Lorde in her classic treatise compiled in Sister Outsider (1984) in which she states, ‘For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change’ (Lorde 2019 [1984], 105). Thus, as we have learned from a rich body of feminist knowledges, new strategies must be invented to truly account for the problematic conditions of our ‘today’, so that we were able to productively reconstruct the challenging realities which we happen to inhabit.

Such thinking reveals the complicit character of practices of knowing/thinking and their active, even though often unacknowledged, participation in the materialisation of the worlds in which we live. These ‘worlds’ seem to be nowadays undergoing significant crises with their catastrophic effects being rapidly extended to both human and more-than-human critters and processes. The detrimental, often fatal, outcomes of these harmful developments are not distributed equally. Those groups, species, and places, which are already most unprivileged and vulnerable, are most severely affected. From there it is logical to conclude that the endeavours aimed at creating ‘different worlds’, ones that would be based on principles of equality and justice, require production of different knowledges. This is meant as a thoroughly transformative and politically informed project, responding to the call formulated by many feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, and southern thinkers to deconstruct, transcend, or disavow the taken-for-granted conventions about what counts as reliable knowledge. In this vein, Elizabeth Grosz urges us to ‘think differently’ about ‘the most forceful and impressive impacts that impinge upon us and that thinking, concepts, and theories address if not resolve or answer’ (2011, 77). Believing in the potential of responsible research practices, Patricia Hill Collins (2013) postulates a form of ‘intellectual activism’, advocating for the production of knowledge capable of generating social change. Similarly, bell hooks calls for a radical transformation of our educational routines and habits, turning education into ‘a practice of freedom’ (1994). This, for hooks, can be achieved by reconnecting teaching and learning with the realm of emotions and affects (typically expelled from the traditionally understood rational knowledge), encouraging a profound investment in the collective efforts to dislocate and transgress the interlocking structures of oppression—such as racism, classism, sexisms, etc.—with an aim to build cultures of equality and trust. Knowledge can therefore be understood as a possible intervention capable of transforming everyday living and contributing to the thorough processes of repairing, or reworking, of our current deeply troubling ‘worlds’. For this, however, it is necessary to reconfigure the dominant ways in which knowledge is conceptualised, generated, and used, while accentuating its contingent and inevitably entangled nature.

Towards an Epistemological Transformation

Conceiving of knowledge in terms of a political project seems to be very distant from the dominant definitions of scientificity, deeply embedded in the modern formations of Western culture. Through a vast array of colonial practices, these assumptions and recommendations have been exported worldwide and presented as a universal template against which the reliability of all knowledges should be judged. Forged within a specific cultural environment, thus embodying its fundamental values and interests, the criteria for defining scientific truths have significantly contributed to a reassertion of the dominant status of Western civilisation, relegating other ways of knowing to the background of mainstream science, often depriving them of the status of knowledge in the first place. Moreover, the principles according to which Western science operates have further added to the process of hierarchising knowledges, prioritising specific ways of formulating what is considered ‘reliable’ scientific truth while ignoring or disregarding any alternatives. This has typically been premised on exclusion, or suppression, of all ‘other’ aspirations ‘to know’, often based in the spirit of collectivity and more-than-human kinship.

The exclusionary logic of Western science finds its expression in the tendency towards ordering and classifying of all phenomena (as much as methodologies and research techniques serving as tools for studying them). This becomes manifest within seemingly transparent and easy-to-navigate systems of grids, schemes, and definitions, assigned an attribute of a universal applicability in specifically defined situations. Thusly conceptualised knowledge is understood in terms of an accurate ‘representation’ of the world, where only certain (read dominant) claims are considered rigorous enough to be included in this supposedly value-neutral and self-evident system. Similarly to the metaphysical construction of the Western culture within which it has been produced, the logic of taxonomising (of philosophies, theories, methodologies, research techniques, etc.) remains entirely negativist as such definitions and categories are essentially conflict-based. The strategy of clearly delineating one entity from another, or defining one phenomenon as different from others, offers a seemingly plain framework, yet one which is built upon a principle of exclusion, where each element—even though connected to others—refers to them only by negation. Thus, if we realise its exclusionary construction and the silencing effects it can possibly produce, this kind of classification emerges as a canonising—thus also colonising—device, contributing to the production of only apparently neutral organisation of knowledges (and power) and reasserting social and epistemic inequalities saturating contemporary (not only academic, and not only Western) environments. Iris van der Tuin captures the nature of this quest for ordering and precise documentation in the term ‘classifixation’,² signalling a Western obsession with regulation and control, which manifests in—among other things—the pursuit of generating ‘accurate’ representations or ‘exact’ depictions of the world. The term, in her words, is also meant to ‘demonstrate how a classification is not a neutral mediator but is thoroughly entangled with the work that it does’ (2015, 19) or, in fact, the materialisation of the phenomena that it ‘depicts’. Classifixation, therefore, does far more than simply classify; it also fixes its ‘objects’ in immobile (thus secure) positions on the ‘map of knowledge’, turning them into quasi-permanent orientation points for further research, effectively hindering any possibilities of knowing differently.

