"Decentralizing Knowledges examines the way modern western thought has attempted to bring all knowledge under its own order, a process of placing all thinking into a single colonial system and looks at the way that this centering process might be undone.The contributors present a complex, multiple and uneven set of decentering processes, that gradually open thinking to what has been excluded, whether that exclusion was gender, race, or sexuality based, or indigenous or culturally different. The collection makes a case for "epistemic decentralizing," or the redistribution and reorientation of resources, institutional support, and authority to peripheral actors, emphasizing the agency to produce new knowledge. The book's theoretical and empirical analysesprovide a comprehensive overview of the complex processes required to challenge mainstream thinking, as well as the contending nature of the initiatives analyzed. Decentralizing Knowledges clearly points out that the processes of decentering and decentralization are useful analytical tools to account for widely documented epistemic asymmetries in the social sciences and humanities"--
Decentralizing Knowledges argues that epistemic decentralizingthe diverse infrastructures and nonhegemonic practices of knowledge productionshould be a main objective in studying the specific infrastructures and practices that make such decentering possible.
Decentralizing Knowledges argues that epistemic decentralizingthe diverse infrastructures and nonhegemonic practices of knowledge productionshould be a main objective in studying the specific infrastructures and practices that make such decentering possible.
Recenzijas
I can think of no other volume that takes up epistemic decentralization as its primary focus. Building on feminist standpoint theory, actor network theory, agnotology, and calls to decolonize social theory, Decentralizing Knowledges will attract great attention from a range of scholars in science and technology studies and beyond. - Heather Paxson, editor of (Eating Beside Ourselves: Thresholds of Foods and Bodies) This volume addresses an important cluster of questions about decentralization and decentering as methods, practices, and theories in the context of decolonial approaches to science and technology. It makes a clear case that commitments to decentralization and decentering make different demands than inclusivity in relation to race, region, economies, agencies, and other intertwined axes of power and knowledge. Important to both the politics and scholarship of decolonial science and technology studies, Decentralizing Knowledges will have a broader audience in cultural studies and anthropology, and among people committed to more globally inclusive knowledge practices. - Donna J. Haraway, author of (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene)
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Epistemic Decentralizing: Distributed Agency in a Context of
Knowledge Asymmetries / Leandro Rodriguez Medina and Sandra Harding 1
I. Thinking from the Margins
1. Extractivist Epistemologies / Linda MartĶn Alcoff 31
2. Epistemic Decentralizing: Revisiting Knowledge Asymmetries from the
Periphery / Leandro Rodriguez Medina 62
3. The Urgency and Benefits of Decentering and Decentralizing Knowledge
Production: Knowledges from the Margins and the Social Studies of Ignorance /
Daniel Lee Kleinman 92
4. Making Difference at the Edge / Sharon Traweek
II. Intrastructuring Postcolonialities
5. Colonial Struggle and the Infrastructures of Knowledge: A Story from
SĮpmi / Liv Ųstmo, Johan Henrik M. Buljo, Line Kalak, and John Law 131
6. Remooring Academia: Postcolonial and Infrastructural Challenges / Angela
Okune, Duygu Kadoan, Aalok Khandekar, Maka Suarez, and Kim Fortun 153
7. Agroecological Innovation: Decentralizing and Democratizing Knowledge in
Brazils Agrifood Economy / Les Leidow 184
III. Creating Alternative Spaces
8. Therapeutic Space as Knowledge Space: Decentralizing Biomedicine in
Inpatient Hospice and Palliative Care / Wen-Hua Kuo 221
9. Decentered Scientific Agendas and Decentralized Actors and Capacities in
Patagonian Science / Ronald Cancino, Cristina Flores, ElĶas Barticevic, and
Hebe Vessuri 239
10. A State-Led Strategy of Decentralization: The BRICS Experience / Wiebke
Keim and Ari Sitas 261
Contributors 289
Index 299
Leandro Rodriguez Medina is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Universidad Alberto Hurtado.
Sandra Harding (1935-2025) was Distinguished Research Professor Emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles.
