I See You, You See Me

Playful Self-Discipline in the South African Academy

in Theoria
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Lindsay Kelland Senior Lecturer, Rhodes University, South Africa l.kelland@ru.ac.za

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Abstract

In this article, I explore the potential of reciprocal relations of recognition of epistemic agency to respond to calls to transform pedagogical practice in the South African academy and, in particular, to disrupt ongoing epistemic injustice in the academy. First, I put forward a picture of recognition as a practice underpinned by an attitude of playful self-discipline and spend some time elucidating what this attitude involves. Second, I turn to a description of epistemic agents as socially and historically situated knowers with normative status. Third, I bring these discussions together to speak about the practice of recognising our own and one another's epistemic agency. And, finally, I explore how intentionally engaging in this practice might serve to respond to calls to transform pedagogical practice and address epistemic injustice in the academy.

Epistemic becoming necessitates curriculum decisions and pedagogies centred on the development of student identities in terms of knowing, acting and being

Quinn and Vorster 2019

In ongoing calls to transform South African higher education institutions (HEIs), I am especially interested in those calls relating to epistemic (in)justice in the academy. I aim to be responsive to my students’ and colleagues’ concerns that most academics in South Africa, myself included, continue to perpetuate epistemic injustice in the academy by foregrounding and reinforcing certain (hegemonic) epistemic frameworks and excluding and silencing others. I am especially interested in responding to my students’ calls for an academy that speaks to them and their place, one that is not experienced as seeking to erase the ways of thinking, knowing, being in and perceiving the world that they bring to it, sometimes for the first time.

In this article, I hope to add to the conversation roused by these calls, focussing on transforming pedagogical practice in South African HEIs through fostering reciprocal relationships of recognition of epistemic agency in the academy.1 In so doing, I am especially inspired by Kathy Luckett and colleagues’ recent call for academics to explore how ‘forms of pedagogy . . . might be used to operationalise decolonial ideas . . . such that classroom practices – as well as course content – might shift’ (2019: 29).

I begin by unpacking what I mean by recognition before turning to the concept of a knower or epistemic agent and their responsibilities and subsequently to how recognition of epistemic agency could transform pedagogical practice in the South African academy. I focus in particular on what it might mean for different players in the university space – academics and students – to recognise or see one another as historically and socially situated epistemic agents with normative status in the academy and what this practice of reciprocal recognition could do to further the transformation of pedagogy in South African HEIs.

Unpacking Recognition

The concept of recognition is explored in numerous conversations in philosophy. Given the wealth of available literature, it helps me to group thinkers roughly according to their focus. Of course, these focal points overlap in interesting ways, especially when thinkers whom I superficially group differently come into conversation with one another. Roughly, though, I have divided the literature as follows. First, philosophers have discussed recognition when trying to understand or describe the nature of the self; among them, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1807), who is concerned with the establishment of the self's certainty of itself as conscious and transcendent being in the world; Jean-Paul Sartre (1943) and Simone de Beauvoir (1949), in their examination of the ambiguous human condition; and Axel Honneth (1992), whose work on recognition focusses on our individual development of self-esteem, self-confidence and self-respect in both public and private spaces. Second, recognition plays a central role in conversations seeking to understand the nature of social, political and economic justice. The wealth of literature exploring the multiculturalism debate, the equally large body of literature devoted to ‘identity politics’ and Nancy Fraser's (2003) extensive work on the relationship between recognition and redistribution are just a few examples of conversations in which recognition plays a central role in thinking about justice.2 Recognition has also begun to play a role in trending discussions of epistemic justice, as we will see.

Relatedly, and moving between these focal points, recognition also features prominently in conversations about ethics or the normative realm, particularly in discussions of our relations with others or the other. Key moments in these conversations are, again, Hegel's (1807) master–slave dialectic, Emanuel Levinas’ (1961) discussion of the primary ethical encounter with ‘the face’ of the other, and Judith Butler's (2009) recent work on the normative implications of recognising our shared precariousness, on the one hand, and the fact of differentially distributed precarity, on the other – or failing to do so, as the case may be. Butler's work takes me to feminist and other critical theorists’ focus on attempting to recognise or understand the situation of the other – for instance, the suffering of the other and one's complicity in this suffering. Most notable, for my purposes, are those engaged in this conversation who propose the role of loving perception in attempts at recognition. It is exceptionally noteworthy, I believe, that thinkers from Marilyn Frye (1983) and Maria Lugones (1987, 2010) to George Yancy (2015), bell hooks (1994) and Audre Lorde (2009) all eventually turn to love in their work addressing these subjects.

This last conversation, perhaps more so than others, has had an enormous impact on my understanding of recognition and informs much of what I say in the rest of this article. Indeed, understanding the other, the other's suffering and my own complicity in this suffering (through, for example, epistemic marginalisation, exclusion and alienation) spoke directly to the concerns from which my interest in the concept of recognition arose. In the next section, I draw on this conversation (and on philosophical thought on attention that brings certain concepts employed in this conversation into sharp relief) to speak about recognition as an intentional practice aimed at loving perception. In the subsequent sections, I turn to what I mean by epistemic agency and then to what the recognition of epistemic agency might amount to. Finally, I turn to how this practice could contribute to transforming pedagogical practice in the South African academy.