In her insightful analysis, van der Tuin returns to Foucault’s (1994 [1966]) salient criticism of the ‘taxonomical’ tendency to organise (not only) academic knowledge in a predictable grid-like order. As she points out, ‘all classifications exist under the spell of an episteme’ (van der Tuin 2015, 28), embodying the values of the context in which they tend to operate. Foucault’s genealogical approach, van der Tuin notices, enables him to expose how the taxonomy emerges as a conjunctive operation of language and things which co-constitute one another through the complex play of a sign, or representation, and a part of the world it is meant to represent or depict. For van der Tuin, Foucault’s criticism clearly exhibits that those classifications do not provide ‘truth’, but descriptively express situated knowledge (2015, 28), without—however—acknowledging their inescapable contingency. As a result, the dominant Western ways of producing knowledge remain disguised as a universal, rather than only partial, perspective. A taxonomical organisation of knowledge as much as of the tools with which it is typically manufactured has a determining effect on what scholars working within specific fields of inquiry dominated by particular theoretical and epistemological paradigms can do in their studies, as the prevailing modes of conducting research and producing theory get operationalised in their scholarly endeavours. This is where the silencing powers of systems of classification are made visible and how they add—through organisation of power again—to the construction of specific scientific ‘truths’, while disregarding, or penalising, other ways of knowing. Promising a production (or discovery) of seemingly value-neutral and decontextualised ‘facts’, such logic further reinforces the dominance of Western culture, extending and strengthening its colonising effects.

In contradistinction to the Western model of producing scientific knowledge, this volume—aligning with the recent tendencies in feminist and decolonial thinking—clearly acknowledges the entangled nature of knowing and attempts to offer a sensitive and committed insight into the organisation of research process and the academic (and other) cultures in which it is embedded, not only in institutional terms. It also advocates for pluralisation of practices of inquiry and creative experimentation with research techniques, embracing inventive alliances between different modes of producing knowledge (artistic, activist, and academic) and acknowledging their complex, situational character. This, we believe, should be seen as a means of creating an inclusive and horizontally organised landscape of knowledges that would contribute to our better understanding of the world. We consider this a necessary step to be made on the way to dismantling the mechanisms of discrimination and exclusion embedded in the Western project of science. This edited collection of chapters calls for the acknowledgement of the collective and situational nature of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• 1 Investigating Cultures of Equality: Relationality at Work in Situated Research
• 2 The Relationality of Knowing: From Economies of Care to Epistemic Justice
• 3 Creating and Contesting Knowledges at the Museo Migrante
• 4 (Re)situating More-than-human Knowledge: Material Entanglements in Laura Gustafsson and Terike Happoja’s Museum of Nonhumanity and Helena Hunter’s Falling Birds
• 5 Connecting Knowledge Production and Praxis: Circulation, Cooperative Constellations, and Collective Learning in Training for Gender Equality
• 6 ‘Bugs’, ‘Broken Binaries’, and Malware: Investigating Gender and the Human in Science Fiction’s Depictions of Technological Malfunction
• 7 Resisting Cultures of Inequality through Feminist Counter-Visuality Practices in Contemporary Spanish Fiction and Non-Fiction Cinema
• 8 Female Masculinities in South Africa: Negotiations Around Belonging
• 9 Im/possible Pathways: The Politics of Place and Decolonial Cartographies in the Global South
• 10 On the Shore: Autoethnography and Reflexivity from a Black Feminist and Decolonial Perspective
• 11 ‘Uncommon for a Straight Boy to Quote Butler the Way You Do’, or Where Should I Speak My Feminism?
• 12 The Uses and Abuses of English Language within Feminist Academic Research
• Index