UCLA Understanding World via Symbolic Interactionism Knowledge and Power Discussion 5-7 pages Paper question: How and why is knowledge rooted in power? –

UCLA Understanding World via Symbolic Interactionism Knowledge and Power Discussion 5-7 pages

Paper question: How and why is knowledge rooted in power? – Use a case to demonstrate how these processes work in a specific field. How does knowledge reproduce inequality on micro, meso, and macro levels?

” I will provide additional details in lecture and post information on CCLE. When you submit your final paper, include at the top of your document your midterm grade and whether or not you’d like comments for the final.”

Requirements:

– Two readings from the syllabus
– One external source
– No spellcheck-able spelling errors
– Avoids passive voice

Here is a rubric GUIDELINE for the papers:
– Clearly stated thesis that maps out the paper’s argument in the introduction

– Follows through on the thesis and clearly walks reader through the argument through the paper
– Argument is well organized through the paper – each paragraph/segment attends to parts of the argument mapped out in the intro
– Grounds argument and claims in the readings and provides citations. Empirical claims backed up by readings.
– Does not include lengthy direct quotes from readings (short direct quotes okay only when necessary)
– Includes conclusion that rehashes your argument and expands beyond the paper and introduces potential real-world applications – the “why should we care?”
– Builds on a topic from lecture but goes very in-depth with a close text reading or makes an argument beyond those discussed in class
– Synthesizes external source with the theoretical argument in a way that strengthens the overall thesis. midterm
by TIANYANG ZHAO
Submission date: 17-Jul-2020 04:29PM (UTC-0700)
Submission ID: 1358817588
File name: 102863_TIANYANG_ZHAO_midterm_590855_157829816.docx (19.24K)
Word count: 1200
Character count: 6780
So certification
and validation
in formal
educational
institutions is a
way people
and
epistemologies
or theories
acquire
power? to get
jobs and
shape word
views? Make
your thesis
clear and
direct
unclear? higher
expectations?
How has this
reflected on
power?
Not in syllabus
unclear if that
is the main
point in Yosso
Unclear
whether
Mbembe talks
about this
Not clear if
this is
warranted in
the literature
in this class’s
syllabus
Not at all
something
Mbembe
touches upon
midterm
GRADEMARK REPORT
FINAL GRADE
GENERAL COMMENTS
63
Instructor
/100
PAGE 1
Text Comment.
So certification and validation in formal educational institutions is a way people
and epistemologies or theories acquire power? to get jobs and shape word views? Make your thesis
clear and direct
PAGE 2
Text Comment.
unclear? higher expectations?
Text Comment.
How has this reflected on power?
Text Comment.
Not in syllabus
Text Comment.
unclear if that is the main point in Yosso
Text Comment.
Unclear whether Mbembe talks about this
Text Comment.
Not clear if this is warranted in the literature in this class’s syllabus
Text Comment.
Not at all something Mbembe touches upon
PAGE 3
PAGE 4
PAGE 5
Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the
Archive
Achille Mbembe
This document was deliberately written as a spoken text. It forms the basis of a
series of public lectures given at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic
Research (WISER), University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), at
conversations with the Rhodes Must Fall Movement at the University of Cape Town
and the Indexing the Human Project, Department of Sociology and Anthropology at
the University of Stellenbosch. The nature of the events unfolding in South Africa,
the type of audience that attended the lectures, the nature of the political and
intellectual questions at stake required an entirely different mode of address – one
that could speak both to reason and to affect.
Twenty one years after freedom, we have now fully entered what looks
like a negative moment. This is a moment most African postcolonial
societies have experienced. Like theirs in the late 1970s, 1980s and
1990s, ours is gray and almost murky. It lacks clarity.
Today many want to finally bring white supremacy to its knees. But the
same seem to go missing when it comes to publically condemning the
extra-judicial executions of fellow Africans on the streets of our cities
and in our townships. As Fanon intimated, they see no contradiction
between wanting to topple white supremacy and being anti-racist while
succumbing to the sirens of isolationism and national-chauvinism.
Many still consider whites as “settlers” who, once in a while, will attempt
to masquerade as “natives”. And yet, with the advent of democracy and
the new constitutional State, there are no longer settlers or natives.
There are only citizens. If we repudiate democracy, what will we replace
it with?
Our white compatriots might be fencing off their privileges. They might
be “enclaving” them and “off-shoring” them but they are certainly going
nowhere.
And yet they cannot keep living in our midst with whiteness’ old clothes.
Fencing off one’s privileges, off-shoring them, living in enclaves does not
in itself secure full recognition and survival.
Meanwhile, “blackness” is fracturing. “Black consciousness” today is
more and more thought of in fractions.
A negative moment is a moment when new antagonisms emerge while
