This Introduction is written by Marianne Ping Huang. This page is designed by Anna Villarica.

Introduction

‘Intersectionality' (race, gender, class) can as shown in Unit I be seen as entanglements of inequity, which can not be approached in siloed ways. Sex and gender issues typically cannot be understood without considering race and class, and race and class cannot be understood unless we acknowledge that our practices, unfolding through knowledge technologies and systems, also imply knowledge paradigms vested in long histories of coloniality, the structures of which continue to prevail. Thus, we must approach such entanglements of knowledge inequality much the same way that we approach other complex problems, e.g. anthropocene entanglements. Of the latter Donna Haraway has famously advised to ‘stay with the trouble’ and do knowledge work through ‘string figures’ (Haraway, 2016; Museum Fatigue, 2020).

We know string figure games as the children’s game of ‘cat’s cradle’, played with a loop of string or yarn in rounds of pattern making – from one pair of hands to the next. String figure games are found all over the world and the technique is the same, but the patterns differ and the way Haraway reference string figures as patterns we weave together, in so many ways covers what we are practicing in this course – in order to stay with the trouble of social justice in knowledge production – by adding in ideas, theories, stories, practices from projects and places across the world in a continuous weaving, recognizing that we can no longer claim linear or privileged pathways to universal knowledge. When speaking of na’atl’o’, the Navajo string games, Haraway writes:

These string figures are thinking as well as making practices, pedagogical practices and cosmological performances. Some Navajo thinkers describe string games as one kind of patterning for for restoring hózhó, a term imperfectly translated into English as “harmony”, “beauty”, “order”, and “right relations to the world,.” It matters which ideas we think other ideas with [my italics] my thinking or making cat’s cradle with na’atl’o’ is not an innocent universal gesture, but a risky proposition in relentless historical contingency. And these contingencies include abundant histories of conquest, resistance, recuperation, and resurgence. (Haraway 2016, 14-15)

Our knowledge institutions, knowledge systems and the way we manage them are more often than not considered universal and objective. However, from the perspective of the history of science, our knowledge institutions, knowledge systems and technologies as well as the practices put in place for knowledge production reveal entanglements of embedded coloniality, racialisation, gender inequality and class distinction which pervade the discourse of universalism and the structures of ‘objectivism’. Intersectional issues and entanglements are structural and lie deep in our institutions and our systems and practices, and unless we become aware we will, unconsciously, reproduce historical biases through inherited and biased knowledge systems and technologies in the claim of universal knowledge. So, to start thinking with others as proposed in the image of string figures, we need to consider and disrupt this idea of universal and objective knowledge – and its foundation in a particular paradigm of knowledge, which gained hegemony over hundreds of years of colonialism, suppressing other knowledge systems,  as part of colonization of territories and peoples. 

1.Coloniality, Local histories, Ecologies of Knowledge

The definition of science and the knowledge paradigm we know and practice within European/Western Culture began in the 15th Century and has often been attributed to the European Renaissance and the revival of classics – philosophy, poetry, poetics, and mathematics – much of which came to us through translation of Greek manuscripts, retrieved from Arabian libraries. But, our knowledge paradigm is also unthinkable without the European colonizing powers going towards the East, the West and the South, creating a sourcing network of knowledge items structured around power, and consequently developing knowledge institutions such as universities and academies, libraries, museums and archives as a result of colonial exploitation and trade. ‘Data’, documents, and artifacts gradually accumulated at these Western centers of knowledge, building over time an institutional framework which made it easier to accumulate more. 

[...] during the period 1500 to 2000, one local history, that of Western civilization, built itself as the point of arrival and owner of human history. Ownership was expressed by building a system of knowledge as if it were the guardian of all knowledges, past and present [...] (Mignolo 2012, x)

Western epistemic, economic, political and cultural hegemony was possible because the construction and management of knowledge was in the hands and heads of European actors, in European languages and supported by European institutions. ‘Westerncentrism of knowledge’ means that sustainable knowledge was cast in six modern European imperial languages based on Greek and Latin. This is not a geographical but an epistemic concept. (Mignolo 2013, 10)

Walter Mignolo, author of Local Histories/Global Designs (2000/2012), The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (2021) and co-author with Catherine E. Walsh of On Decoloniality. Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (2018) has vastly theorized the concept of decoloniality as an ontological and epistemological concept. This concept, which gradually over the past few decades, has encouraged us to more broadly think of knowledge and knowledge systems as not being universal, but rooted in local histories and epistemes, countering a colonial history that over a period of more than 500 years hegemonized the many knowledges of those living in coloniality, in the image of Western civilization. Mignolo argues that coloniality is the dark side of modernity, and that Western epistemic hegemony of the spheres of culture, knowledge, aesthetics, and sensibility – caused not only other  (kinds of) knowledge to be  muted, but also was instrumental in the disappearance of local knowledge (epistemicide) – that has been a significant driver of Western political and economic expansion. 