Recognition: A Practice Supported by an Attitude

Engaging with the numerous philosophical accounts of recognition available, especially those of Frye and Lugones, I am struck by the effort required to recognise the other or their situation or suffering, which one might miss upon first glance. Indeed, given the centrality of metaphors surrounding perception and the extensive use of language that speaks to sight and ‘seeing’ in this conversation,3 we might mistakenly believe that our task in recognising the other is a relatively simple one. After all, the experience of sight – of seeing – is not standardly thought to be in our control; the ordinary individual assumes that they simply see what is before them.4 But the seeing that is spoken of in this conversation is not the simple reception of what is outside – although, as we will see, receptivity remains essential – but is rather an intentional act, a skill, perhaps even a virtue, that we must develop through ongoing practice. Moreover, as we will see, this is a practice supported by a particular attitude towards both oneself and what is seen that does not come naturally to us. Indeed, on these accounts, the practice of recognition requires overcoming what we might, following David Foster Wallace (2009), call our ‘natural default settings’ – it requires displacing our ego or ‘holding it in abeyance’ (Freeman 2015) to see the other, or what is other on their or its own terms.5

Marilyn Frye (1983) coins the concepts of ‘arrogant perception’ and ‘loving perception’ in her attempts to think through the impact of patriarchal oppression on women or, put differently, to raise the question of what women might be like outside of the confines of arrogant perception – a kind of being and perceiving that instrumentalises and objectifies the other in light of the seer's own interests, projects, values, beliefs and so on or, in Frye's terms, that ‘grafts the substance’ of the other to the self.6 In contrast, to attempt to perceive lovingly, for Frye, is to attempt to see the other on their terms instead of on one's own. It is to see them as independent from the self and the self's projects, desires, etc., which requires a particular form of self-discipline. The self must, Frye insists, acknowledge the boundaries of itself in relation to the other to be able to see the other on its own terms. The other must be understood as distinct from the self and its projects, as separate from and not in relation to the self. In Frye's words:

The loving eye knows the independence of the other. It is the eye of a seer who knows that nature is indifferent. It is the eye of one who knows that to know the seen, one must consult something other than one's own will and interests and fears and imagination. One must look at the thing. One must look and listen and check and question. (Frye 1983: 75)

Maria Lugones is both inspired by Frye's work on loving perception and critical of her focus on the independence of the other in our attempts to recognise them. Indeed, it is her independence from her mother and white women's independence from other women – notably women of colour – that concerns her in ‘Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception’ and that she describes as a failure to identify with other women and, thereby, a failure to love them (1987: 4). For Lugones, we have all been raised to perceive one another arrogantly, particularly across differences like race and culture, and so fail to identify with or recognise one another (1987: 5). However, she is nevertheless moved by the idea of loving perception and what it could mean for women to betray arrogant perception (1987: 18) and the hegemonic culture(s) built upon it and learn, instead, to love one another – to perceive one another lovingly – across socially salient differences. In a Hegelian moment, Lugones argues that we could come to be through learning to love one another (1987: 8) – through genuinely striving to see one another lovingly – which would require a disciplined commitment to perceptual change and reciprocal learning.

As a decolonial feminist interested in pursuing a pluralistic feminism, Lugones (1987, 2010; see also Lugones and Spelman 1983) is aware of the difficulties associated with the idea of simple identification and evokes an image of the reflective activity she is interested in through the metaphor of ‘world’-travelling. For Lugones, a ‘world’ is a particular construction of reality beset with norms and discourse and inhabited by flesh-and-blood people7 that one can move in and out of wilfully (1987: 10–11) and be more or less at ease within (1987: 12).8 Lugones mentions a number of ways of being at ease in a ‘world’ including understanding the rules or norms or ‘being a fluent speaker’ in a ‘world’, endorsing these norms; being ‘humanly bonded’ in a ‘world’; or having a shared history in a ‘world’. She warns that being too at ease in a ‘world’ can be dangerous because this ease can stand in the way of the will to travel to other ‘worlds’. She brings this metaphor to life by speaking to the experience(s) of women of colour and Latina women in the US context, who, out of ‘necessity and survival’ (1987: 11) are forced on a daily basis to move in and through ‘worlds’ characterised by hostile white supremacist patriarchy. She argues that we can learn from this ‘world’-travelling and, in fact, can deliberately exercise this skill to recognise or see one another lovingly – that is, on the other's terms instead of our own. By travelling into and through the ‘world’ of another, we attempt to see this ‘world’ as it is constructed or perceived by the other, including how one's self is constructed or perceived in this ‘world’. It is only through this ‘world’-travelling that she thinks we can identify with one another or fully acknowledge the subjectivity of one another. For our purposes, when thinking about the ‘knowledge project’ of the academy, it is particularly interesting to note that, for Lugones, it is only once we have done this that we can begin to create meaning together – to be fully subject to and with one another – even when subjected to various forces.9

Lugones makes a significant contribution to the conversation by emphasising the necessity of adopting a particular attitude when attempting to travel to the ‘world’ of another. She describes this attitude as playful and spends some time explaining what she means by play, contrasting it with the agonistic sense of play at work in sports, for example. In her words:

Positively, the playful attitude involves openness to surprise, openness to being a fool, openness to self-construction or reconstruction of the ‘worlds’ we inhabit playfully. Negatively, playfulness is characterised by uncertainty, lack of self-importance, absence of rules or a not taking rules as sacred, a not worrying about competence and a lack of abandonment to a particular construction of oneself, others and one's relation to them. (Lugones 1987: 17)

In this and other work, Lugones recommends the pursuit of an attitude towards being in and perceiving the world that is far from our natural default settings. As seen above, she describes an attitude of abandonment of self – to surprise and reconstruction – ‘abandonment to a particular construction of oneself, others and one's relation to them’. This abandonment requires openness and vulnerability in the face of the other, which she describes in the quote above and which is brought to life in the game she describes when elucidating her understanding of play. However, while ‘playful’ this attitude nevertheless depends, as indeed Frye insists, on a kind of self-discipline.