old ones remain unresolved.
It is a moment when contradictory forces – inchoate, fractured,
fragmented – are at work but what might come out of their interaction is
anything but certain.
It is also a moment when multiple old and recent unresolved crises seem
to be on the path towards a collision.
Such a collision might happen – or maybe not. It might take the form of
outbursts that end up petering out. Whether the collision actually
happens or not, the age of innocence and complacency is over.
When it comes to questions concerning the decolonization of the
university – and of knowledge – in South Africa now, there are a number
of clear-cut political and moral issues – which are also issues of fairness
and decency – many of us can easily agree upon.
Demythologizing whiteness
One such issue has just been dealt with – and successfully – at the
University of Cape Town.
To those who are still in denial, it might be worth reiterating that Cecil
Rhodes belonged to the race of men who were convinced that to be black
is a liability.
During his time and life in Southern Africa, he used his considerable
power – political and financial – to make black people all over Southern
Africa pay a bloody price for his beliefs.
His statue – and those of countless others who shared the same
conviction – has nothing to do on a public university campus 20 years
after freedom.
The debate therefore should have never been about whether or not it
should be brought down. All along, the debate should have been about
why did it take so long to do so.
To bring Rhodes’ statue down is far from erasing history, and nobody
should be asking us to be eternally indebted to Rhodes for having
“donated” his money and for having bequeathed “his” land to the
University. If anything, we should be asking how did he acquire the land
in the first instance.
Arguably other options were available and could have been considered,
including that which was put forward late in the process by retired Judge
Albie Sachs whose contribution to the symbolic remaking of what is
today Constitution Hill is well recognized.
But bringing Rhodes’ statue down is one of the many legitimate ways in
which we can, today in South Africa, demythologize that history and put
it to rest – which is precisely the work memory properly understood is
supposed to accomplish.
For memory to fulfill this function long after the Truth and
Reconciliation paradigm has run out of steam, the demythologizing of
certain versions of history must go hand in hand with the
demythologizing of whiteness.
This is not because whiteness is the same as history. Human history, by
definition, is history beyond whiteness.
Human history is about the future. Whiteness is about entrapment.
Whiteness is at its best when it turns into a myth. It is the most corrosive
and the most lethal when it makes us believe that it is everywhere; that
everything originates from it and it has no outside.
We are therefore calling for the demythologization of whiteness because
democracy in South Africa will either be built on the ruins of those
versions of whiteness that produced Rhodes or it will fail.
In other words, those versions of whiteness that produced men like
Rhodes must be recalled and de-commissioned if we have to put history
to rest, free ourselves from our own entrapment in white mythologies
and open a future for all here and now.
It might then be that the statue of Rhodes and the statues of countless
men of his ilk that are littering the South African landscape properly
belong to a museum – an institution that, with few exceptions, has
hardly been subjected to the kind of thorough critique required by these
times of ours in South Africa.
Yet, a museum properly understood is not a dumping place. It is not a
place where we recycle history’s waste. It is first and foremost an
epistemic space.
A stronger option would therefore be the creation of a new kind of
institution, partly a park and partly a graveyard, where statues of people
who spent most of their lives defacing everything the name “black” stood
for would be put to rest. Putting them to rest in those new places would
in turn allow us to move on and recreate the kind of new public spaces
required by our new democratic project.
Architecture, public spaces and the common
Now, many may ask: “What does bringing down the statue of a late 19th
century privateer has to do with decolonizing a 21st century university?”
Or, as many have in fact been asking: “Why are we so addicted to the
past”?
Are we simply, as Ferial Haffajee, the editor of the weekly City Press
argues, fighting over the past because of our inability to build a future
which, in her eyes, is mostly about each of us turning into an
entrepreneur, making lots of money and becoming a good consumer?
Is this the only future left to aspire to – one in which every human being
becomes a market actor; every field of activity is seen as a market; every
entity (whether public or private, whether person, business, state or
corporation) is governed as a firm; people themselves are cast as human
capital and are subjected to market metrics (ratings, rankings) and their
value is determined speculatively in a futures market?
Decolonizing the university starts with the de-privatization and
rehabilitation of the public space – the rearrangement of spatial
relations Fanon spoke so eloquently about in the first chapter of The
