Knowledge Production

Appendix for the thesis Acts of Research: Knowledge Production in Contemporary Art between Knowledge Economy and Critical Practice

The term ‘knowledge society’ is used to refer to the increasing relevance of non- manual knowledge-producing labour in current post-industrial economies. Contemporary art, especially since 1989, has not been left out of this trend, to the extent that today it is not rare to see artists and curators described as knowledge producers and exhibitions and art works as instances of knowledge production. Acts of Research: Knowledge Production in Contemporary Arts between Knowledge Economy and Critical Practices analyses this development.
The academic discussion of knowledge production in the arts has taken place mostly in seminars and articles, in which knowledge is often discussed as an intrinsic quality of the artwork. Acts of Research, however, is devoted to studying the rise of knowledge production in contemporary art from the perspective of artistic, curatorial and educational research with an awareness of larger political, economic, geographical and art-related aspects. The concept of ‘acts of research’ is suggested as a way to understand knowledge production as a creative act in which research carried out in relation to a specific material challenges and resists the protocols of conventional knowledge production and norms. It is argued that knowledge production is not a stable concept, but may indicate a series of acts of research that allow each art practice to participate in a collective constitution of both the term and its practice.
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The conclusions are based on two different methodological approaches that structure the thesis. First, Chapter One traces the conceptual history of the term ‘knowledge production’, originally coined in economics and entering arts discourse as a critical term deployed against the rapidly growing global economy of the 1990s, and subsequently becoming a contested term in the new millennium due to its parroting of the discourse of that same global economy. Second, Chapters Two, Three and Four provide close readings of practices of artistic research in relation to the image and war (Hito Steyerl, The Otolith Group and Rabih Mroué), curatorial research in relation to global dynamics (Home Works: A Forum for Cultural Practices 2002-2013, III Bienal de La Habana and dOCUMENTA (13)) and educational projects in relation to knowledge and market economy (Tania Bruguera’s Cátedra de Arte de Conducta, Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen’s Copenhagen Free University and Boris Buden’s Learning Place, part of the Former West Congress 2013); these readings are undertaken in order to understand the practices and workings of the specific mode of knowledge production unfolding through acts of research in the contemporary arts.

The term ‘knowledge society’ is used to refer to the increasing relevance of non- manual knowledge-producing labour in current post-industrial economies. Contemporary art, especially since 1989, has not been left out of this trend, to the extent that today it is not rare to see artists and curators described as knowledge producers and exhibitions and art works as instances of knowledge production. Acts of Research: Knowledge Production in Contemporary Arts between Knowledge Economy and Critical Practices analyses this development.
The academic discussion of knowledge production in the arts has taken place mostly in seminars and articles, in which knowledge is often discussed as an intrinsic quality of the artwork. Acts of Research, however, is devoted to studying the rise of knowledge production in contemporary art from the perspective of artistic, curatorial and educational research with an awareness of larger political, economic, geographical and art-related aspects. The concept of ‘acts of research’ is suggested as a way to understand knowledge production as a creative act in which research carried out in relation to a specific material challenges and resists the protocols of conventional knowledge production and norms. It is argued that knowledge production is not a stable concept, but may indicate a series of acts of research that allow each art practice to participate in a collective constitution of both the term and its practice.
277
The conclusions are based on two different methodological approaches that structure the thesis. First, Chapter One traces the conceptual history of the term ‘knowledge production’, originally coined in economics and entering arts discourse as a critical term deployed against the rapidly growing global economy of the 1990s, and subsequently becoming a contested term in the new millennium due to its parroting of the discourse of that same global economy. Second, Chapters Two, Three and Four provide close readings of practices of artistic research in relation to the image and war (Hito Steyerl, The Otolith Group and Rabih Mroué), curatorial research in relation to global dynamics (Home Works: A Forum for Cultural Practices 2002-2013, III Bienal de La Habana and dOCUMENTA (13)) and educational projects in relation to knowledge and market economy (Tania Bruguera’s Cátedra de Arte de Conducta, Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen’s Copenhagen Free University and Boris Buden’s Learning Place, part of the Former West Congress 2013); these readings are undertaken in order to understand the practices and workings of the specific mode of knowledge production unfolding through acts of research in the contemporary arts.

Between the acquisition of the Philippines in 1898 and the approval of an independence bill in 1934, members of Congress extensively discussed the future of the Philippines as an American territory using the ideas and images created by American writers, journalists, scholars, missionaries, travelers, and colonial and military officers. However, members of Congress did not passively consume a body of knowledge about the Filipinos created by the American cultural mainstream. They also sought their own answers to the questions raised by American control of the Philippines. Through their travel accounts, books, interviews, articles, public speeches and lectures, a group of congressmen actively participated in American knowledge production about the Philippines. In doing so, these congressmen also expressed beliefs about the United States' international role, and the challenges and anxieties that possessing colonies posed for the American republican system. Congressional knowledge pr...