Recall that Frye speaks of the discipline required to recognise the boundaries between the self and the other – between the self's projects and projections of meaning and those of others or the other. While Lugones is critical of the independence of the other that Frye insists upon, she is nevertheless informed by the picture of attention that Frye paints. To return to Frye's words:

The loving eye is one that pays a certain sort of attention. This attention can require a discipline but not a self-denial. The discipline is one of self-knowledge, knowledge of the scope and boundary of the self. What is required is that one know what are one's interests, desires and loathings, one's projects, hungers, fears and wishes, and that one know what is and what is not determined by these. In particular, it is a matter of being able to tell one's own interests from those of others and of knowing where one's self leaves off and another begins. (Frye 1983: 75)

Frye's influence on Lugones’ thinking on the relationship between recognition and attention is especially clear in ‘Sisterhood and Friendship as Feminist Models’, where Lugones and Rosezelle argue that:

Friendship across positions of inequality has to be worked for rather than discovered or found. One needs to shift the focus of one's attention in ways that are epistemically very demanding. The shift in focus requires a dislodging of the centrality of one's position in the racist, ethnocentric, capitalist, patriarchal state in one's own self-concept. This entails a profound transformation of one's self. (Lugones and Rosezelle 1995: 143)

Both Frye and Lugones speak about ‘paying a certain sort of attention’ that simultaneously knows and holds as well as shifts away from the self. It seems that for both, a shift in the focus of one's attention is required for recognition. Or, put differently, that recognition depends upon or even is a particular sort of attention.

Thinking about the relationship between recognition and attention led me to the work of Mark Freeman and, through him, back to the thought of Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil. The resonance between Murdoch and Weil on attention and Frye and Lugones on recognition is remarkable. On all accounts, a significant role is played by ‘unselfing’ or holding the self in abeyance to perceive the other or what is other from the self, uncontaminated by the ego – again, allowing what is other to emerge on its own terms – through the act of paying attention.10 For these thinkers, to properly give one's attention one needs to ‘unself’ or displace the ego – something that, while automatic and incidental at times, can also be deliberately willed and practised, indeed ought to be so if we want to lead ethical lives. Freeman (2015) draws on Murdoch's description of a kestrel alighting outside her window and pulling her attention away from her ruminations on a slight to her reputation. In that moment, her attention is beheld by the kestrel, and everything else is insignificant. Importantly, while this can happen when we least expect it – as in Murdoch's experience of the kestrel – we often have to will ourselves to invest our attention or to deliberately practise paying attention in this way – to ‘intentionally behold and in beholding be beheld’ (2015: 168).

Given what has been said above, the picture of recognition informing the rest of this article is that of a practice that one develops over time – one of attempting to perceive the other or what is other lovingly – supported by an attitude at once playful and disciplined. Again, this is a practice that one must work towards developing, since it is supported by an attitude that does not come naturally to us – that involves overcoming our ‘natural default settings’. Developing this practice would also involve coming to understand when it is appropriate or inappropriate to adopt this attitude. As Lugones rightly cautions, there are ‘worlds’ in which it would be foolish to be playful (1987: 17).

Epistemic Agents and Their Responsibilities

Let us now turn to what I mean by epistemic agency. What does it mean to be an epistemic agent? And what responsibilities are entailed by this particular form of agency? First, I briefly touch on Matthew Congdon's (2018) account of the normative status of knowers as epistemic agents within socio-epistemic practices. Second, I turn to conversations about the situated knower emerging from feminist standpoint epistemology and decolonial and postcolonial feminisms to further elucidate what it might mean, following Congdon, to afford knowers their rightful place within socio-epistemic practices. Understanding what this entails enables us to think more clearly about the recognition of epistemic agency in the academy and how this practice could transform pedagogy in South African HEIs.

Over the past two decades, talk of epistemic agency has garnered momentum with trending discussions of epistemic (in)justice. Congdon (2018) elucidates the concept by exploring the normative status of knowers as epistemic agents. According to Congdon, a knower has normative status in at least two respects: first, as one who engages with, and can be held and hold others accountable to epistemic standards within the logical space of reasons, and second, because ‘the process of becoming a knower is inseparable from the broader project of pursuing a flourishing human life’ (2018: 1). It follows from both points, for Congdon, that knowers exist in ethical relationships with one another. For the purposes of this article, I will only be concerned with the second respect in which a knower has normative status – namely, the relationship between becoming a knower – relying as it does on socio-epistemic practices of recognition – and the broader project of pursuing a flourishing human life.

In spelling out this relationship, Congdon (2018) turns to Honneth's influential work on recognition and the nature of the self to argue that the successful development of our epistemic faculties (including epistemic self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem) necessary for pursuing a flourishing life as a knower rely on reciprocal relations of recognition where one is afforded one's rightful place within socio-epistemic practices.11 It follows from this both that one can be harmed and wronged as a knower and that the very process by which one becomes an epistemic agent or develops one's identity as a knower is vulnerable to the ways in which one is treated and perceived by others – if one is not recognised (or is misrecognised) by others, one's identity formation as a knower, and thereby one's epistemic agency, can be stunted. Congdon summarises his position as follows:

Regarding oneself as a knower is (a*) a form of practical self-relation that (b*) comes along with normative expectations concerning others’ recognition of that status and (c*) generates a distinctive sort of vulnerability to corresponding sorts of recognition failure, that is, one's susceptibility to being ‘wronged in one's capacity as a knower’, to put it with Fricker . . . repeated acts of testimonial or hermeneutical injustice can threaten one's very identity as a knower, and thus ‘can inhibit the very formation of self’ . . . epistemic agency is a fragile and socially dependent achievement. (Congdon 2018: 10)

In this picture, the development of a person's epistemic agency, including their identity formation as a knower, necessary for pursuing a flourishing human life, relies on reciprocal relations of recognition where one is afforded one's rightful place within socio-epistemic practices. Where these relations are absent, the process by which one becomes an epistemic agent – or indeed, by which one achieves epistemic agency, according to Congdon (2018) – can be threatened and stunted.12

Although there are various ways to spell out the responsibility Congdon points to above, I want to turn briefly to feminist philosophy and the conversations led by standpoint epistemologists and decolonial and postcolonial feminists to expand on the idea that knowers should be afforded their rightful place in socio-epistemic practices. These conversations, I believe, shed additional light on our responsibilities as epistemic agents, particularly when it comes to theorising and the knowledge project. Both speak, that is, to the necessarily embodied and situated nature of knowers and the importance of recognising knowers as such when thinking about ourselves and others as knowers, or about knowledge and our knowledge projects, or indeed about our responsibilities as knowers.

