Social Struggles as Epistemic Struggles

Abstract

What does it mean to think of social struggles as epistemic struggles? What happens if we see social struggles as questioning our worldviews? This paper seeks to advance answers to these questions as an alternative route of engagement in the Activism 2010+ debate. In our view, to think social struggles as epistemic struggles is an invitation not so much to study them as objects, but rather to recognize the questions that they pose to our forms of understanding. With this, we aim to instigate an engagement with social struggles that includes not only their relation to economic and political forms of domination (e.g. neoliberal globalization), but also their capacity to generate knowledges and reveal the limits of our academic frameworks.Our entry points in the Activism 2010+ debate are the questions 'why now ' and 'what makes it distinctive'. These questions point towards establishing a temporal demarcation.We can recognize the importance of this debate in order to see, for example the role that new technologies are playing in the articulation of contemporary activisms. Moreover, the Activisms 2010+ debate is from our perspective, a contribution to the understanding of 'different waves' of political activism traditionally associated in the literature on social movements to claims for political rights (XVII-XIX centuries), socio-economic rights (1950-1980s) and rights of recognition (1980s-to date). Although, following Zibechi (2005), we see in Latin America a movement that predates 2010 and that shows the emergence of activisms that are not anymore focused on claiming for rights in relation to the state, but that are fighting for 'dignity in autonomy'. These activisms have one of its most visible examples in the Zapatistas. They are activisms that fight to enact dignified life-worlds in autonomy from the major institutional framework of modernity: the state and the market. They are producing and theorizing other forms of the political, other economies, other knowledges.

Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics

“…Decolonial thinking has been recently contributed to an effort to understand social struggles in global politics (Icaza 2015b(Icaza , 2010Icaza and Vazquez 2013). Coloniality refers to: long-standing patterns of power that emerge in the context of colonialism, which redefine culture, labor, intersubjective relations, aspirations of the self, common sense, and knowledge production in ways that accredit the superiority of the colonizer.…”

The Aims and Methods of Liberal Education: Notes from a Nineteenth Century Pan-Africanist

“…In contrast, epistemic justice affirms that the knowledge systems of such communities (including their fault-lines) are resources that, in principle, hold epistemic authority when it comes to identifying what counts as a problem, what constitutes the problem and what are the means of redress. Epistemic justice is therefore a crucial dimension of the wider struggle for reparation of colonial injustice (see Grosfoguel 2007;Icaza and Vázquez 2013).…”

(Un)Defining resilience: subjective understandings of ‘resilience’ from the field

“…Thus, we argue that the contemporary moment of definitional uncertainty around resilience -and how we might know, measure, and evaluate it -provides a unique opportunity to contribute to a rethinking of development itself. It opens a space that helps make visible how development is itself an epistemic struggle for the reproduction of knowledge (Icaza & Vázquez, 2013), an 'intense battlefield in the long history of colonial subalternisation of knowledge' (Mignolo, 2000, p. 12). Highlighting the definitional confusion around resilience allows us to question the epistemic structures that normalise the order of oppressions, make visible the plurality of alternatives through which social life is organised and experienced, and break down the hierarchies and exclusions related to the dominant representations of the real (Icaza & Vázquez, 2013).…”