Kurzzusammenfassung
Im Zentrum dieser Arbeit steht die Frage, wie die Disziplin der (Sonder-)Pädagogik Wissen zum Gegenstand ADHS produziert und damit eine spezifische Wirklichkeit des Phänomens hervorbringt. Aufgrund der Beobachtung, dass das Label ADHS im schulischen Kontext eine Generalisierung ‚nicht_normaler’ Verhaltensweisen darstellt, wird untersucht, wie das Phänomen ADHS auf der Ebene (sonder-)pädagogischer Wissensbestände als eine Kategorie ‚nicht_normalen’ Verhaltens konstruiert wird. Dazu wird einem kulturwissenschaftlich inspirierten Verständnis von Behinderung gefolgt, das auf Konstruktionsprozesse des (sonder-)pädagogischen Feldes übertragen wird. Dies hat zum Ziel, institutionalisierte Ausgrenzungsprozesse zu erfassen und die Notwendigkeit einer veränderten Konzeptualisierung des ‚Nicht_Normalen’ herauszustellen. Durch den Transfer der Perspektiven der Dis_ability Studies auf die (sonder-)pädagogische Wissensproduktion kann ein Beitrag zum Ansatz der Dis_ability Studies in Education geliefert werden, der eine differenztheoretisch inspirierte und theoretisch fundierte, empirische Inklusionsforschung unterstützt.
Gegenstand des empirischen Teils dieser Arbeit ist ein Korpus von 74 wissenschaftlichen Artikeln, das sich aus 49 (sonder-)pädagogischen Fachzeitschriften- und 25 Handbuchartikeln zusammensetzt, die zwischen 2000 und 2015 erschienen sind. Untersucht werden diese mit einer normalismus- und machtkritischen Perspektive durch ein diskurstheoretisches Konzept. Dadurch wird es nicht nur möglich, die diskursive Konstruktion des Gegenstands ADHS zu rekonstruieren. Vielmehr noch wird nachgezeichnet, wie im (sonder-)pädagogischen Interdiskurs die Grenze zwischen ‚normalen’ und ‚nicht_normalen’ Verhaltensweisen gezogen wird, welche Angebote die als ‚nicht_normal’ markierten Schüler_innen zur Reintegration in die Normalzone erhalten und mit welchen Adressierungen diese Beschäftigung einhergeht.
Durch die auf den einzelnen Analyseebenen identifizierten Befunde wird deutlich, dass die Konstruktion des ‚Nicht_Normalen’ im (sonder-)pädagogischen Fachdiskurs die im schulischen Kontext bestehende Normalität schützt und dass diese Schutzfunktion mit individualistischen Zuschreibungen und Zwängen einhergeht.


 


Abstract
The present study focusses on the question how the discipline of special education produces knowledge on the subject of ADHD and thereby creates a specific reality of the phenomenon. Due to the observation that in schools the label ADHD is used as ‘catch-all-typology’ and a generalisation for abnormal behaviours, it is questioned how ADHD is constructed as a category of ‘not_normal’ behaviour within special educational literature. Therefore, an understanding of disability, which is inspired by a cultural studies perspective, will be applied on the production of knowledge on the field of special education. The goal is to identify institutionalised processes of exclusion and to highlight the necessity of a modified conceptualization of the ‘not_normal’. Transferring perspectives of dis_ability studies to the field of special education, the analysis can be placed within the context of dis_ability studies in education. This supports a difference-theoretical inspired and theoretically founded, empirical research on the subject of inclusion.
The body of investigation includes 74 articles published in special education journals and handbooks between 2000 and 2015. The articles have been examined by a critical perspective on power relations and the construction of normality with a discourse analytical concept. As a result, not only the discoursive construction of the subject ADHD can be reconstructed. Moreover, it can be shown, how in the discourse of special education ‘normal’ behaviour is differentiated from ‘not_normal’ behaviour, how the students being marked as ‘not_normal’ are requested to re-integrate into the normal zone and which invocations follow this discussion.
The findings clearly demonstrate, that the construction of the ‘not_normal’ in the discourse of special education secures prevailing norms in school and that this is accompanied by individualistic attributions and constraints.

This is a second part of my essay which was published last summer. This first Bolkhovitinov’s trip to the United States in 1968 changed completely not only his skeptical perception of the “country which killed its best politicians like Kennedy,” but also his understanding of the nature of the “historian’s craft” and “methodology of collecting and analyzing the historical sources.”

Whilst North to South knowledge transfer patterns have been extensively problematised by Southern and decolonial perspectives, there is very little reflection on the practice of research capacity development (RCD), still strongly focused on technoscientific solutionism, yet largely uncritical of its underlying normative directions and power asymmetries. Without making transparent these normative and epistemological dimensions, RCD practices will continue to perpetuate approaches that are likely to be narrow, technocratic and unreflexive of colonial legacies, thus failing to achieve the aims of RCD, namely, the equitable and development-oriented production of knowledge in low- and middle-income societies. Informed by the authors’ direct experience of RCD approaches and combining insights from decolonial works and other perspectives from the margins with Science and Technology Studies, the paper undertakes a normative and epistemological deconstruction of RCD mainstream practice. High...