In both conversations, knowers – in virtue of our embodied and thereby necessarily situated nature – are taken to have particularly embodied ways of knowing about, perceiving and being in the world.13 Put differently, our situation in the world – socially, culturally, historically and so on – informs our beliefs, values and what we come to know. As Alison Jaggar puts it: ‘Different social positions provide different vantage points from which some aspects of reality come into prominence and from which other aspects are obscured’ (1983: 361). For this reason, standpoint epistemologists talk about epistemic advantages and disadvantages stemming from our necessarily embodied and situated nature as knowers. Thinking of knowers in this way – as embodied/situated and as members of epistemic communities occupying different vantage points – implies a picture of knowledge and, indeed of (most if not all) knowledge projects, as similarly situated.14 To think of knowledge in these ways – in relation to social position and lived experience – remains controversial, but following Sandra Harding and other standpoint epistemologists, I believe that ‘the grounds for knowledge are fully saturated with history and social life rather than abstracted from them. . . . [and] the same kinds of social forces that shape objects of knowledge also shape (but do not determine) knowers and their scientific projects’ (1992: 445–453).15 For Harding, it follows from this, first, that the subject of knowledge should be placed on the same critical, causal plane as objects of knowledge (since both are socially positioned and informed), and second that, as subjects of knowledge, we ‘must learn to take historic responsibility for the social position from which [we] speak’ (1992: 457).16

This act of taking responsibility for one's epistemic situatedness is at the heart of decolonial feminist critiques of (white) Western – and especially second-wave – feminism, such as those presented by Sylvia Tamale (2020) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003). In perhaps her most famous essay, ‘Under Western Eyes’, Mohanty describes Western feminists as practising ‘discursive colonization’ – positioning themselves as the normative or ‘implicit referent; that is, the yardstick by which to encode and represent cultural others’ (2003: 21). Mohanty objects to the cultural imperialism of Western feminism, which she argues positions women outside of history in so far as women are implicitly positioned as ‘an already constituted, coherent group with identical interests and desires, regardless of class, ethnic, or racial location, or contradictions, [implying] a notion of gender or sexual difference or even patriarchy that can be applied universally and cross-culturally’ (2003: 21). She and other decolonial thinkers and those who take their ideas seriously reject these ideas about women. They defend instead the heterogeneity of women and the significance of this heterogeneity when it comes to contextually and historically nuanced theorising about women that takes the relationships between location, embodiment and theorising seriously. In so doing, they accuse Western feminists of failing to take responsibility for the position from which they speak.

Engaging with these concerns, Elizabeth Spelman concedes that:

the notion of a generic ‘woman’ functions in [Western] feminist thought much the way the notion of generic ‘man’ has functioned in Western philosophy: it obscures the heterogeneity of women and cuts off examination of the significance of such heterogeneity for feminist theory and political activity. (Spelman 1988: ix, emphasis added)

Both the emphasis placed by decolonial and postcolonial thinkers on the necessity of recognising heterogeneity when it comes to nuanced theorising about women, and Spelman's recognition of the deleterious consequences of Western feminism's generic ‘woman’ for feminist theory production have, I believe, significant bearing on our understanding of the role that the reciprocal recognition of epistemic agency could play in enriching the knowledge project in the South African academy.

Tamale argues that in place of colonial thinking – which binarises, essentialises and universalises – decolonial feminists ought to adopt an intersectional lens when theorising or producing knowledge – drawing, she suggests, on interpretive narratives, life histories and case studies to ‘reveal intersecting identity categories that emerge as lived experiences’ (2020: 70). The goal of this work, for Tamale, should be to explore how these experiences are ‘linked to structural power arrangements’ (2020: 70). Citing Vivian May, she describes intersectionality as:

an epistemological project that contests dominant mindsets; an ontological approach that accounts for complex subjectivity and offers different notions of agency; a radical political orientation grounded in solidarity, rather than sameness, an organizing principle; and a resistant imaginary useful for intervening in conventional historical memory and prevailing social imaginaries. (Tamale 2020: 280–281)

Importantly, decolonising the African academy, for Tamale, must involve both ‘unhinging [colonization's] structural and ideological legacies’ (2020: 236) as well as ‘conscious resistance to internalised colonial structures of thought . . . [the] essentialization, stereotypes and biases of colonial-dominated hegemonies’ (2020: 244).

To bring this brief discussion to a close, the knower at the heart of these conversations is inherently socially positioned and informed. Moreover, they are responsible for taking their social position into account in their capacity as a knower not only when engaging with other knowers but also in relation to their engagement with knowledge, knowledge projects and knowledge production.

Recognising Epistemic Agency in the South African Academy

We now need to bring together the discussions from the first section (on recognition as a practice supported by the attitude of playful self-discipline) and the second one (on epistemic agency) to speak about what it could mean to recognise epistemic agency. Subsequently, we will be ready to turn our attention to the recognition of epistemic agency in the academy and the question of how this practice might transform pedagogy in the South African academy.

Given what I have said above, I suggest that we think about recognising epistemic agency – both our own and that of others – as an ongoing practice supported by an attitude of playful self-discipline, requiring a commitment to foster this attitude towards both ourselves and others as knowers and our respective epistemic communities and knowledge projects.

