Discourses of the North Atlantic

Abstract

In the 21st century, historic relations of power continue to shape the epistemic status of nations. Epistemologies of the North Atlantic consistently constitute the bases of institutionally valued scholarship. Indeed, control over the narrative of science has been constitutive of the discourse of modernity and North Atlantic intellectual hegemony. The premise of this article rests on the assertion that to effectively study life in the 21st century, we must abandon all notions of epistemic innocence. This analysis begins with the broad considerations of coloniality, modernity, and epistemology and takes up the specific mandates of formalization and interpretation that define North Atlantic epistemologies. It then considers the importance of critical rationalities, social epistemologies, and the need to robustly de-center research paradigms originating in the North Atlantic.

Keywords

epistemology coloniality discourse qualitative methods

Introduction

The 21st century harkens what may be an unprecedented era of paradox, peril, and promise—for social life and for social research. New media technologies both facilitate and alienate human connections. The very processes that accelerate the expansion of global scholarship simultaneously consign global knowledge production to the more narrow realms of English-speaking scholars. In the United States and more globally, it is easy to identify sharpening inequalities, increasing violence, environmental disasters, global warming, and health pandemics. At the same time, it is also easy to identify unprecedented movements for social change—many of which rely on international networks made possible by new media technologies. Social Watch (http://www.socialwatch.org/node/16333) dubbed 2013 the year of protest. Social media continues to give a new voice to this dissent. Its social and political relevance was evident in Brazilian protests against state violence. Protests in Egypt and Turkey made news around the globe, and in 2014, the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, was met with protest locally, nationally, and globally. As scholars using qualitative methods in the 21st century, we must ask, what does it mean to study social structure or interaction at this particular moment in history? How do relations of power, global and national, shape epistemology? What techniques will best enable an examination of global flows of information, people, and processes? Of power, privilege, and inequalities?

The premise of this article rests on the assertion that to effectively study life in the 21st century, we must abandon notions of epistemic innocence and seek to understand how specific forms of knowledge are made true—while others are either rendered inaccessible or made invisible—by social science. In this sense, representation—of any sort—is always a site of transcendental illusion (Deleuze, 1994). Inevitably, our methodologies shape the kinds of questions that can be asked and also the interests that our answers serve. And, when a narrow locus of enunciation becomes universal, it acquires the force of controlling its own criticism. Indeed, the narrow discourses of scientific knowledge in the 21st century are the result of centuries of marginalizing technologies, practices, and discourses that delimit knowledge production and enact historically situated cultural ideologies, hierarchies, conditions, and processes.

Where qualitative research is concerned, it would be accurate to say that something of an insurrection against the hegemonic construction of science has been underway since the 1960s. The task of critical qualitative research has been to make clear the link between the social production of knowledge and the social production of society. There are many excellent histories of qualitative research (see Erickson, 2011; Platt, 1996; Vidich & Lyman, 1994). This article contributes to scholarship on qualitative research by examining both social science in general and qualitative research in particular as productive systems of signification. It regards the historical inflections of power in the discursive production of qualitative knowledge. As such, the article moves beyond historical overviews and analyses of error and distortion and toward an analysis of consequences and possibilities.

Knowledge—and its production—is never an individual enterprise. Rather, to a significant extent, knowledge, cognition and perception must always be discursive formations and cultural productions. In this sense, science is most correctly understood as a cultural activity—a kind of performance that enacts itself. While the production of knowledge cannot be reduced to relations of power, neither can it dissociated from them (Foucault, 1972, 1980, 1994). Knowledge production is a conditioned performance that generates not innocent or objective knowledge but a highly politicized form of social currency. The question for qualitative scholars must always regard the nature of the politics that the production of knowledge is made to serve. Of most concern here is how scientific discourses selectively constitute some logics, and consequently some knowledge, as privileged and authoritative. In the North Atlantic, epistemology has consistently been defined in geographical terms—Knowledge is surveyed and divided into fields, topics (from topos, or place), provinces, domains, realms, and spheres to be mastered.¹ I begin with the assertion that colonial expansion was as much an expansion of forms of knowledge—epistemologies—as it was an acquisition of territories.²