Since Hal Foster introduced ‘the ethnographic turn of contemporary art’ in the mid-1990s, the exchange between contemporary art and ethnography has continued to expand. Much of the debate considers the artistic incorporations of ethnography, but little has been discussed about the ethnographic practices of art researchers. The latter's relevance derives from current changes in the art world. Art objects and exhibition formats take new shapes and circulate internationally, creating situations of translocality in contemporary art. This inevitably raises a crucial ethnographic question: How can one engage thoroughly with artworks and exhibitions from different cultural contexts, without losing the complexity of the local discourses inherent in them? This article answers that question by drawing on three ethnographic tools: 1) the multi-sited ethnographic approach (George Marcus); 2) the pairing of aesthetic analysis of artworks and ethnographic fieldwork (Georgina Born); and 3) the use of generative ethnographic stories as a writing tool (Helen Verran). The latter two, especially, are then employed in analysing the Beirut-based extended exhibition, ‘Home Works: A Forum on Cultural Practices’. The analysis shows that adding ethnographic tools to the aesthetic analysis of international exhibitions allows for the complexity of local discourses, enhances attentive art writing, and urges engaged art research.

This article looks at the heightened role of universities in the global knowledge age. Flows of people, ideas, and also capital in the academic realm continue to multiply, propelling global connectedness and contributing to the reshuling of the hitherto prevailing political orders. Universities are understood as places where these lows are instigated and controlled. The article adds insight to the ield of global higher education by emphasizing universities in the Global South, to better understand their role in shaping processes of globalization. Four arguments guide the reader, the irst of which explains how universities have been discursively rescaled. The second argument looks at university-state relations and increased institutional power. Differentiation in the higher-education landscape and academic hierarchies are examined in the third part, while section four reveals shortcomings of mobility igures aggregated at national level.

Der Artikel thematisiert die zunehmende Bedeutung von Universitäten im Zeitalter der glo-balen Wissenslandschaft. Akademische Mobilität, der Austausch von Wissen und die damit verbundenen Kapitalströme tragen erheblich zur globalen Vernetzung und zur Neuordnung der Weltpolitik bei. Universitäten werden als Orte verstanden, an denen diese grenzüberschrei-tenden Prozesse initiiert und kontrolliert werden. Im Fokus stehen hier Universitäten im globa-len Süden, was Diskussionen über deren Rolle in Globalisierungsprozessen anregt und somit das Spektrum der globalen Hochschulforschung erweitert. Der Artikel gliedert sich in vier Teile, wobei sich der erste mit einer diskursiven Neuausrichtung befasst. Zweitens werden die Bezie-hungen zwischen Universität und Staat vor dem Hintergrund einer Portalperspektive skizziert, bevor im dritten Teil die Relevanz von Diferenzierung und akademischen Hierarchien erklärt wird. Das letzte Argument stellt die Aussagekraft von nationalen Mobilitätsstatistiken in Frage.

This paper / article presents a brief discussion on contemporary ‘artists citizens’. It will examine the public life, and the political activity in particular (vita activa), of the critical cultural worker in neoliberal capitalist society. Here, a critical cultural worker – theoretician, artist, curator, journal editor, cultural producer, etc. –means the one who wants and tries to be political. Through discussing her dubious politicality, I aim here to unpack a tension between the work and the politics in today’s society. In addition, assuming that most citizens today are workers themselves I would propose a few thoughts on what the politics today could be and how it could look like once we recognize its classical definition as socially and historically inadequate.

Keywords: cultural worker, labor, politics, politicality, vita activa, precarization, Post-Fordism, knowledge production, complicity, community

The aim of this paper is to provide an insight into how knowledge about dr. Franjo Tuđman was internationally created, namely the international context in which scientists and experts have produced factual truths about Croatia's First President's leadership, his role and accountability in the events that have marked the violent disintegration of former Yugoslavia, Croatia's war of defense, and democratic transition. Developed discourse of the international scholarship about Yugoslav wars of disintegration and Croatia's painful democratic transition is analyzed to determine how and in what way Dr. Franjo Tuđman is represented in selected publications available to the author of this paper. International scholarly production under the review is rather multidisciplinary with a variety of approaches, methodologies and theories providing rich data which in this case is studied juxtaposed to dominant transitional justice discourse framework. Such qualitative sociological research tries to deconstruct international scholarly context in which factual truths about dr. Franjo Tuđman were socially constructed by scholars and experts. Even though not always framed under the umbrella of transitional justice scholarship, developed discourse is nonetheless analyzed through critical lenses of social constructivism 1 and approached in post-modernist sociological manner.

The existing historiography primarily discusses the early Philippine experience of Roman Catholic conversion in terms of (a) conversion’s success or failure, or (b) local resistance against colonial hegemony. This article, meanwhile, approaches the confrontation generated by conversion as a process of colonial knowledge production. The concept of “idolatry” was central to this confrontation. I ask: in what ways did indigenous agents help create this concept as it was used locally? This essay examines two late-seventeenth century missionary investigations into indigenous animism. They took place in and around Bolinao, Pangasinan and Santo Tomas, Batangas, both communities in the northern Philippine island of Luzon. Together, these investigations generated interviews with indigenous respondents, whose transcriptions are housed at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain. Initially, neither the missionaries nor the missionized had a clear idea of what local words, actions, and objects counted as “idolatrous.” Indigenous agents constructed generalizations about their religious beliefs to advance their own interests, to protect themselves from persecution, and to understand indigenous deities within their increasingly colonial reality. The indigenous were not passive gatherers of raw data for missionary ethnographers. They were, in their own right, producers of colonial knowledge.