As self-disciplined, the attitude we must foster requires ongoing work on the self to overcome our natural default settings by learning to identify and hold our particularly embodied and situated ways of seeing the world from our own vantage point – or from within the epistemic communities within which we feel at ease – in abeyance in order to attempt to see the other's ‘world’ or identify with their epistemic community on their own terms. Again, this requires the will both to develop an awareness of one's epistemic commitments or one's situatedness in particular epistemic communities – which is necessary if one hopes to take responsibility for the position from which one speaks – and to hold these in abeyance to be capable of perceiving others’ commitments on their own terms. Given this, to take responsibility for the position from which one speaks entails working towards humility and openness – acknowledging that our embodied and, thereby, social or historical situation informs our beliefs, what we take ourselves to know and what we deem important to know, and working towards understanding how our situation informs our beliefs and respective knowledge projects in relation to or in contrast with those of others. I take this discipline to primarily be self-directed, although I believe that one also requires discipline to bear these facts in mind when it comes to others as embodied and situated knowers, particularly in cases of fundamental disagreement.

As playful, this attitude seeks to provide space for others to speak and for alternative epistemes to be represented and acknowledged within collective socio-epistemic practices. As playful, the self and the ‘world’ are open to surprise and reconstruction in light of their attempts to identify with other knowers’ ideas, beliefs and values on their own terms. This attitude is underpinned by the understanding that certain aspects of reality – for example, certain areas of social reality, experience, or even certain ontological frameworks – may be obscured from different positions or vantage points, that what seems clear and obvious from some perspectives – mine or another's – may appear blurry from others. It also entails acknowledging that we may not be at ease in other epistemic communities. Understanding ourselves and others as socially and historically positioned knowers entails acknowledging that what we take to be normal, natural, inevitable, and so on may very well be a consequence of the communities we belong to and in which we are formed and the mindsets and ideologies dominant or prevailing within them. Moreover, it entails acknowledging that, given the above, we are able to learn a great deal from those positioned differently from ourselves. Indeed, it perhaps entails a duty to engage with alternative, even competing, epistemes and, once again, the humility and openness required to do so.

Finally, as playful and self-disciplined, this attitude is underpinned by the acknowledgement that epistemic agency is an achievement that we require others to secure. Recognising the epistemic agency of oneself and others, therefore, requires at least a tacit understanding that this status depends on reciprocal relations of recognition – that our identities as knowers are formed within and can only properly shift within epistemic communities.

Again, we may find it appropriate to step in and out of this attitude given different circumstances, interlocutors or conversations.17 To return briefly to the caution Lugones recommends, there could be ‘worlds’ in which it would be dangerous to attempt to maintain this playful attitude. Indeed, if we take seriously her cautionary words, then we might want to ask ourselves whether we, as academics, create the kinds of learning environments in which our students feel able to travel playfully.

Transforming the South African Academy through the Recognition of Epistemic Agency

At the outset of this article, I mentioned that calls to transform South African HEIs – particularly those relating to epistemic (in)justice in the academy – for example, the marginalisation, exclusion or epistemicide of non-Western epistemes – motivated my initial interest in the concept of recognition. I mentioned in the introduction that my interests were informed, first, by my students’ calls for a curriculum that speaks to them and their place – one that they do not experience as silencing or alienating – and, second, by my colleagues’ calls for a decolonised academy.

Young South African philosopher Siseko Kumalo, writing about his and his peers’ experiences while studying in South Africa, speaks about Black South African students at ‘formerly white universities’ in South Africa as ‘natives of nowhere’ (2018: 1–17). Here, he draws on Chrissie Boughey and Sioux McKenna's (2021) concept of the ‘decontextualised learner’, implying that academics in South African HEIs fail to pay attention to the role of the social context or space in which their students’ identity development (and academic performance or success) occurs.18 According to Kumalo (2018), students sharing this experience find themselves socialised into disciplinary communities – or ‘disciplined by discipline[s]’ – that erase or are experienced as erasing and exclusionary to some part of them, leading to a potentially enduring sense of alienation in the academy.

Colleagues within my discipline of philosophy also give voice to significant concerns regarding the state of the academy. Bernard Matolino, for instance, claims that:

the official and current state of the academe is born out of the colonial experience . . . the philosophical struggle of this place is a struggle between an epistemology of dominance or an epistemology that seeks to dominate all other epistemologies by appealing to its imagined universalist nature and character and insisting that all epistemologies must live up to its character. (Matolino 2015: 401–412)

Mogobe Ramose echoes these sentiments, challenging philosophers working in South Africa – like myself – to respond to concerns about epistemic injustice within the discipline. In his words: ‘Philosophical contestation continues in the academic scientific domain in part because genuine dialogue is yet to be achieved. . . . Philosophy in South Africa is yet to demonstrate that she takes seriously the thesis that epistemic justice is an indispensable complementary to social justice’ (2015: 555–557). If these accusations are fair, then we should expect Kumalo's experience to be commonplace amongst our students. Indeed, this seems to follow if we agree that higher education has, as Vicki Baker and Lisa Lattuca argue, both epistemic and ontological implications for students and that ‘cultural roles and expectations may interfere with the wholehearted adoption of new ideas, practices and new identities if these epistemological and ontological changes separate (in actuality or perception) the . . . student from other valued social groups’ (2010: 822). It is in this context that I turn to the question of how the recognition of our own and our students’ epistemic agency, understood in the ways described above, could serve the transformation of pedagogical practice in the South African academy.

It seems to me that my students’ calls for epistemic justice in the academy are partly calls to be recognised as epistemic agents with normative status, as knowers who are members of distinct epistemic communities that should be represented and heard in academic conversations in the South African academy. Moreover, it seems as though my colleagues call for genuine dialogue in which one epistemology does not seek to dominate others. Given this, it seems to me that one seemingly obvious way of responding to these calls is to explicitly and actively work towards recognising – being lovingly receptive to – and supporting epistemic agency in the academy in its diversity or plurality. I turn below to focus on our students, as I believe that responding to their calls is also a way of responding to my colleagues.

