Towards epistemic justice in anthropological education

Abstract (English)

In research, anthropologists routinely question epistemology in their methods and practices. In teaching, however, anthropologists tend to be less inclined to admit to epistemological uncertainty (Burgos-Martinez 2018). How can anthropologists overcome the rift between the openness to epistemological questions in research and the narrowness in epistemologies considered appropriate in anthropological education? How can anthropologists take seriously different ways of knowing as valid for scholarship more broadly, but also in their pedagogies?

Anthropologists at different times and places have long called for and worked towards decolonizing in order to address unethical disciplinary practices (E.g. Harrison 1991). With the #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter movements decolonizing has finally gained widespread attention even within dominant anthropologies (E.g. Gupta and Stoolman 2022). And yet, anthropology in most universities continues to be a ‘defacto white public space’, where students, and staff, of colour are subjected to various forms of discrimination and aggression. Indeed, the elephant in most anthropology classrooms remains the virtually unquestioned epistemic coloniality in how it is taught.

‘Epistemicide’ is an integral part of coloniality (Santos 2014), which consists in the appropriation, followed by attempts to eradicate, any ways of knowing encountered by European colonizers. This was done both through violent means such as residential schools, and by defining non-European knowledge traditions and practices as ‘culture’, ‘tradition’ or ‘belief’, in other words as forms of ‘non-knowledge’. This Western universalist knowledge is operationalized around sets of binaries such as subject vs. object and reason vs. emotion. In fact, epistemicide is also the fate of any knowledges from ‘Europe’ that did not fit this ontology/epistemology, including any gendered forms of knowing, and the oppression of women more generally.

Another key factor in the tenacity of coloniality in classrooms is the difficulty anthropologists have in being responsive to the ways of knowing students have to offer, for both institutional and pedagogical reasons. Students bring with them their own approaches, experiences and knowledges. And yet in most cases, in educational institutions still dominated by the ‘banking’ model of education (Frere 1973), students are envisaged as empty vessels to be filled, and knowledge is understood only to be within the purview of the teacher.

This panel invites presentations exploring examples of anthropological education by means of different ways of knowing, with the specific aim of epistemic justice. Examples of educational practices in both formal and nonformal contexts are important and welcome. Presentations that enact epistemic justice, and or that include practical examples of working by means of different onto/epistemologies are particularly encouraged. The aim is to move towards pluriversal anthropologies, where different ways of knowing, and the people who bear them, are not only valued, but understood as vital to scholarship and education.