This thesis focuses on the role and historical development of strategies of experimental domestication in scientific knowledge production, with a particular focus on the function of the laboratory strains known as 'wild types' in the model organism systems of classical genetics, where they play the role of standing in for the 'natural' instance of the species so that variation may be measured. As part of establishing how lab wild types came to assume this role, I have situated them within a much longer historical trajectory that tracks how changes in the manner that European intellectual traditions conceptualised the domestic-wild divide were linked to the development of new forms of scientific domestication and knowledge production. These new developments required that existing domesticating practices be intensified, expanded and analogised in order to better control, capture and comprehend 'wild' nature. My first two chapters introduce the domestic-wild div...

Our project was created as a part of the workshop titled REACTION (MEDS 2013) that was consisted of a series of small urban interventions (ACTIONS) on chosen locations around the Graça neighborhood in Lis-bon. The main idea behind the workshop was to provoke participation by the residents of Graça through proposals for alternative uses of public spaces. At the same time the proposals contested the gentrification process that is rapidly changing the area. During the workshop, fifteen groups of students developed urban furniture, children's playgrounds, meeting points, temporary art installations and organised events with the residents.

A produção do conhecimento no ambiente escolar vem sendo alvo de debates que apontam questionamentos e mudanças nos diferentes contextos educacionais.

Ao entender o processo de aprendizagem e as práticas escolares, percebemos que ainda há uma grande lacuna que precisa ser ressignificada quando se refere a currículos, mediação e avaliação. Para tanto, é importante compreender qual o papel das escolas como mediadoras do processo de ensino e aprendizagem e construtoras de novos conhecimentos.

No capítulo 1 deste livro, apresentamos reflexões que tratam da centralidade da aprendizagem nas práticas educativas escolares, instigando você pós graduando à análise de práticas escolares na relação com a produção de conhecimento.

Abordaremos o conhecimento e a Era das Relações, questionando quais as novas pautas da educação, conduzindo você a comparar a perspectiva do conhecimento de acordo com os modelos de ciência em cada época, e suas implicações na educação atual, compondo o capítulo 2 deste livro.

No capítulo 3 debateremos a relação professor-aluno apresentando as diferentes teorias e ambientes de aprendizagem apontando dados de pesquisas atuais sobre a relação professor-aluno e seus efeitos no seu desempenho.

Por fim, compondo o capítulo 4 discutiremos os contextos atuais e os desafios sobre o conhecimento na escola, apresentamos algumas das reflexões sobre o conhecimento, as disciplinas, o papel e o conteúdo escolar em todos os níveis, que estão formando um contexto para as práticas atuais.

In this paper I draw from critical work on the historical, social, political, and economic functions of race to show how Eurocentrism, hegemony and colonialism (reproduce e " legitimate " knowledge and knowers in the Western world. Specifically, I discuss how mainstream academia in the West reinscribes colonial and racial thinking by strategically reducing the vast theoretical contributions of racialised and Indigenous scholars to experiential insights or " stories. " As such, these critical contributions remain marginalized in the mainstream, western scholarly canon. In my analysis, I outline the need for race-based epistemologies, in order to resist the ideological, discursive and material racism in research and knowledge production. I also argue that employing critical white supremacy as a theoretical framework would de-center and contextualize western ways of thinking and knowing, and intervene in projects which seek to know, essentialize, and represent bodies of color by unearthing the historical, colonial, and racial relations that have desired the " Other " as a category of analysis. This paper presents important theoretical positions on epistemology, and contributes highly to critical theory and practice.

This unique companion is a much-needed guide for those who are embarking on field research in conflict-affected countries. In a break with academic tradition, the chapters are mainly written in the first person and contain personal accounts of the ethical and practical challenges of fieldwork. In the book, over thirty scholars reflect on the complexity of dealing with human subjects in conflict-affected contexts. This indispensable book provides insider knowledge and gives confidence to researchers - both those at the very start of their careers or during their studies, and experienced researchers who want to consider positionality, responsibility and the moral obligation of the researcher in new ways. Essential reading for students and scholars embarking upon fieldwork in International Relations, Politics, Sociology, Political Geography and Anthropology.

