Knowledge Normativity And Power In Academia

Despite its capacity to produce knowledge that can directly influence policy and affect social change, academia is still often viewed as a stereotypical ivory tower, detached from the tumult of daily life. Knowledge, Normativity, and Power in Academia argues that, in our current moment of historic global unrest, the fruits of the academy need to be examined more closely than ever. This collection pinpoints the connections among researchers, activists, and artists, arguing that--despite what we might think--the knowledge produced in universities and the processes that ignite social transformation are inextricably intertwined. Knowledge, Normativity, and Power in Academia provides analysis from both inside and outside the academy to show how this seemingly staid locale can still provide space for critique and resistance.

Everyday Wisdom is an introduction for lived religion, interreligious studies, and interfaith engagement and leadership. Tying together the aims and learning objectives of interreligious-studies courses, the book proposes a framework for interreligious studies and interfaith leadership, aiming to be a core text in undergraduate and graduate study.

Academic freedom is increasingly being threatened by a stifling culture of conformity in higher education that is restricting individual academics, the freedom of academic thought and the progress of knowledge – the very foundations upon which academia and universities are built. Once, scholars demanded academic freedom to critique existing knowledge and to pursue new truths. Today, while fondness for the rhetoric of academic freedom remains, it is increasingly criticised as an outdated and elitist concept by students and lecturers alike and called into question by a number of political and intellectual trends such as feminism, critical theory and identity politics. This provocative and compelling book traces the demise of academic freedom within the context of changing ideas about the purpose of the university and the nature of knowledge. The book argues that a challenge to this culture of conformity and censorship and a defence of academic free speech are needed for critique to be possible and for the intellectual project of evaluating existing knowledge and proposing new knowledge to be meaningful. This book is that challenge and a passionate call to arms for the power of academic thought today.

In this unique study, emerging higher education leader and policy expert Kenneth D. Gariepy takes a Foucauldian genealogical approach to the study of the intellectually “free” subject through the analysis of selected academic freedom statement-events. Assuming academic freedom to be an institutionalized discourse-practice operating in the field of contemporary postsecondary education in Canada, a specific kind of cross-disciplinary, historico-theoretical research is conducted that pays particular attention to the productive nature and effects of power-knowledge. The intent is to disrupt academic freedom as commonsensical “good” and universal “right” in order to instead focus on how it is that the academic subject emerges as free/unfree to think – and therefore free/unfree to be – through particular, effective, and effecting regimes of truth and strategies of objectification and subjectification. In this way, the author suggests how it is that academic freedom operates as a set of systemically agonistic practices that might only realize a different economy of discourse through the contingent nature of the very social power that produces it. Dr. Gariepy’s use of Foucault’s genealogical analysis provides a wholly different way in which to re-think the construction and practice of academic freedom in Canada and is thus an important contribution to the broader discursive field it seeks to analyze. Given contemporary neoliberal critiques of the university, the issue of academic freedom and the intellectually free subject is a vital problem that is of interest to numerous knowledge producing communities – on and off campus. Equally important in addressing the problem of academic freedom is how the book also contributes a new description of the genealogical method – something Foucault did not stipulate – that is original, ambitious, compelling, and insightful. I commend Dr. Gariepy for returning, to investigate anew, an issue we think we know.” – E. Lisa Panayotidis, PhD, Professor & Chair, Educational Studies in Curriculum and Learning, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Editor of History of Intellectual Culture.

How can performing be transformed into cognition? Knowing in Performing describes dynamic processes of artistic knowledge production in music and the performing arts. Knowing refers to how processual, embodied, and tacit knowledge can be developed from performative practices in music, dance, theatre, and film. By exploring the field of artistic research as a constantly transforming space for participatory and experimental artistic practices, this anthology points the way forward for researchers, artists, and decision-makers inside and outside universities of the arts.

In Governing Muslims and Islam in Contemporary Germany Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar critically analyzes the institutionalization of the German Islam Conference and the different projects this institution has set in motion to govern Islam and Muslims against the looming presence of racial representations of Muslims.

Humans are justificatory beings - they offer, demand, and require justifications. The rules and institutions they follow rest on justification narratives that have evolved over time and, taken together, constitute a dynamic and tension-laden normative order. In this collection of essays, the first translation into English of the ground-breaking Normativitat und Macht (Suhrkamp 2015), Rainer Forst presents a new approach to critical theory. Each essay reflects on the basic principles that guide our normative thinking. Forst's argument goes beyond 'ideal' and 'realist' theories and shows how closely the concepts of normativity and power are interrelated, and how power rests on the capacity to influence, determine, and possibly restrict the space of justifications for others. By combining insights from the disciplines of philosophy, history, and the social sciences, Forst revaluates theories of justice, as well as of power, and provides the tools for a critical theory of relations of justification.