If we aim to recognise and so engage and support our students as epistemic agents in and of their learning – that is, in their capacities and roles as knowers – then it follows that:

  1. We need to understand that the development of epistemic agency is a social achievement, as Congdon (2018) puts it, vulnerable to misrecognition, wrong and harm, and that, as educators, it is part of our role and responsibility to enable our students to secure this achievement.

  2. To do so, we need to be lovingly invested in the process by which they develop their epistemic agency – including their epistemic self-esteem, self-confidence and self-worth – which Congdon speaks about as ‘one's regarding oneself as having distinct and valuable contributions to make to collective epistemic practice’ (2018: 14).19

  3. We need to acknowledge our students’ situated ways of being in and perceiving the world and afford these their rightful place amongst alternative, oftentimes competing, epistemic frameworks in the academy. Put differently, we need to see our students as epistemic agents or knowers who bring knowledge – their own socially, historically and culturally informed ways of being in and perceiving the world – to the academy and its ongoing conversations. In thinking about our students as epistemic agents, we need to think of them not simply as the kinds of beings who can come to know what we know, who can be taught and are at university to learn, but also as beings who already know a great deal and are able to contribute as members of different epistemic communities to the co-creation of knowledge – to the epistemic work that lies at the heart of the academy.

  4. We need to actively enable and encourage our students to bring their own particularly embodied and situated ways of knowing and being into their work and the socio-epistemic practices of the academy and be lovingly receptive of these when they do. Of course, they may need to be introduced to many of the conversations we are having, but once introduced, they should be seen as able to contribute to and shape these conversations in their own ways and from their own perspectives or from within their own epistemic communities. Their contributions may point to alternative directions for our conversations to go in or could begin altogether new ones.

  5. We need to take seriously our own nature as embodied and socially situated knowers – that what we see and know also stems from a particular vantage point that is not incontestable or universal – so that we are not only able to take responsibility for the social position from which we speak but are also able to show our students that we speak from a particular social (i.e. not universal) position. To do so, we need to engage in active and critical reflection on the social and historical situatedness of our own knowledge and knowledge projects20 – and to reflect on this in relation to our teaching, research and community engagement endeavours – we need to be mindful of the epistemic frameworks that we draw upon, which thinkers we are exposing our students and readers to, whose views we are reinforcing, and whose we are silencing. Put differently, we would need to critically interrogate the historical influences and traditions that have formed our thought and, in turn, what and how we teach, whom we privilege in our curricula and supervision, and whom we exclude. Indeed, it is probably the case that we would need to be willing to actively engage with and be receptive to different epistemic constructions of reality to identify who and what we are excluding. We need, following Harding (1992) and Spelman (1988), to place ourselves on the same critical plane as objects of knowledge.

  6. We need to be mindful of our own, our colleagues’ and our students’ relative ease in different epistemic ‘worlds’. Indeed, Lugones’ (1987) work on being at ease warns us of the risks that accompany being too comfortable in any single construction of the world – or epistemic community – particularly, I would add, in those that have been called out by our colleagues and students as silencing and exclusionary. Recognising epistemic agency in the academy would encourage us all to travel playfully to epistemic ‘worlds’ where we are less at ease and perhaps even incompetent – not only those that differ from our own but also those that challenge our own in fundamental ways that call for a response.

What these suggestions point to is a need to focus on fostering particular kinds of relationships – that is, reciprocal relations of the recognition of epistemic agency – between students and academics. These relationships, I believe, would radically transform pedagogical practice in the academy, begin to assuage the alienation that is likely felt by many of our students and colleagues, and be a significant step towards genuine dialogue between different epistemologies in the academy. If we refuse to recognise the nature of our own, our colleagues’ and our students’ epistemic agency, and the responsibilities this normative status brings with it in the academy, then we run a number of very real risks: amongst them, hindering the development of not only our students’ epistemic agency and thereby their pursuit of the flourishing human life, but also the decolonisation or transformation of the South African knowledge project itself. But, if we intentionally work at this practice – work towards perceiving competing epistemes and those who represent them with playful self-discipline – then we could open ourselves and the academy to reconstruction. Here, we must be guided by Lorde, who argues that ‘meeting across difference always requires mutual stretching’ (2009: 57).

Notes

1

In thinking of academia as involving ongoing conversations, I draw on Graff (2003) and Graff and Birkenstein (2014).

2

Of course, Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser (2003) have extensive conversations about the primacy of or relationship between recognition and redistribution, and so bring together what I am superficially dividing into conversations about the nature of the self, on the one hand, and conversations about the nature of justice, on the other.

3

Yancy (2015) speaks about listening with love.

4

The actual complexity of awareness surprises us when brought to our attention. Surprise is a notable response to the invisible gorilla experiments devised by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons (2010), and points to our certainty that we do in fact see what is front of us.

5

There is reason to object that sight is overly privileged in Western philosophy. Indeed, Lauren den Besten and Louise du Toit (2024), in their work on a scoliotic ontology and ethics, describe Western philosophy as ‘ocular-centric’. Den Besten is particularly interested in the ‘gaze’ and the ‘stare’ as these manifest in relation to bodies positioned outside of what they describe as the Western, male/masculine, able-bodied norm.

6

Frye could arguably be accused of failing to complicate her understanding of ‘women’ along intersectional lines (something for which most ‘Western’ feminists are arguably guilty). Although I do not defend this claim here, I am swayed by the arguments of decolonial and postcolonial feminists in this regard and attempt to be mindful of this in my own academic practice. See Mohanty (2003) or Tamale (2020).

7

A utopia, then, is not a ‘world’ for Lugones.

8

Being at ease is particularly interesting to me when thinking about ‘worlds’ as epistemic frameworks in academia. Which epistemic ‘world(s)’ or communities do we feel at ease in? And does our comfort in these ‘worlds’ prevent us from wilfully travelling to others?

9

Indeed, this last insight is one that she gains from travelling to her mother's world.

10

It is helpful to return to the etymological roots of ‘attention’: attendere in Latin – to stretch towards or give heed to – and later in French – to wait. Here, the receptivity and openness of attention, and thereby recognition, is highlighted.