These "Interventions" were submitted by participants in the University of Michigan's International Institute Summer Seminar, “Sacred Spaces and Heretical Knowledge: National Universities and Global Publics” (August 2002) in response to the original position paper written by David William Cohen and Michael Kennedy, and published in the volume Responsibility in Crisis: Knowledge Politics and Global Publics, edited by David William Cohen and Michael D. Kennedy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

Abstract:
This paper situates ‘bazaar’ as a site of multifaceted exploration. It is as much an inquiry into a bazaar (‘Janpath’ in New Delhi) as it is into the modes of knowledge about the bazaar. Challenging the representation of the postcolonial bazaar as a bizarre relic of the past or the pure theoretical market, I make the case for viewing it as a socioeconomic site of modernity. The symbolic geography of this site is contested, populated as it is, with the evocations, expectations, and histories of the various implicated human constituencies.
Bazaars are integral to cultural imaginaries, and I start by presenting some of the ways in which they have functioned to excite fantasy and fear. In spite of this, bazaars are often conceptualised primarily as an economic space to ‘truck, barter and exchange’. I suggest that in this characterisation there is a problematic slippage between the market and the bazaar. The bazaar is not simply another market. Neither is the market itself any much more than a convenient fiction for the purposes of an abstract deductive political economy which obtains its purchase on the ‘economic’ realm by a perpetual erasure of subjectivity and particularity under the signs of objectivity, generality and science. While, even to many anthropologists, the appeal of judging the bazaar against a pervasive ideal of the market continues to be irresistible, I argue that the bazaar offers a valuable site to challenge the culture/economy separation that characterises much thinking about the economic realm. It is to this effect that the paper travels to re-member the coming into being of a specific bazaar – the Janpath. What makes this travel interesting is the forays it makes into issues of governmentality, patriarchy, livelihoods under capitalist globalisation, nationstatism, in other words, the spatial and symbolic contexts of postcolonial modernity in India.
...

Overview:
The bazaar has been an exotic site and its rationality has been the subject of rescue endeavours in much research. In contrast, I have argued that we need to see the bazaar as a fertile ground – a hybrid space for stories, for theories, and for explorations of the nation-state, of capitalism, colonialism, globalisation, and governmentality. In particular, the Janpath Bazaar provides us with a site for exploring diverse postcolonial subjectivities under the influence of a weighty history and the diffuse operation of coercive power. If we see it as a space unrarefied by the disciplinary boundaries of culture, economy, history, theory, literature, activism – it can be the site for exploring several interconnected issues as they are lived, experienced, and observed. This paper has travelled to transgress the story/theory modes of enquiry in the hope of presenting the poetics and politics of bazaars in general and the Janpath bazaar in particular as contested spaces with many layers of meaning that undo the pervasive and problematic separations of culture and economy in modernity.

In this chapter I focus on how contemporary art practitioners engage with notions of epistemic disobedience and the production of knowledge, both responding to, and generating theoretical insights for, a corpus of theoretical discourse. I argue that contemporary art theory and practice is assuming an ever more important role in the configuration and reconfiguration of the Global South platform. The emphasis that this platform places upon knowledge generation means that artists working from within this paradigm encounter and respond to an entirely different notion of ‘participation’ than that articulated by Claire Bishop (2004, 2006, 2012) or Nicolas Bourriaud (2002). I further argue that what characterizes and shapes these processes is their location: marginal to the apparel of mainstream academia, and positioned at the porous frontier of institutional and non-institutional contemporary art spaces, these practices occur instead from within a skein of networks and hierarchies deriving from multiple modes of life. And it is this crossing of axes – the horizontal and the vertical, the mercantile and the post material, the ephemeral and the utopian – that renders such re-signification, participation, and production of knowledge entirely unique.

The book addresses the broad issue of sustainability of our civilization and seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion of what many see as its systemic crisis. There is a broad agreement that new creative ideas, initiatives, and solutions are essential for dealing with the current problems. However, despite this recognition, we still know very little about the process of creation and how it works. As a result, our civilization fails to harness the enormous creative potential of humanity. This failure, the book argues, is the main source of our current problems—languishing economy, deteriorating environment, continued violence, the deficit of democracy, and the lack of new fundamental breakthroughs in science. It examines some of these problems and demonstrates the connection between them and our failure to embrace the process of creation. The book offers a perspective that sheds light on the process of creation. It pays special attention to the theoretical contributions of Jean Piaget and the ongoing discussions of knowledge production that help us understand better how the process of creation works. The central argument of the book is that in order to solve our current problems and ensure the sustainability of our civilization well into the future we must embrace the process of creation and make it the central organizing principle of our social practice. Finally, the book provides an outline of the principal changes that the adoption of the new social practice organized around the process of creation will involve.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of decolonizing interpretive research in ways that respect and integrate the qualitative sensibilities of subaltern voices in the knowledge production of anti-colonial possibilities.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws from the decolonizing and post-colonial theoretical tradition, with a specific reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s contribution to this analysis. Findings – Through a critical discussion of decolonizing concerns tied to qualitative interpretive interrogations, the paper points to the key assumptions that support and reinforce the sensibilities of subaltern voices in efforts to move western research approaches toward anti-colonial possibilities. In the process, this discussion supports the emergence of an itinerant epistemological lens that opens the field to decolonizing inquiry.
Practical implications – Its practical implications are tied to discursive transformations, which can impact social and material transformations within the context of research and society.
Originality/value – Moreover, the paper provides an innovative rethinking of interpretive research, in an effort to extend the analysis of decolonizing methodology to the construction of subaltern inspired intellectual labor.
Keywords Interpretive research, Post-colonial, Decolonizing, Knowledge production, Subaltern voice

This article explores ethnographic intimacy beyond an identitarian focus on sex, sexual identity, and sex-desire by reflecting on three of my own fieldwork projects in queer anthropology. Bringing queer, decolonizing, postcolonial, and critical race theory into conversation with reflexive work on sex in/and ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that broadening our conceptions of intimacy enables us to think less about sex in the field and more about sex as a field—a field of encounters, relationalities, and entanglements that connects us queerly to others. I suggest that such approaches to ethnographic knowledge might disrupt anthropology's colonial object relations by embracing a critical intimacy of interrelationality—staying with, rather than foreclosing, reifying, or trying to master, the overwhelming aspects of both sex and ethnography.

