Research

My current SSHRC-funded research is focussed around four thematic issues - vulnerability, incredulity, ignorance, and trust. These issues intertwine around a commitment to crafting guiding principles for the construction and circulation of knowledge that foster democratic, respectful cohabitation: a thought that concludes the Introduction and runs through my 2006 book, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location. The current project extends that thread to show how the issues that structure my argument are operative throughout the rhetorical spaces of western societies, regulating knowledge projects, sometimes tacitly, sometimes more explicitly, in ways that complicate “doing epistemic justice” to people, places, and situations.

In the hegemonic epistemic imaginaryof the affluent white western world, the knowledge claims of especially vulnerable members of societies, the evidence - particularly the experiential evidence - they present, and hence their attempts to confer and receive trust, tend, variously, to be thwarted, ignored, silenced, subjugated. Thus my inquiry is animated by questions about the interlocking structures of authority and expertise that govern institutional, social, communal, and individual projects of producing, circulating, and “using”or appealing to knowledge, and about the circumstances and responsibilities of knowers situated in dominant and/or subordinate positions, within those structures. My purpose is not so much to apply the theory I have developed in Ecological Thinking and elsewhere, but to show, case by case, how its explanatory resources make possible a productive re-engagement with the oppressions and suppressions these social-conceptual structures sustain.

The “ignorance” theme addresses a “politics of unknowing”, enacted in superimposing an epistemic grid upon people, practices, vulnerabilities, abuses, and injustices, thereby claiming to “know” them and to act knowledgeably, while blocking possibilities of knowing well across diversity. The literature of economic development details numerous “unknowing” impositions of the values of affluent groups or societies on Others whose circumstances differ so radically from theirs that the “knowledge” informs harmful rather than beneficial policies and practices. Honouring the exacerbated vulnerability of the disenfranchised, the marginalized, requires interrogating the power structures that sustain such stereotype-governed unknowing; analysing the social-political ecology of its persistence.