Wretched of the Earth.
It starts with a redefinition of what is public, i.e., what pertains to the
realm of the common and as such, does not belong to anyone in
particular because it must be equally shared between equals.
The decolonization of buildings and of public spaces is therefore not a
frivolous issue, especially in a country that, for many centuries, has
defined itself as not of Africa, but as an outpost of European imperialism
in the Dark Continent; and in which 70% of the land is still firmly in the
hands of 13% of the population.
The decolonization of buildings and of public spaces is inseparable from
the democratization of access.
When we say access, we are naturally thinking about a wide opening of
the doors of higher learning to all South Africans. For this to happen, SA
must invest in its universities. For the time being, it spends 0.6% of its
GDP on higher education. The percentage of the national wealth invested
in higher education must be increased.
But when we say access, we are also talking about the creation of those
conditions that will allow black staff and students to say of the
university: “This is my home. I am not an outsider here. I do not have to
beg or to apologize to be here. I belong here”.
Such a right to belong, such a rightful sense of ownership has nothing to
do with charity or hospitality.
It has nothing to do with the liberal notion of ‘tolerance’.
It has nothing to do with me having to assimilate into a culture that is
not mine as a precondition of my participating in the public life of the
institution.
It has all to do with ownership of a space that is a public, common good.
It has to do with an expansive sense of citizenship itself indispensable for
the project of democracy, which itself means nothing without a deep
commitment to some idea of public-ness.
Furthermore – especially for black staff and students – it has to do with
creating a set of mental dispositions. We need to reconcile a logic of
indictment and a logic of self-affirmation, interruption and occupation.
This requires the conscious constitution of a substantial amount of
mental capital and the development of a set of pedagogies we should call
pedagogies of presence.
Black students and staff have to invent a set of creative practices that
ultimately make it impossible for official structures to ignore them and
not recognize them, to pretend that they are not there; to pretend that
they do not see them; or to pretend that their voice does not count.
The decolonization of buildings and public spaces includes a change of
those colonial names, iconography, ie., the economy of symbols whose
function, all along, has been to induce and normalize particular states of
humiliation based on white supremacist presuppositions.
Such names, images and symbols have nothing to do on the walls of a
public university campus more than 20 years after Apartheid.
Classrooms without walls and different forms of intelligence
Another site of decolonization is the university classroom. We cannot
keep teaching the way we have always taught.
Number of our institutions are teaching obsolete forms of knowledge
with obsolete pedagogies. Just as we decommission statues, we should
decommission a lot of what passes for knowledge in our teaching.
In an age that more than ever valorizes different forms of intelligence,
the student-teacher relationship has to change.
In order to set our institutions firmly on the path of future knowledges,
we need to reinvent a classroom without walls in which we are all colearners; a university that is capable of convening various publics in
new forms of assemblies that become points of convergence of and
platforms for the redistribution of different kinds of knowledges.
The quantified subject
Universities have always been organizational structures with certified
and required programs of study, grading system, methods for the
legitimate accumulation of credits and acceptable and non acceptable
standards of achievement.
Since the start of the 20th century, they have been undergoing internal
changes in their organizational structure.
Today, they are large systems of authoritative control, standardization,
gradation, accountancy, classification, credits and penalties.
We need to decolonize the systems of management insofar as they have
turned higher education into a marketable product bought and sold by
standard units.
We might never entirely get rid of measurement, counting, and rating.
We nevertheless have to ask whether each form of measurement,
counting and rating must necessarily lead to the reduction of everything
to staple equivalence.
We have to ask whether there might be other ways of measuring,
counting and rating which escape the trap of everything having to
become a numerical standard or unit.
We have to create alternative systems of management because the
current ones, dominated by statistical reason and the mania for
assessment, are deterring students and teachers from a free pursuit of
knowledge. They are substituting this goal of free pursuit of knowledge
for another, the pursuit of credits.
The system of business principles and statistical accountancy has
resulted in an obsessive concern with the periodic and quantitative
assessment of every facet of university functioning.
An enormous amount of faculty time and energy are expended in the
fulfillment of administrative demands for ongoing assessment and