This article is intended to rethink a symbiotic but otherwise inadequately attended relationship between postcolonial studies and Chinese academia at a time when the rise of China evokes epistemic, ontological and empirical challenges for critical reflection. Above all, I argue that China is situated in her postcolonial conditions in such a way that these conditions largely define China's multi‐faceted positioning as colonial agent, (semi‐)colonial victim, recipient of colonialist ideology, overthrower of that ideology and its accompanying world‐system, and contender for the “top place” within such a world‐system. Postcolonial theory hence becomes relevant and productive in terms of its potential to problematize various puzzles, contradictions and tensions during China's rise like widespread disregard of basic civic values, political partisanship in scholarship, aggravation of the East‐West divide and rising Chinese exceptionalism. Additionally, however, this article also pinpoints the need to transform and reshape the oftentimes Eurocentric inclination in postcolonial studies through an incorporation of the revolutionary and post‐revolutionary experiences in China and elsewhere. Doing so therefore calls for a post‐revolutionary paradigm as proposed by Wang Hui, among others. I thus advocate cross‐fertilization, rather than mutual exclusion, not only be-tween the postcolonial and post‐revolutionary paradigms but also between postcolonial studies and Chinese scholarship/academia.

Rodriguez-Tatel, Mary Jane. 2015. Philippine Studies/Araling Pilipino/Pilipinolohiya sa Wikang Filipino: Pagpopook at Pagdadalumat sa Loob ng Kapantasang Pilipino. Humanities Diliman 12, blg. 2, 110-179.

Since its inception as an area studies program instituted by the United States after World War II, Philippine Studies in the University of the Philippines has undergone a radical transformation. From being a neo-colonial program designed to create a venue for the Americans to perpetuate their hegemony in Philippine scholarship, it has become a springboard from which some progressive Filipino intellectuals particularly in the 1970’s formally launched the indigenization (read: Filipinization) movement in the Philippine academic community. Recontextualized and reconceptualized as part of the nationalist project, the program, since then, would become a site of engagement of Filipino scholars in the development of our own scholarly tradition. It would take on significant epistemological and methodological shifts emphasizing the vital role of Filipino language as primary tool of knowledge production.

To map out the extent of this paradigm shift, knowledge production in Filipino both at the undergraduate and graduate levels of the Philippine Studies program is analyzed. Two general directions based on Virgilio Enriquez’s SP construct are discernible along this line: (a) “indigenization from within” or the development of our own analytical tool and conceptual framework using our indigenous language and culture as source; and (b) “indigenization from without” or appropriation/adaptation of foreign formulations to local realities. Such production is viewed in the larger context of the development of a “Philippine studies” envisioned by Rizal in the 19th century and carried on by Filipino scholars over the last five decades in their efforts to construct a more meaningful framework for understanding Filipino psyche, culture and society. It is hoped that a fully-developed Filipino academic discourse shall be our significant contribution to a truly universal scientific tradition.

Keywords: Philippine studies, indigenization, Filipinization, language and knowledge production

This study examines the consumers’ purchase intention of two-wheelers in Nepal 2017/18. The
independent were product knowledge, perceived quality, perceived value and perceived risk and
the dependent variable was the purchase intention. This study aims to find those independent
variables which affect the dependent variable the most. Applying the correlation and the multiple
regressions, the study finds that among the multiple independent purchase intention variables
taken for analysis: perceived quality and perceived value affected the dependent variable purchase
intention the most. Perceived Quality and Perceived Value have a statistically significant positive
relationship with the dependent variable Purchase Intention .The Product Knowledge and
mitigated Perceived Risk, on the other hand, had no significant relationship with the dependent
variable purchase intention.
Therefore, two-wheeler manufacturers in Nepalese context must attempt to improve perceived
quality and perceived value in the mind of customers to ensure sales better than their competitors.

Examining conspiracy theory authors has not been seen as worthy of ethnographic inquiry in anthropology as of yet. This is intriguing, as encountering conspiracy theorists inspires a process of reassessing the critical nature of our own discipline, with its doubting mechanisms and thrill for alternative realities, and the essay offers analogies between such theories and anthropology. ThIs article tackles conspiracy theory through ethnographically encountering the people largely responsible for the creation and dissemination of such theories. I argue that ethnography of conspiracy theory is ethnography on and with conspiracy theorists. The essay responds to recent calls to address uncomfortable ideas 'at eye level'. Such calls to take seriously people who adhere to challenging ideas comes from work among far-right thinkers, an area sometimes converging with conspiracy theory. Reviewing material from fi eldwork in Greece among authors in the conspiracy genre illuminates a wide array of concerns, from the idea that their work is science-worthy to statements both associated and dissociated from fascist ideas. The essay shows how professionals of the conspiracy theory fi eld craft such theories and (re)work their own social standing, while I take conspiracy theory arbiters' claims to the epistemic seriously and explore their relations to the far-right.