What Mignolo understands as ‘Global Designs’ are a direct result of  Western civilizations  and coloniality suppressing local histories and causing epistemicide. This has been undertaken and  “disguised with the rhetoric of modernity, of salvation and progress.” (Mignolo 2012, xvi) . As  a remedy Mignolo proposes ‘border thinking’ which is thinking and doing knowledge while staying in the border. Epistemic borders open in moments when the imaginary of modernity - in the spheres of culture, knowledge, aesthetics – cracks to reveal its Janus-faced darker side of coloniality. Such moments of border thinking allow us to acknowledge a plethora of local perspectives within the same border, “not only what is visible in the ‘ground’, but what has been hidden from view in the ‘underground’ by successive layers mapping people and territories” (Mignolo 2012, 24). Border thinking is an actional epistemic approach, it may be multidisciplinary but is seldom solely academic, as it goes beyond or is delinked from disciplinary territorialities, aiming at “doing decoloniality” and changing structurally the perimeters of knowledge.

Border thinking with local histories takes other tools than what we find within Western knowledge institutions. It is a structural disruption of the paradigm which went from Western knowledge centers to the East, South, and to the Americas in a dispersal of the institutional paradigms which became one of the backbones of coloniality. For intersectional communities, communities of color, and indigenous communities, information retrieval through existing knowledge systems is often an experience of being made invisible reinforcing the experiences of such communities as being undervalued as legitimate sources of knowledge, and ones that cannot provide unique insights into interconnecting systems of social and colonial injustice. This is where colonialism and hundreds of years of knowledge extraction and epistemicide by colonizing powers have turned into coloniality as a legacy of long-standing patterns of power that still define sociocultural and economic structures and relations, as well as knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. 

Coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 243)

While the struggles for decolonization characterized many of the 20th Centuries social justice movements claiming equality, decolonial thinkers take these struggles towards the liberation from coloniality as power structures of knowledge, identity, and being – including institutions such as universities. 

Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, author of Epistemic Freedom in Africa (2018), has prominently theorized the conceptual and actual power structures and border zones between the epistemologies of colonialism, coloniality, and practices of decoloniality in academia and beyond:
 

As an epistemological movement, it has always been overshadowed by hegemonic Euro-North American-centric intellectual thought and social theories. As a political movement, it has consistently been subjected to surveillance of global imperial designs and colonial matrices of power. But today, decoloniality is remerging at a time when the erstwhile hegemonic Euro-North American-centric modernity and its dominant epistemology are experiencing an epistemological break. This epistemic break highlights how Euro-North American-centric modernity has created modern problems of which it has no modern solutions and how theories/knowledges generated from a Euro-North American-centric context have become exhausted if not obstacles to the understanding of contemporary human issues. (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015, 485)

In 2022,  Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni contributed to a series of twelve video-interviews on Decolonial Thinking, in the ninth interview, on Ecologies of Knowledge, African Archive, Ndlovu-Gatsheni states amongst other that decolonizing 'means that we change the archive, from which we draw, and that also means that we recover that which has been displaced. We need to remember what has been dismembered [...] Therefore we need to look for other knowledges to rescue ourselves from the epistemic crises we find ourselves in. [...] One knowledge system from one civilization is no longer adequate.' (4:13)

In the interview above, Ndlovu-Gatsheni also talks of the emergence of “ecologies of knowledge”,  that recovering local knowledges which have displaced, means putting them towards remedying  the epistemic crisis brought on by the institutional hegemony of Western-centric knowledge.

According to Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Western-centric knowledge

is no longer adequate to the problems the world is facing therefore we need to look for other knowledges so that we rescue ourselves from the systemic and epistemic crisis we are in. So it is in this context, you draw from Islamic knowledge, you draw from African knowledge, you draw from Indian knowledge, you draw from indigenous peoples knowledge. [...] It means that the problems facing humanity are so sophisticated that one knowledge system from one civilisation is no longer adequate. (4:58)

2. Changing the Archive: Who Studies, Whom Is Studied

Unit III is our contribution to highlight how interventions into specific aspects of existing knowledge systems and technologies can reveal less linear, but more ‘complete’ epistemic  systems and production which are similar in practice to string figuring across knowledges and border thinking, opening ecologies of knowledge towards the systemic entanglements of coloniality and intersectionality. In this way, historians of the history of science, such as Donna Haraway may speak about  disrupting ‘violent hierarchies’, particularly about who has the opportunity to study and whom is studied.