Coloniality, Modernity, and Knowledge Production

If the roots of European epistemologies can be traced to Christianity, it is also true that they quickly became anchored in the secular as earlier notions of infidels were replaced with rising racial formations of whiteness (Mignolo, 2002). The epistemic project of Europe was produced, in part, through the racialization of colonial corporate enterprises. The rise of modern science coincided with the suppression of non-Western peoples around the globe. From the East and West Indies trading companies to the neo-colonial enterprises of contemporary corporations, business interests have played a significant role in the production of scientific knowledge about the world. Importantly, corporate interests are equally implicated in the logics that sustained both colonial projects and the development of the social sciences.³ The historical contributions of corporations might be most evident in the standardization of instruments, procedures, recording conventions, and observation (Harris, 1998). Indeed corporations were foundational to numerous natural science fields including botany, geography, mathematics, and astronomy. Corporations were imbricated in colonial and intellectual expansion. While the colonial period was an historical moment with continuations into the present, the coloniality of power must be understood as constituting modernity itself.⁴ North Atlantic discourses of modernity have secured their own privilege by rendering subaltern perspectives as lacking. A North Atlantic epistemology has been thoroughly imbricated in colonial projects and runs parallel to the history of capitalism—with all of its ramifications (see Mignolo, 2000, 2002).

Discourses of modernity are largely understood as having produced a series of familiar binary oppositions (e.g., modernity/tradition, theory/empiricism, modern/primitive). The “enduring enchantment of modernity” (c. f., Mignolo, 2002) is predicated on its ability to produce oppositional categories as well its capacity to establish and maintain the systems through which the oppositions are maintained. The intellectual juxtaposition of the modern and the colonial is produced by conflating and collapsing modernity, capitalism, and Eurocentrism (Quijano, 2000). Modernity, science, capitalism, and Eurocentricism are thoroughly imbricated in, and reproduced through, North Atlantic epistemology. Inevitably, then, North Atlantic epistemology is complicit in the production and reproduction of apparatuses of power that sustain core relations of oppression, exploitation, and privilege.

In the 21st century, global relations of power continue to shape the epistemic status of nations. Some have a modern status, others colonial, and still others “primitive.” In this sense, the spatial is always, already, temporal; nations are not just understood as being in different places but also as being in different times. Critiques of science are undergoing a spatial turn; there are increasing numbers of analyses regarding how geographical location shapes the degree to which knowledge is recognized as credible and authoritative (Pereira, 2014). Certainly, control over the narrative of science has been constitutive of the discourse of modernity and North Atlantic intellectual hegemony. This includes both the discourses constitutive of modernity and those in reaction to it (e.g., postmodern, poststructural, and posthumanist). The scope of what counts as important scholarship needs to be radically expanded. Today, the central task at issue for qualitative scholarship is not the reclamation of excluded or forgotten bodies of knowledge but the deconstruction of coloniality that occupies contemporary geographies of knowledge production. This project includes decolonizing North Atlantic logics as well as addressing the rising neocolonialism in academia.

Significantly, academic institutions no longer need to be situated within the North Atlantic to be grounded in North Atlantic epistemologies (Connell, 2010; Pascale, 2013; Patel, 2010). The global dominance of English-speaking countries is reproduced through academic reliance on publications in English. For example, academia requires publication in ranked and indexed journals—most all which are controlled by the United States (Descarries, 2014). English-speaking dominance is amplified yet again because citation counts (not only publications) from these journals are used as the material basis for evaluating a scholar’s career and credibility.

To some extent, the dominance of English as the lingua franca of academia is premised on the assumption that languages are equivalent and to large degree interchangeable—that we lose nothing in translation. This assumption has been a hallmark of colonial dominance but has little bearing in reality. Furthermore, an argument is often made that English, as the lingua franca of scholarship, enables transnational knowledge. If this is true, English dominance must also be understood as an intellectual hegemony that marginalizes all knowledge not produced in English.⁵ Today, even as universities increasingly move toward global scales of knowledge production and consumption, the discourses of North Atlantic modernity continue to reproduce the epistemic status of nations and an asymmetrical pattern of knowledge circulation and recognition.