Esta pesquisa parte de um contexto de crescente interesse e intensas mudanças envolvendo questões relacionadas a gênero e sexualidade no Brasil, articulando essas temáticas com a antropologia do conhecimento. Tem como objeto empírico redes científicas, artísticas e ativistas que se entrelaçam a partir de obras escritas por praticantes de BDSM (bondage, disciplina, dominação, submissão, sadismo e masoquismo)/SME (sadomasoquismo erótico) que, ao produzirem contos, livros, blogs e sites de internet, colocam-se publicamente como tal e, eventualmente, disputam sentidos relacionados ao estigma e à patologização de suas condutas sexuais. A pesquisa focaliza processos sociais recentes na sociedade brasileira, tendo por objetivo geral colaborar para o conhecimento: 1) de mudanças nas convenções sociais de gênero e de sexualidade; 2) da multiplicidade e heterogeneidade das redes implicadas na produção das categorias relacionadas ao sadomasoquismo erótico e ao BDSM no Brasil no período da pesquisa; 3) da produção de sujeitos e “comunidades” relacionadas à sexualidade e estratégias de legitimação de condutas sexuais, sobretudo no diálogo com o campo científico. Além da análise de livros publicados entre os anos 1980 e 2000, a pesquisa contou com observação de redes de praticantes em ocasiões de sociabilidade online e offline durante o período desta pesquisa e análise de entrevistas e vídeos disponibilizados na internet.

Grounded in my own praxis of how I strive to decolonize my engagement with knowledge production (reading, writing, sensing, and doing) as an independent scholar, and building on Anibal Quijano’s “colonial matrix of power” and Walter Mignolo’s’ concept of “epistemic disobedience”, this article addresses the critical components we must consider if we are to engage with knowledge production and consumption as equals not as submissive minds and souls who have nothing to contribute. The critical components I identify, each addressed in a separate section, include what it really means to decolonize knowledge; why decolonizing language is essential; and how do we decolonize academia. On the latter, the article identifies and addresses specific areas. Those include research inception and funding (e.g. the formation of ideas and funding research projects); the politics of citation (who is citable and who is ignored and why); academic writing and publications; the question of objectivity (the myth that the West is more objective than the rest, which keeps the game unchanged in favor of Western knowledge production); thought and intellectual classification; and the worn-out mantra of “publish or perish”. I close with reflections on how to decolonize other aspects of our daily life such as: reading and writing, relationships, social and professional connections, hobbies, activities, and even travel destinations. I do so because everything is connected and intertwined, and therefore, a holistic approach to decolonize our entire existence is a must. We can’t decolonize knowledge production until we decolonize everything else, and we can’t decolonize anything before we rigorously begin the process of decolonizing knowledge production.

Today’s social movements, such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and AIDS activism, come from long histories of women of color feminist and radical traditions that challenge white supremacist, masculinist, capitalist, militarized, and authoritarian rule. These movements have also been adapted by liberal and mainstream politics at the cost of intersectional and radical traditions, including #AllLivesMatter and the growing attention to white women and men in both #MeToo and AIDS movements. The deflection away from those who suffer the most under structural violences ultimately strengthens rather than transforms our institutions of power. Women of color feminisms and queer and trans of color critiques generate networks of solidarity across institutions by analyzing and shifting the terms of power. By turning to scholarship embedded in histories of organizing that centers women of color and queer and trans people of color, we find roadmaps for accounting and countering the multiple crises that facilitate the AIDS pandemic, including that of knowledge production within academia.

Since its inception as an area studies program instituted by the United States after World War II, Philippine Studies in the University of the Philippines has undergone a radical transformation. From being a neo-colonial program designed to create a venue for the Americans to perpetuate their hegemony in Philippine scholarship, it has become a springboard from which some progressive Filipino intellectuals particularly in the 1970's formally launched the indigenization (read: Filipinization) movement in the Philippine academic community. Recontextualized and reconceptualized as part of the nationalist project, the program, since then, would become a site of engagement of Filipino scholars in the development of our own scholarly tradition. It would take on signif icant epistemological and methodological shifts emphasizing the vital role of Filipino language as primary tool of knowledge production. To map out the extent of this paradigm shift, knowledge production in Filipino both at the undergraduate and graduate levels of the Philippine Studies program is analyzed. Two general directions based on Virgilio Enriquez's SP construct are discernible along this line: (a) "indigenization from within" or the development of our own analytical tool and conceptual framework using our indigenous language and culture as source; and (b) "indigenization from without" or appropriation/adaptation of foreign formulations to local realities. Such production is viewed in the larger context of the development of a "Philippine studies" envisioned by Rizal in the 19 th century and carried on by Filipino scholars over the last f ive decades in their efforts to construct a

Presentation held at the 22nd Workshop on the History and Memory of National Socialist Camps and Extermination Sites in Budapest Oct 21, 2017. The title and topic of this year was "Practices of Memory and Knowledge Production”.