Let us start with the question of how embodied knowledge of exclusion or tokenization is a significant and situated knowledge, pointing to the sensitivity towards lived experience as a knowledge form (Mignolo) when approaching structural exclusion from knowledge spaces. This question is about what counts as knowledge, as well as acknowledging situated points of view within the idea of rational knowledge and that the object of knowledge can turn into a subject of knowledge. In her seminal essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” (Sister Outsider, 1984) intersectional feminist and poet activist Audre Lorde, asked, “What does it mean when tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of the same patriarchy?”. And then she  answers: “It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.” Lorde wrote her essay after having been invited as a speaker to an academic conference in 1979, only to find herself the token Black Feminist and Lesbian Artist in a diversity panel. Issues of tokenism mistaken for representation, as experienced in the public spaces of knowledge production, is where intersectional inequality is ‘felt’ in an embodied way. Frantz Fanon wrote about this in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) in which Fanon analyzes and relates the lived experiences of being Black. Fanon’s phenomenological approach is adopted by Sara Ahmed in “The phenomenology of whiteness” (2007) in which she takes such experiences into an analysis of institutional spaces: 

After all, institutions provide collective or public spaces. When we describe institutions as ‘being’ white (institutional whiteness), we are pointing to how institutional spaces are shaped by the proximity of some bodies and not others: white bodies gather, and cohere to form the edges of such spaces. When I walk into university meetings that is just what I encounter. Sometimes I get used to it. [...] Whiteness is only invisible for those who inhabit it, or those who get so used to its inhabitance that they learn not to see it, even when they are not it. (Ahmed 2007, 157). 

Another point made by Sara Ahmed, in On Being Included (2012) is that meager representation is still an issue in knowledge institutions and even if these institutions have equipped themselves with diversity officers and committees, ‘commitment to diversity’ remains symbolic or ‘non-performative’, as the institutional commitments do not bring about what they name. On Being Included is based on Ahmed’s interviews with diversity workers and practitioners in higher education institutions and on her own work as a diversity officer. One conclusion to be drawn from Ahmed’s empirical work in On Being Included is that diversity counts as an institutional value proposition, but that  representation is not how inequality and exclusion are solved structurally. Much the same point for another seminal branch of knowledge capacity building, the field of library and information studies (LIS) in the US, has been put forward by Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight, editors of Knowledge Justice. Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory (2021):

Like most other fields, library and information studies (LIS) has framed the race problem as one of diverse representation of racialized bodies, rather than one of racial power, domination, and privilege. [...] This understanding lacks a critical understanding of racial power and how it operates in the field, which is unsurprisingly considered how radical justice efforts centered on race have materialized in the US society. (Leung and López-McKnight 2021, 2) 

In her 1988 book, Situated Knowledges, Donna Haraway offers a critique of the existing science paradigm introducing the notion of ‘situated knowledges’, which is also embodied knowledge, to replace scientific objectivism. This seminal text was part of Haraway’s feminist (and activist) critique of Reaganist politics and the exclusion of intersectional and embodied experiences as pathways to knowledge:

I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people's lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. Only the god trick is forbidden. (Haraway 1988, 589)

Haraway argues that claims for universal knowledge and disembodied objectivity is the hyper-bias of western knowledge systems which she finds schrouded in metaphors of abstract vision – also described as knowledge from “the point of view of the unmarked [...] the master, the Man, the One God (Haraway 1988, 587). In the place of the ‘god trick’ of indifferent objectivism, Haraway argues for a clearly positioned and responsible knowledge production where what has counted as ‘objects’ for science, may become actors of situated insights. Haraway in no way discards rational science, rather, she calls for a new rationale by pointing to scientific abstraction and disembodiment - one might add ‘disengagement’ or indifference - to this hyper-bias, which has guided the West for hundreds of years with the consequence of excluding the partial, the embodied, the limited or muted voices, the powerless: what we may recognise as the communities being robbed of the knowledge which entered science as objects, as artifacts, becoming  collections and specimens to be studied:

We seek not the knowledges ruled by phallogocentrism (nostalgia for the presence of the one true Word) and disembodied vision. We seek those ruled by partial sight and limited voice – not partiality for its own sake but, rather, for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible. Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals. The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular. (Haraway 1988, 590)

Knowledge institutions create and sustain knowledge systems. This is also true with our technical knowledge infrastructures, our digital and software interactions with resources, as well as with fellow knowledge seekers and creators of these systems. Digital information systems provide library and archival services, virtual knowledge environments and labs, digital infrastructures. As it goes for analogue spaces, we also experience virtual or digital spaces as excluding certain bodies and knowledges and as such un-consciously biasing research, education and social innovation when moving further into a digital transition. 