The Changing Discourses of North Atlantic Social Science

North Atlantic traditions of social research adopted the methods established in the physical sciences as the model for social inquiry. Positivism (and its incarnations of post- and neo-positivism) mirrors the commonsense ontology of daily life in which things exist as they appear—unless one is dreaming or deceived.⁶ Within positivist traditions, the narrowness of valid knowledge, and of the means for producing valid knowledge, can be located in the imperial impulse of colonialism. The logic of positivism is more than a methodological orientation; it serves an ingrained aspect of the logic of capitalist and imperialist projects.⁷ The imbrication and repetition of this logic through the construction of science, the development of states, and the flows of capital provide the sustaining hegemonic density of North Atlantic epistemology. While interpretivist, poststructural and postmodern epistemologies have (with varying levels of success) rejected positivist in all of its incarnations, they constitute forms of resistance within the epistemic discourses of the North Atlantic.

To imagine what a shift outside of North Atlantic discourses might mean, consider the simplicity of counting. In a North Atlantic epistemology numbers have no meaning beyond the narratives used to explain them; it is an epistemology that fails to recognize that the act of counting is itself an abstraction, a representation and not a reality. This distinction is highlighted by considering an alternative method of counting—a traditional Yoruban grammar mathematical logic that stands in contradiction to the most basic logic of counting in the North Atlantic:

In English, number names work like adjectives—they relate to nouns and quantify, implying the existence of qualities in the world. In Yoruba, however, number names work like adverbs. They relate to the workings of verbs and modify, pointing to what we might call ‘various forms of manifesting’ (Verran, 2001, p. 52).

Despite the continued presence of traditional forms of Yoruban math, the coloniality of a North Atlantic epistemology has marginalized historical practices. Yet this example demonstrates what a dramatic epistemic shift can be achieved by decentering the North Atlantic traditions. While there are considerable forms of intellectual resistance in the form of emergent methods and theories within the North Atlantic, they have not released scholarship from the colonizing force of North Atlantic epistemic practices. Arguably, the intellectual empires of the 19th century have outlasted the geographic ones.

Talking to Ourselves: North Atlantic Processes of Formalization and Interpretation

Fundamentally, in a North Atlantic epistemology, social science research faces two overarching tasks: formalization and interpretation. To a significant extent, processes of formalization and interpretation are epistemologically linked—the two cannot operate independently—however, they serve slightly different ends. Processes of formalization are those ways of systematizing knowledge production that transform phenomenon into data—the collection and production of valid evidence. Procedures for formalization enable researchers to make credible, scientific claims about social phenomena. Procedures for formalization are the standards for producing science.

In social science, the first task of the social researcher is that of formalization. Researchers must systematically transform social phenomena into data by identifying, collecting, and describing—indeed by constituting—phenomena as valid evidence. The authentication of claims through systematic procedures for constituting empirical data defines the primary distinction between scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities. Practices of formalization regard the systematic production evidence—a production, which is always grounded in a local (i.e., empirically accessible) context. The master narratives of science and modernity were constructed through a self-consciously anti-historical, anti-narrative, naturalistic conceptual frame (St. Pierre, 2011). Based on a Cartesian belief that simplification leads to clarity, social scientists have tried to understand complex processes by dividing them into small, isolated parts that can be located as evidence in a fixed, stable, and naturally occurring context. So-called local contexts are always the result of decisions about who and what matters; they arise from sets of decisions elided by the very terms of science. The implications of this construction of research are particularly significant because contexts are boundaries that circumscribe and focus our abilities to analyze flows of power, effects of power, and the production of discourses. It would be more transparent to speak of localized contexts—emphasizing the construction of contexts.

Even if we dispute the belief in the stability of social and natural systems, and understand contexts as localized—rather than local—not all features of the context will appear to be “evidence.” Phenomena count as evidence only if they are recognized in relation to a potential analysis (see Gordon, 1997; Scott, 1991). An intellectual context of preexisting ideas, methods, theories, and knowledge leads one to recognize “evidence” from a mass of experience and text. Evidence is always the political effect of decisions regarding what constitutes valid and relevant knowledge as well as decisions that regard the conditions that a researcher must fulfill to give her or his work value as science.

The concepts of contexts and evidence encumber if not prevent the ability to examine absence as a social production. Consequently, social science research methods have been directed toward oppression and domination but have proven to be poor tools for understanding routine forms of privilege and power. To the extent that the social sciences remain exclusively bound to empirical evidence in localized contexts, we will fail in our abilities to analyze particular aspects of power, privilege, culture, and knowledge—which always and inevitably exceed any local context.