For more information about the workshop:
https://workshopnscampsandexterminationsites.com/22nd-workshop-in-budapest/

The paper will be published in the upcoming collective volume.

This dissertation examines everyday social relations in the settler colonial city of Vancouver. Its contemporary ethnographic focus updates and reworks historical and political analyses that currently comprise the growing body of scholarship on settler colonialism as a distinct socio-political phenomenon. I investigate how non-Aboriginal residents construct and relate to Aboriginal alterity. The study is situated in three ethnographic sites, united by their emphasis on “including” the Aboriginal Other: (1) the 2010 Winter Olympics, which featured high-profile forms of Aboriginal participation (and protest); (2) the Mount Pleasant public library branch, which displays a prominent Aboriginal collection and whose staff works closely with the urban Aboriginal community; and (3) BladeRunners, an inner-city construction program that trains and places Aboriginal street youth in the local construction industry. Participants in this research include non-Aboriginal “inclusion workers” as well as non-Aboriginal patrons at the library, construction workers on a BladeRunners construction placement site, and audiences at Aboriginal Olympic events. I explore how my participants’ affective knowledges shape and are shaped by spatial and racializing processes in the emergent settler colonial present. My analysis reveals how everyday encounters with Aboriginal alterity are produced and experienced through spectacular representations and spectral (or haunting) Aboriginal presence, absence, and possibility in the city. In relation to inclusion initiatives, I argue that discourses of Aboriginal inclusion work to manage and circumscribe Aboriginal difference even as they enable interaction across difference. Ultimately, I suggest that social projects aimed at addressing Aboriginal marginality and recognition must actively engage with and critique non-Aboriginal ideologies, discourses, and practices around racialization, meaning-making, and settler privilege, while working within and against a spectacular and spectralized milieu. This research demonstrates how critical ethnography can be leveraged productively to analyse settler participation in the reproduction and transformation of the colonial project.

31st Swahili  Colloquium ‘Mtandao’ (‘Network’), University of Bayreuth 11-13 May 2018

Mahmoud Ahmed Abdulkadir is an imam, poet and teacher living on Lamu island in Kenya. On the island and by his community he he is considered a social philanthropist.  Indeed, he orientates his people through his knowledge and teachings. Ustadh Mau’s expertise in the Kiamu language and Swahili poetry, along with his astonishing knowledge of the Arabic language, textual sources and Muslim doctrine, have made him the authority to consult, and his library a meeting point where he has supplied several scholars and researchers with information and material.
Mahmoud Mau started reading his father’s poetry when he was a young boy, and this made him start appreciating and composing poetry on his own. Another factor that helped to train him as a poet was the madrasa classes that he attended for nine years, where he learned how to chant and compose qasida to be recited at celebrations of the prophet’s birthday (maulidi).  Like many Swahili scholars, particularly before independence, Ustadh Mahmoud Mau received a Muslim education, as opposed to the ‘formal education’ introduced by Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century ad he himself neither regrets nor hides his upbringing. It is not only his humbleness but also his immense knowledge of Muslim culture and Swahili poetry and linguistic varieties that have, indeed, earned him recognition ‘despite the lack of formal education’, as P. J. L Frankl (2012: 3) has pointed out. 
Mahmoud Mau’s private library, which he has created over the years, is a special place for him. It is full of books, stacked high on every shelf, in Swahili, English and Arabic. He began to order Arabic-language books from Cairo when he was around sixteen years old. Mahmoud Mau’s joy lies in his one thousand books, and this joy permeates his library: Raha yangu iko kwenye zitabu. Ndio maana nimetengwa sehemu hii [makataba] niwe yangu, mimi peke yangu na vitabu vyangu.
Mahmoud Mau’s poems (mashari and tendi) – excluding those composed on commission - count around one hundred fifty and have been listed and stored at the DEVA Archive for African Studies at the University of Bayreuth, his sermons are more than one thousand and fifty dating back to 1986 when he became imam of the oldest mosque on Lamu. How to define the kind of ‘archive’ generated by this polyhedral person in the course of the years? Which are the Arabic, English and Swahili ‘classics’ which have inspired his thinking and his texts, be they sermons or compositions? Still, how far are his poems part of a literary tradition? Lastly, as ‘literature results from conscious acts of men in society’ (Thiong’o 1981:5), how do his writings and words build social relation, resonate to and engage his community?
The aim of my presentation is to share first remarks from workshops, interviews and field researches undertaken with Ustadh Mau in the recent years.

The theory of museology produced over the past half century to define its own moral interpretation of reality has shown to be marked by paradigms created within colonial structures of power. This paper aims to question whether museology has a political centre. Two methods of analysis – author geopolitical backgrounds and bibliography and citations – were chosen to identify the main patterns of geopolitical impact on international museological production through examining key international publications: Dictionnaire encyclopédique de muséologie, The International Handbooks of Museum Studies and ICOFOM Study Series. Our research shows that the theory of museology is still produced according to colonial structures of power.