11

Honneth's influential taxonomy of recognition should be evident here. Honneth is arguably the leading Hegelian scholar of our time. See Honneth (1996).

12

These ideas seem consistent with those of Joel Anderson (2013), whose work explores the intimate relationship between vulnerability and the development of autonomy. Anderson argues that the development of one's autonomy competencies depends on access to particular communities of practice to which one may be disallowed entry or may have to qualify to gain entry to. Entry into these communities depends on recognition, and subsequently he argues that vulnerability to a failure of recognition is inherently involved in the process of fostering autonomy. I am also reminded of Fraser's emphasis on participatory parity for social justice – constituted by both recognition and redistribution (Fraser and Honneth 2003).

13

The work of the existential phenomenologists, as well as the traditions they have sparked, also speaks directly to embodied and socially situated ways of knowing and being in the world.

14

Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach (2017) speak of our living in communities of knowledge. Knowledge, they argue, is essentially communal such that when we express our beliefs, we are all just channelling our communities of knowledge. Another way to put this is simply to say that all knowers are of necessity of their time and place and that these inform both how and what they know (and often, I would add, what they are able to know).

15

It seems to me that these insights are consistent with those of thinkers who speak about the impact of moral luck on the formation of our beliefs, values and identities. Here, I am thinking, for instance, of Raoul Martinez (2016) and his work on ‘the lottery of birth’ and the resultant arbitrary nature of our relationship with some of our most deeply cherished beliefs, and of Lisa Tessman (2005), who works on systemic bad constitutive moral luck. I am also mindful of Tessman's concern with a focus on individual efforts to respond to systemic problems. In speaking to the attitudes that an individual can foster to recognise the epistemic agency of others in the academy is, at least initially, to focus on transformation at the individual level.

16

This is a particularly poignant concern given the context within which I teach.

17

Thanks to Jean du Toit for pushing me on this point.

18

As they show, this leads us to see failings (especially in terms of performance and motivation) as inherent in our students and unrelated to social context.

19

He goes on to claim that ‘epistemic disesteem, in turn, can refer to acts that convey the notion that one's distinctive contributions to cooperative epistemic practice are undervalued or viewed as worthless’ (2018: 15).

20

Indeed, as Spelman (1988) shows us, we need to be mindful of how privilege, for instance, has damaged or skewed feminist thought to examine how one's point of view can undermine thinking.

References

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    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Baker, V. L., and L. R. Lattuca. 2010. ‘Developmental Networks and Learning: Toward an Interdisciplinary Perspective on Identity Development during Doctoral Study’, Studies in Higher Education 35 (7): 807827. doi:.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Boughey, B., and S. McKenna. 2021. Understanding Higher Education: Alternative Perspectives. Cape Town: Alternative Minds. doi:.

  • Butler, J. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable. New York/London: Verso Books.

  • Chabris, C., and D. Simons. 2010. The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. New York: Crown.

  • Congdon, M. 2018. ‘“Knower” as an Ethical Concept: From Epistemic Agency to Mutual Recognition’, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 4 (4): 126. doi:.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • De Beauvoir, S. 2015 (1949). The Second Sex. London: Vintage Classics.

  • Den Besten, L., and L. du Toit. 2024. ‘The Scoliotic Subject of Philosophy: Imaginary for a New Ontology and Ethics’. Paper presented at the 2024 Philosophical Society of Southern Africa Conference, Stellenbosch.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Foster Wallace, D. 2009. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. New York: Hachette Book Group.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Fraser, N., and A. Honneth. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition: A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso.

  • Freeman, M. 2015. ‘Beholding and Being Beheld: Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and the Ethics of Attention’, The Humanistic Psychologist 43 (2): 160172. doi:.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Frye, M. 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.

  • Graff, G. 2003. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  • Graff, G., and C. Birkenstein. 2014. They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. New York: W.W. Norton.

  • Hegel, G.W.F. 2017 (1807). Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Terry Pinkard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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    • Export Citation
  • Honneth, A. 1996. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. MIT Press.

  • hooks, b. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge Press.

  • Jaggar, A. 1983. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld.

  • Kumalo, S. 2018. ‘Explicating Abjection: Historically White Universities Creating Natives of Nowhere?Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning 6 (1): 117. doi:.

    • Crossref
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  • Levinas, E. 1991 (1961). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

  • Lorde, A. 2009. ‘I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organising across Sexualities’. In R. P. Byrd, J. B. Cole and B. Guy-Sheftall (eds), I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 5763.

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  • Luckett, K., S. Morreira and M. Baijnath. 2019. ‘Decolonising the Curriculum: Recontextualisation, Identity, and Self-Critique in a Post-Apartheid University’. In L. Quinn (ed.), Reimagining Curriculum: Spaces for Disruption. Stellenbosch: African Sun Media, 2344.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Lugones, M. 1987. ‘Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception’, Hypatia 2 (2): 319. doi:.

  • Lugones, M. 2010. ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’, Hypatia 25 (4): 742759. doi:.

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    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Lugones, M. and Spelman, E. 1983. ‘Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for “the Women's Voice”’, Women's Studies International Forum 6 (6): 573581. doi:.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Martinez, R. 2016. Creating Freedom: Power, Control and the Fight for our Future. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.

  • Matolino, B. 2015. ‘The Place of South African Philosophy in the Future of South African Philosophy’, Social Dynamics 41 (3): 399414. doi:.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Mohanty, C. T. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Quinn, L., and J.-A. Vorster. 2019. ‘Why the Focus on Curriculum? Why Now? The Role of Academic Development’. In L. Quinn (ed.), Reimagining Curriculum: Spaces for Disruption. Stellenbosch: African Sun Media, 122.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Ramose, M. 2015. ‘On the Contested Meaning of “Philosophy”’, South African Journal of Philosophy 34 (4): 551558. doi:.

