Proposal Title
Voicing the Voiceless: Crafting a Dialogue between Cultural Epistemic Traditions
Proposal Type
Individual Presentation
Location
Olscamp 201: Language, Voice, and Collaboration
Start Date
21-10-2017 2:15 PM
End Date
21-10-2017 3:30 PM
Abstract
This presentation suggests that embodied acts of student protest can influence how humanities scholars collaborate across disciplines. As a method of collaboration, I consider Achille Mbmebe’s, “horizontal strategy of openness to dialogue among different epistemic traditions.” For Mbembe, a horizontal strategy of openness requires a new arrangement of epistemological traditions while troubling current epistemic hierarchies, ascribing Western Eurocentric knowledge systems over others.
Voicing the Voiceless: Crafting a Dialogue between Cultural Epistemic Traditions
Olscamp 201: Language, Voice, and Collaboration
This presentation suggests that embodied acts of student protest can influence how humanities scholars collaborate across disciplines. As a method of collaboration, I consider Achille Mbmebe’s, “horizontal strategy of openness to dialogue among different epistemic traditions.” For Mbembe, a horizontal strategy of openness requires a new arrangement of epistemological traditions while troubling current epistemic hierarchies, ascribing Western Eurocentric knowledge systems over others.
Proposal
This presentation suggests that embodied acts of student protest can influence how humanities scholars collaborate across disciplines. As a method of collaboration, I consider Achille Mbmebe’s, “horizontal strategy of openness to dialogue among different epistemic traditions.” For Mbembe, a horizontal strategy of openness requires a new arrangement of epistemological traditions while troubling current epistemic hierarchies, ascribing Western Eurocentric knowledge systems over others.
I consider the possibilities and limits of this method of collaboration in the wake of the rise of student protest movements such as the #Rhodesmustfall Movement at the University of Cape Town and the Concerned Student 1950 Movement at the University of Missouri. In both of these cases, students in protest appeal to social issues such as racism to demand changes in the curricular structures at the university. Hence, this presentation suggests that contemporary student protest movements centered in social justice can reveal something deeper about social issues and also point to the limitation of epistemological structures.
In terms of rhetoric, embodied acts of student protest point to the urgency for rhetorical scholars to consider how these student protest movements impact how we produce theories, design and utilize research methods, and execute pedagogies in the classroom. In particular, we must reexamine how our theories, methodologies, and pedagogies reinforce or intervene on what Douglas Ehniger once described as the “machinery of higher education.” To this point, we need to consider how we place values on certain epistemic traditions over others and how these values echo or intervene the values defined by our material realities.