Course:LIBR559A/Brigg, M. (2016).

Purpose:

“Increasing engagement with Indgenous knowledges (IKs) in mainstream tertiary education institutions presents both ethico-political and epistemological challenges. This article engages these challenges by first cautioning against making wholesale distinctions between IKs and Western knowledges (WKs) and then examining the epistemological and politico-cultural entailments of the figure of the mainstream WK knower. Although the WK knower is typically cast as a sovereign being in command of knowledge, the practicalities of processes of knowing reveal the knower as at least partially relational. While the sovereign knower typically returns to his/her self in mainstream WKs, thereby disavowing or subsuming cultural others in ways that compromise serious engagement with IKs, relationality suggests more positive possibilities for becoming susceptible to Indigenous concerns and ways of knowing. This does not spell a relativist agenda. Rather, it shows that knowledge is established through relational processes and that WK knowers might better engage IKs by become less sovereign and more relational knowers" (p 152).

Main argument:

As Indigenous knowledges become more commonplace in Western epistemology there is a “reflex response” (p 152) in positioning IKs as fundamentally different from WKs. The stressed difference between the two epistemologies further creates a divide between who is allowed and in what ways participation is governed in specific epistemologies.

Method:

Brigg situates the learner within contexts of learning systems and explores theoretical backings of those learnings. Brigg compares and contrasts IKs and WKs while trying to not emphasize a great divide between the two but instead reviewing literature of learning development.

Topics:

Epistemology, group norms, Indigenous knowledge, politics of knowledge, Western knowledge,

Novel ideas/weakness:

Seeking to dismantle the artificial divide that knowing cannot cross cultural bounds is a novel idea. One sees in this analysis a burgeoning set of ideas defined from a WK perspective as participatory research. Brigg seeks to dismantle the notion of learner as a pure entity entirely grounded in a single epistimology, and engages in a (re-)evaluation of learner within learning environments—specifically IKs and WKs. One must be careful when approaching this narrative to adopt a sameness of epistimologies, to still honor unique perpsectives in ways of knowing. Without the reflexive and self-interrogation of motives (which is built into PAR) it may be possible to slip into aspects of whiteness and appropriatition.

Page Author: Erin Brown