  • Sartre, J.P. 2018 (1943). Being and Nothingness. New York: Routledge Press.

  • Sloman, S., and P. Fernbach. 2017 The Knowledge Illusion. New York: Riverhead Books.

  • Spelman, E. 1988. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon Press.

  • Tamale, S. 2020. Decolonization and Afro-Feminism. Ottawa: Daraja Press.

  • Tessman, L. 2005. Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles. New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Yancy, G. 2015. ‘Dear White America’, New York Times, 25 December. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/dear-white-america/.

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Contributor Notes

Lindsay Kelland is a Feminist Philosopher and Senior Lecturer working at Rhodes University in the small city of Makhanda. She works on transforming pedagogy within ethics, philosophy and higher education, and has authored and co-authored numerous articles in these areas, including ‘The University as a Site for Transformation: Developing Civic-minded Graduates at South African Institutions through an Epistemic Shift in Institutional Culture’ with Sharli-Anne Paphitis and, most recently, ‘A Pedagogy of Being: Humanising Learning Environments in the South African Tertiary Sector’ with Nolwandle Lembethe, Mapula Maponya and Pedro Tabensky – the academic team at the Allan Gray Centre for Leadership Ethics. Further to the philosophy of education, her research also covers gender, sexualities and sexual/gender-based violence. E-mail: l.kelland@ru.ac.za; ORCID: 0000-0001-9945-6734

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Theoria

A Journal of Social and Political Theory

  • Anderson, J. 2013. ‘Autonomy and Vulnerability Entwined’. In C. Mackenzie, W. Rogers and S. Dodds (eds), Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 134161.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Baker, V. L., and L. R. Lattuca. 2010. ‘Developmental Networks and Learning: Toward an Interdisciplinary Perspective on Identity Development during Doctoral Study’, Studies in Higher Education 35 (7): 807827. doi:.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Boughey, B., and S. McKenna. 2021. Understanding Higher Education: Alternative Perspectives. Cape Town: Alternative Minds. doi:.

  • Butler, J. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable. New York/London: Verso Books.

  • Chabris, C., and D. Simons. 2010. The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. New York: Crown.

  • Congdon, M. 2018. ‘“Knower” as an Ethical Concept: From Epistemic Agency to Mutual Recognition’, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 4 (4): 126. doi:.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • De Beauvoir, S. 2015 (1949). The Second Sex. London: Vintage Classics.

  • Den Besten, L., and L. du Toit. 2024. ‘The Scoliotic Subject of Philosophy: Imaginary for a New Ontology and Ethics’. Paper presented at the 2024 Philosophical Society of Southern Africa Conference, Stellenbosch.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Foster Wallace, D. 2009. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. New York: Hachette Book Group.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Fraser, N., and A. Honneth. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition: A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso.

  • Freeman, M. 2015. ‘Beholding and Being Beheld: Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and the Ethics of Attention’, The Humanistic Psychologist 43 (2): 160172. doi:.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Frye, M. 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.

  • Graff, G. 2003. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  • Graff, G., and C. Birkenstein. 2014. They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. New York: W.W. Norton.

  • Hegel, G.W.F. 2017 (1807). Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Terry Pinkard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Harding, S. 1992. ‘Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is “Strong Objectivity?”The Centennial Review 36 (3): 445453. doi:.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Honneth, A. 1996. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. MIT Press.

  • hooks, b. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge Press.

  • Jaggar, A. 1983. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld.

  • Kumalo, S. 2018. ‘Explicating Abjection: Historically White Universities Creating Natives of Nowhere?Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning 6 (1): 117. doi:.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Levinas, E. 1991 (1961). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

  • Lorde, A. 2009. ‘I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organising across Sexualities’. In R. P. Byrd, J. B. Cole and B. Guy-Sheftall (eds), I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 5763.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Luckett, K., S. Morreira and M. Baijnath. 2019. ‘Decolonising the Curriculum: Recontextualisation, Identity, and Self-Critique in a Post-Apartheid University’. In L. Quinn (ed.), Reimagining Curriculum: Spaces for Disruption. Stellenbosch: African Sun Media, 2344.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Lugones, M. 1987. ‘Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception’, Hypatia 2 (2): 319. doi:.

  • Lugones, M. 2010. ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’, Hypatia 25 (4): 742759. doi:.

  • Lugones, M., and P. A. Rosezelle. 1995. ‘Sisterhood and Friendship as Feminist Models’. In P. Weiss and M. Friedman (eds.), Feminism and Community. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 135146.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Lugones, M. and Spelman, E. 1983. ‘Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for “the Women's Voice”’, Women's Studies International Forum 6 (6): 573581. doi:.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Martinez, R. 2016. Creating Freedom: Power, Control and the Fight for our Future. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.

  • Matolino, B. 2015. ‘The Place of South African Philosophy in the Future of South African Philosophy’, Social Dynamics 41 (3): 399414. doi:.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Mohanty, C. T. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Quinn, L., and J.-A. Vorster. 2019. ‘Why the Focus on Curriculum? Why Now? The Role of Academic Development’. In L. Quinn (ed.), Reimagining Curriculum: Spaces for Disruption. Stellenbosch: African Sun Media, 122.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Ramose, M. 2015. ‘On the Contested Meaning of “Philosophy”’, South African Journal of Philosophy 34 (4): 551558. doi:.

  • Sartre, J.P. 2018 (1943). Being and Nothingness. New York: Routledge Press.

  • Sloman, S., and P. Fernbach. 2017 The Knowledge Illusion. New York: Riverhead Books.

  • Spelman, E. 1988. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon Press.

  • Tamale, S. 2020. Decolonization and Afro-Feminism. Ottawa: Daraja Press.

  • Tessman, L. 2005. Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles. New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Yancy, G. 2015. ‘Dear White America’, New York Times, 25 December. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/dear-white-america/.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

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