reviews of programs and in the compilation of extensive files
demonstrating, preferably in statistical terms, their productivity – the
number of publications, the number of conference papers presented, the
number of committees served on, the number of courses taught, the
number of students processed in those courses, quantitative measures of
teaching excellence.
Excellence itself has been reduced to statistical accountancy.
We have to change this if we want to break the cycle that tends to turn
students into customers and consumers.
We have to change this – and many other sites – if the aim of higher
education is to be, once again, to redistribute as equally as possible a
capacity of a special type – the capacity to make disciplined inquiries
into those things we need to know, but do not know yet; the capacity to
make systematic forays beyond our current knowledge horizons.
The philosophical challenge
Let me now move to the most important part of this lecture. While
preparing it, it became clear to me that the questions we face are of a
profoundly intellectual nature.
They are also colossal. And if we do not foreground them intellectually in
the first instance; if we do not develop a complex understanding of the
nature of what we are actually facing, we will end up with the same old
techno-bureaucratic fixes that have led us, in the first place, to the
current cul-de-sac.
To be perfectly frank, I have to add that our task is rendered all the more
complex because there is hardly any agreement as to the meaning, and
even less so the future, of what goes by the name “the university” in our
world today.
The harder I tried to make sense of the idea of “decolonization” that has
become the rallying cry for those trying to undo the racist legacies of the
past, the more I kept asking myself to what extent we might be fighting a
complexly mutating entity with concepts inherited from an entirely
different age and epoch. Is today’s university the same as yesterday’s or
are we confronting an entirely different apparatus, an entirely different
rationality – both of which require us to produce radically new concepts?
We all agree that there is something anachronistic, something
fundamentally wrong with a number of institutions of higher learning in
South Africa.
There is something fundamentally cynical when institutions whose
character is profoundly ethno-provincial keep masquerading as replicas
of Oxford and Cambridge without demonstrating the same productivity
as the original places they are mimicking.
There is something profoundly wrong when, for instance, syllabi
designed to meet the needs of colonialism and Apartheid continue well
into the post-Apartheid era.
We also agree that part of what is wrong with our institutions of higher
learning is that they are “Westernized”.
But what does it mean “they are westernized”?
They are indeed “Westernized” if all that they aspire to is to become local
instantiations of a dominant academic model based on a Eurocentric
epistemic canon.
But what is a Eurocentric canon?
A Eurocentric canon is a canon that attributes truth only to the Western
way of knowledge production.
It is a canon that disregards other epistemic traditions.
It is a canon that tries to portray colonialism as a normal form of social
relations between human beings rather than a system of exploitation and
oppression.
Furthermore, Western epistemic traditions are traditions that claim
detachment of the known from the knower.
They rest on a division between mind and world, or between reason and
nature as an ontological a priori.
They are traditions in which the knowing subject is enclosed in itself and
peeks out at a world of objects and produces supposedly objective
knowledge of those objects. The knowing subject is thus able, we are
told, to know the world without being part of that world and he or she is
by all accounts able to produce knowledge that is supposed to be
universal and independent of context.
The problem – because there is a problem indeed – with this tradition is
that it has become hegemonic.
This hegemonic notion of knowledge production has generated
discursive scientific practices and has set up interpretive frames that
make it difficult to think outside of these frames. But this is not all.
This hegemonic tradition has not only become hegemonic. It also
actively represses anything that actually is articulated, thought and
envisioned from outside of these frames.
For these reasons, the emerging consensus is that our institutions must
undergo a process of decolonization both of knowledge and of the
university as an institution.
The task before us is to give content to this call – which requires that we
be clear about what we are talking about.
Is ‘decolonization’ the same thing as ‘Africanization’?
Calls to “decolonize” are not new. Nor have they gone uncontested
whenever they have been made. We all have in mind African postcolonial
experiments in the 1960s and 1970s. Then, “to decolonize” was the same
thing as “to Africanize”. To decolonize was part of a nation-building
project.
Frantz Fanon was extremely critical of the project of “Africanization”.
His critique of “Africanization” (The Wreched of the Earth, chapter 3)
was entirely political.
First, he did not believe that it “nation-building” could be achieved by
those…
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