Hegemonic discourses of social research not only produce a particular kind of knowledge about the world; they also have produced epistemologies of ignorance (see Alcoff, 2007; Pascale, 2011; Sullivan & Tuana, 2007; Swan, 2010). Notably, epistemic ignorance is not a lack of knowledge but systematic production of inaccurate information. It is a determined and active misapprehension produced through cultural error and erasure.⁸ Above all, epistemic ignorance is a form of labor and, like all labor, requires resources and justifications (Swan, 2010). Fundamentally, epistemologies of ignorance are maintained by a loss of critical rationality that has become routinized.⁹

If social research methods are not yet capable of fully accounting for human experience, there must be something in our assumptions that alienates research processes from aspects of human experiences. Regardless of whether researchers use grounded theory or analytic induction, once we accept the commonsense notion of contexts and evidence we are embedded within, and accountable to, a North Atlantic epistemology—and all that comes with that production. Yet to disregard processes of formalization is to stand outside of science—not a small consequence for qualitative scholars in the social sciences.

Qualitative scholarship in the 21st century needs a concept of evidence that will enable us to account for the systematic construction of both presence and absence in physical, textual, and historical spaces. We need a concept of evidence that will enable us to examine contexts as flows of information, relationships, people, ideas, and resources. We need qualitative research methodologies that have the capacity to excavate the full range of social life, including the ways that it is mediated by technologies. Historically, scientific discourse has been invested in limiting processes of formalization. Dominating discourses (both historical and contemporary) involve relations of power in which unity with the past is artificially conserved, thus creating order from conditions of disorder (Milliken, 1999). Without question, North Atlantic epistemologies have been produced through, and reconstituted by, the privilege to narrate their own histories and universalize their own goals.

The dominant discourses of social science also have long histories of resistance (see Feyerabend, 2010; Flyvbjerg, 2001; Harding, 1991; Winch, 1958). These challenges are renewed and sustained by interest in critical methodologies that challenge both qualitative (see Ramazanoglu & Holland, 2002; Reinharz, 1992; Sandoval, 2000) and quantitative epistemologies (see Zuberi, 2001; Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008). If scholars have had some success in challenging processes of formalization in critiques of science, in the practice of research itself, dominant standards of formalization have been far more difficult to challenge effectively—precisely because they are fundamentally linked to the critique and evaluation of research.

We might reasonably consider modified analytic induction (Robinson, 1951), which shifted analytic induction from a quantitative to a qualitative strategy, and the development of grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) as the earliest challenges to existing processes of formalization. However, analytic induction and grounded theory—like interpretive frameworks and critical theories—resist the limitations created by processes of formalization, but they do not overcome them. Participatory action research transforms the role of the researcher and relations of power in the research process but not processes of formalization. Similarly, some efforts to decenter North Atlantic scholarship within U.S. academic circles (Connell, 2010; Pascale, 2013; Patel, 2010) are gaining traction; however, these do not necessarily or consistently challenge processes of formalization. Alternatively, within the North Atlantic the institutional ethnographies developed by Dorothy Smith more squarely challenged processes of formalization. By examining the social organization of knowledge in institutional settings, Smith (1990a, 1990b, 1999) moved beyond an understanding of social relationships and toward an understanding of social power in mundane settings.

In addition, both autoethnography and performative scholarship cultivate cultural insights and critiques without utilizing processes of formalization that systematize knowledge production. Autoethnographies (see Ellis & Bochner, 1996; Ellis, Bochner, & Denzin, 2002) stand as a radical challenge to processes of formalization by refusing the terms of formalization all together. Autoethnography is not predicated on the systematic collection of data but rather uses systematic self-reflection, which is grounded both theoretically and experientially. Similarly, in some disciplines, a performative turn has established a new heuristic for scholarship. With roots in anthropology, dramaturgy, and postmodernism, performative scholarship provides intellectually useful and emotionally powerful experiences that do not engage practices of formalization. Consequently, both autoethnography and performative scholarship stand at the margins of social science in some disciplines and completely outside the bounds of social science in others. While autoethnography and performance scholarship challenge the notions of what counts as evidence, St. Pierre (2011) advances a challenge to processes of formalization by arguing that coding data is a relic of positivism that can be replaced by a breadth of reading and depth of thinking.