Social Justice principles applied to knowledge systems such as archives, libraries, databases, and infrastructures go beyond issues of representation and towards critical interactions and interventions. The epistemicide of colonized and excluded cultures and the hierarchies of who studies and whom is studied, are embedded in knowledge institutions throughout the West – from the physical institution in terms of how objects and collections have been displayed, cataloged, and described, to new digital infrastructures in terms of the metadata standards utilized to the  search systems providing access. In his 2006-article “Introducing critical race theory to archival discourse”, Anthony W. Dunbar suggests a number of ‘disrupting’ approaches when introducing Critical Race Theory to unearth biases in archives, from researching counter-stories to official documentation and searching for micro-aggressions across the system of appraisal of archival records. Dunbar is looking for “ the sensibility and consciousness [...] to explain cultural contexts beyond traditional institutional perspectives'' and to acknowledge [...] that institutional memory is a negotiated space with multiple points of interpretation” (Dunbar 2006, 117). 

[...] the records continuum model suggests that when a record is created, it establishes at least two identities, that of the documenter (or records creator) and the documented (the subject of the record). At this point, it should be clear that both the documenter and the documented have different perspectives or vantage points of the ‘‘transaction’’ that a record is documenting. As a result it is also possible that the differing perspectives can constitute a development of different realities. In some cases, there may be differing if not conflicting documentation because those who are documented can have institutionally-created or self-created records of the same transactions that the documenter has recorded. (Dunbar 2006, 124)

To Dunbar, the aim of introducing critical race theory to archival discourse (and consequently, archival practices) is one of democratizing archives from a structural point of view, in providing “an opportunity to discuss records multi-dimensionally as products, such as recordkeeping vehicles and artifacts of evidence, as well as processes, namely transactions and identity development” (Dunbar 2006,124). This approach is based on the assumption that records can be made to provide multiple dimensions, if the aforementioned power structure of ‘who studies’ and ‘whom is studied’ is recognized as an imbalance between the records creator and the subject of the record which can be disrupted.

Unit III will, as the other units in our Social Justice in the Digital Humanities course, offer a number of case studies highlighting new knowledge practices, going beyond or disrupting a Western knowledge paradigm, as well as its history of gathering ‘objects’ for study and for building the institutions themselves around stored artifacts, specimens, and data. 

Author Bio*:

Marianne Ping Huang is Associate Professor at the School for Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. Her field of research covers cultural and creative ecosystems, digital cultures and creative learning communities, investigative aesthetics and artistic interventions, sustainability and coloniality in new knowledge production, She is currently working on CRAFT-IT4SD (Horizon Europe 2024-26) for sustainable textiles and fashion, enabled by crafts techniques and immersive technologies.

Design Bio Notes*:

Anna Villarica is a research assistant on the #dariahTeach project. She is a junior lecturer at Maastricht University currently teaching courses on design thinking, digital transformations, the philosophy of technology, research skills, and museology. She received her MA in Media Studies Digital Cultures from Maastricht University and her BA in Communications and New Media from the National University of Singapore. While she does not specialise in anything (yet), she loves all things digital and is always learning and creating.

*Bio(s) and affiliation(s) are accurate at the time of writing

Bibliography

• Ahmed, Sara. "A Phenomenology of Whiteness." Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 149-168.
• Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included. Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012
• Dunbar, Anthony W. “Introducing Critical Race Theory to Archival Discourse. Getting the Conversation Started.” Archives and Museum Informatics 6, no. 1 (March 2006):109-129,
• Haraway, Donna J. 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective', Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-599.
• Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016
• Leung, Sofia Y., and Jorge R. López-McKnight. Knowledge Justice. Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021
• Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “On the Coloniality of Being.” Cultural Studies 2, 2-3 (2007): 240-270
• Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012
• Mignolo, Walter D. "Re-emerging, decentring and delinking. Shifting the geographies of sensing, believing and knowing." Platform 005. IBRAAZ (2013).
• Museum Fatigue, Making String Figures Amid the Troubles (on Zoom), 20 September 2020. https://museumfatigue.org/2020/04/09/making-string-figures-amid-the-troubles-on-zoom/
• Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. “Decoloniality as the Future of Africa”. History Compass 13, no. 10 (October 2015): 485-496
• The Global Center of Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability (GCSMUS). "Decolonial Thinking with Prof. Dr. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni." Last modified July 24, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnKHmFi6Tcx9FWO0Xa1sw1bxlvxpYDor6