Other challenges to processes of formalization have come from scholars who more commonly broaden notions of empirical evidence by turning to the humanities to blur the lines between formalization and interpretation (Clough, 1992, 2000; Gordon, 1997; St. Pierre, 2011; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000). Consider for example the range of disciplines in which researchers are attempting to expand the effectiveness of qualitative research through the incorporation of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Foucauldian discourse analysis, or genealogy. In a heterodox turn, Wright (2015) draws not from the humanities but from theoretical physics to develop a “physics of Blackness” that moves beyond a middle passage epistemology of Blackness. All of these strategies are interesting intellectual provocations, yet they have a fairly limited impact on how social science is conducted in the North Atlantic—precisely because they challenge the need for the broad coherence that continues to define social science. The impulse for change has been both clear and highly controversial. The development and use of emergent methods are made to stand outside the arena of social science; consequently, in many disciplines the use of emergent methods affects employment, publishing, funding, promotion, and tenure. The stakes of change may be as high as the costs of inaction.

Within the North Atlantic, nearly all challenges to the Cartesian model of the natural sciences have regarded the second task of social science research, that of interpretation—that is, explaining the significance of evidence. Indeed, a significant aspect of scientific activity is rendering some interpretations more plausible than others (Latour & Woolgar, 1986). Interpretive traditions have shared historical roots in the work of German social philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1899). Dilthey advocated for human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) that would stand apart from natural sciences; he inspired Max Weber and Georg Simmel in sociology as well as the hermeneutical turn taken by philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas (Erickson, 2011). In the North Atlantic, social scientists have elaborated on a variety of methodological processes of interpretation (e.g., social constructionism, symbolic interaction, and ethnomethodology); in addition, they have inflected their analyses of empirical data with variety of theories (e.g., feminist, critical race, poststructural, and psychoanalytic). The epistemic frictions generated by these analyses have been sought for their own sake—for the forms of resistance they constitute.¹⁰

The vibrant intellectual contributions of interpretive and theoretical frameworks have brought greater inclusivity, both in terms of scholars and fields of interest; they have developed competing notions of objectivity and elaborated new processes of interpretation including those focused on subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In a variety of ways, processes of interpretation have facilitated transformative insights into the processes of social life; however, they have never liberated scholarship from the demands of formalization—the standards of effective and credible research. A Cartesian ontology directs techniques of data collection and analysis—even if another ontology, such as symbolic interaction, directs the interpretive process. Interpretive and theoretical variations that expand qualitative research remain substantially constrained by the processes of formalization that construct the foundation of social science.

The pragmatic consequences of the entrenched epistemologies of the natural sciences in the social sciences are evident in what constitutes the most institutionally valued scholarship—in terms of publication, promotion, and tenure. Funded research has long been at the top of this institutional hierarchy. Increasingly universities press faculty to produce “high impact” scholarship that inevitably must reproduce disciplinary assumptions about the nature of research at the expense of paradigmatic innovation—indeed often at the expense of qualitative research itself.

While qualitative methods have moved considerably away a Cartesian conceptualization of science, in areas of external funding, quantitative models continue to define the standards of social research. In this context, it is noteworthy that within the United States, the National Science Foundation seems to have taken on the work of socializing qualitative researchers as to the practices that constitute good science by providing guidelines as to what constitutes “good” (i.e., fundable) qualitative research.¹¹ In a climate in which the government is pressing steep cuts to even the most conventional forms of social science research (see Sides, 2015; Space, 2015), the purported need for socializing scholars on how best to conduct their research takes on an unabashedly political inflection.

Gramsci (1995) was an early critic of the trend in social research to use the physical sciences as a model; he described this treatment of the physical sciences as “science as fetish.” Gramsci (1995) wrote, “There do not exist sciences par excellence and there does not exist a method par excellence, ‘a method in itself’” (p. 282). Gramsci argued that every process of inquiry needed to be congruent with its own particular purpose. Similarly, Feyerabend (2010) wrote,

A theory of science that devises standards and structural elements for all scientific activities and authorizes them by reference to “Reason” or “Rationality” may appeal to outsiders—but it is much too crude an instrument for the people on the spot, that is, for scientists facing some concrete research problem. (p. xix)

Social sciences have all but demolished the grand narratives of social theory and yet cling to the grand narrative of North Atlantic epistemologies. It may be that to move beyond the colonial relationships that permeate academia, we must move beyond the standards and apparatuses used to assess and regulate social science (Lincoln, Lynham, & Guba, 2011). Yet this extremely idealistic pursuit could be as disabling as it would be revolutionary. An inclusive social science would recognize multiple styles of inquiry that use a variety of processes of formalization for making systematic claims, each best suited to its purpose. However, if intellectual life thrives with epistemic frictions, the same cannot be said for ruling relations of power.

Practical Considerations

As qualitative researchers, our task is to restore critical rationality to scholarship and to generate the epistemic frictions that accompany it. Despite the dominant discourses of science, credible knowledge production does not require fixed and universal rules; rather it requires an increased tolerance for ambiguities and uncertainties (Medina, 2011). The question is not whether or not qualitative research can tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty—clearly it can. The question is how much ambiguity and uncertainty it can tolerate. The focus here must not be the tensions between knowledge and ignorance but rather the tensions among multiple routes to knowledge.

Any adequate epistemology must account for the inseparability of knowledge production and social organization—social sciences need social epistemologies. With relationality as an ontological premise, social epistemologies demand that we pursue knowledge about the social world by examining social routes to knowledge. Of particular relevance here are those practices that best support the production of knowledge in ways that are consistent with efforts to apprehend the intertextuality of socialities: specifically, the historicity of localized contexts, the technological mediation of culture, the production of absence, and the subjective processes of social research. How might processes of formalization be transformed to allow for an analytic emphasis on social routes to knowledge?

There are myriad ways of conceptualizing social epistemologies that have a broad range of political effects. One possibility is to reclaim the study of language (in many variations) as integral to the study of social life (Pascale, 2011). Language, broadly construed as systems of signification, is arguably the foundation of shared culture. Our most private experiences are narratively constructed through the cultural framework of language.¹² All classificatory systems are narratively produced; even the individual, as such, does not exist as such prior to language. Without language there is no social interaction; without social interaction there is no social structure, no culture; without language there is no shared meaning. Consequently, studies of language offer an effective means for developing social epistemologies that link together structure and agency, history and local interaction.

Analyses of language—as organic, rhizomatic connections across temporal, geographic, and cultural contexts—can offer nuanced and fluid understandings of social routes to knowledge that emerge in the contexts of daily life. Expanding what counts as legitimate evidence would constitute what Foucault (1994) and Nietzche (1994) referred to as a genealogy—a kind of topology of social practices. In the North Atlantic, such efforts often require broadening conceptions of “mixed methods” to refer to efforts to combine qualitative and theoretical strategies. In West Africa, scholars are deconstructing the narratives of science and society that have been inherited from colonial regimes (see Osha, 2005).

To some extent, the unintended effects of knowledge production can be mitigated through the practice of a reflexive research ethic that considers its own reproduction of systems of power/knowledge and attends to the marginalization and exclusion of other forms of knowledge production. However, given the relationships among coloniality, modernity, and epistemology, paradigms originating in the North Atlantic do not need to be expanded or opened up; rather, they need to be robustly decentered as one way of knowing among many. Social epistemologies will be most useful if they can challenge both processes of formalization and interpretation. Returning to the intellectual products of the North Atlantic may offer only limited usefulness for transforming the discourse of science because these products necessarily emerged from various expressions of coloniality.

The future of innovative and critical qualitative research will continue to be shaped not only by how one thinks of the relationship of theory and method (oppositional, collegial, or commensurate ways of knowing) but also by our relationships to coloniality—the ability and willingness of scholars to decenter a North Atlantic epistemologies and to cultivate a decolonized imagination.

In a 21st-century knowledge-based global economy, the production, distribution, and use of knowledge and information are a dominant economic force. Globalization and the internationalization of disciplines are central to our time, yet exactly what scholars are able to contribute—and how useful those contributions may be—will have much to do with how we think about our research in relationship to existing narratives of science, our ability to get at the social routes to knowledge, and our ability to think transculturally. Yet not all forms of transcultural scholarship are equally helpful—some merely broaden the scope of a North Atlantic epistemology and reinscribe coloniality. More to the point, at this moment, academia will benefit from scholarship that decenters North Atlantic epistemologies, critically engage transcultural systems of governmentality and apprehends social routes to knowledge. If this call coming from within the North Atlantic seems paradoxical, it may be so only because the process transformation must belong to each of us in different form and measure.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Celine-Marie Pascale’s research concerns language, culture, and power. She has authored two award-winning books and more than two dozen articles. She also is editor of an international collection of research titled Social Inequality & the Politics of Representation: A Global Landscape.

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