Approaching Difference in Research and Beyond: Lessons from Indigenous Epistemologies.

For the past couple weeks I’ve begun preparing full force for my written exams– perching on the couch and reading for eight hours a day has its perks, but it can certainly get old after a while. This week I’ve been reading about indigenous epistemologies, something that until recently I knew little about. Indigenous epistemologies take a very different approach to knowledge, identity, and difference. Rather then try to summarize or reduce the diversity of indigenous epistemologies in this post, I’d like to touch on the work of indigenous scholar and activist Vine Deloria Jr., and discuss some of the productive insights his work offers for approaching difference in research and life.

Vine Deloria Jr. is a prolific Lakota scholar and activist whose work spans the 1960’s until his death in 2005. His work, among other things, explored the link between colonialism and the production of western knowledge, and the deep ideological rifts between indigenous and western approaches to knowledge production and identity. He argued that reclaiming a space for indigenous knowledge both inside and outside of the academy is central to social justice movements and the establishment of indigenous self-determination and sovereignty.

            
In the article “If you think about it you will see it’s true,” Deloria compares Western approaches to knowledge production and the Sioux’s approach to knowledge and identity. For the Sioux, there was no knowledge that was not valuable and all knowledge was directed towards the goal of “finding the proper moral and ethical road upon which human beings should walk” (43). The Sioux understood the universe as moral and alive, and every event and action was understood through its relational effects. According to the Sioux, everything was related and humans were not given a special status within these relations, but were just another important aspect of the whole. Unlike western approaches to knowledge, personal experience, emotions, and anomalies were seen as significant, and were presented as evidence that was reflected on personally and collectively. This evidence was grounded in the dynamics of place and understood through careful observation. Patterns that emerged were often connected through narratives and stories but never came to be understood as universal laws.

           
Deloria’s work offers a number of important insights that are relevant to us as researchers who produce variegated forms of knowledge. He argues that, for indigenous people, knowledge is a moral endeavor that helps people find their “proper moral and ethical” path in life. Thus knowledge is itself rooted in the moral imperative to finds one’s proper place, a place that is recognized as relationally constructed by human and non-human entities and that is always subject to change. Furthermore, the indigenous approach to engaging with all sources of knowledge, particularly the experiential and the unexpected, offers an inclusive and grounded approach that does not marginalize or create a hierarchy where some perspectives and experiences are given more weight than others. The evidence that deviates from an expected trajectory generates greater reflection and becomes a source for the development of new patterns and narratives. Lastly, indigenous approaches to knowledge tend to emphasis process over outcome within knowledge production. Research is judged primarily by the concepts of respect and reciprocity at the core of the process, and the actual relevance of the work to the different communities involved, rather than abstracted claims about future benefits.

            
I find that Deloria’s work and the work of countless other indigenous scholars (of whose work I’m only now starting to engage with) offers important alternatives to approaching research in ways that are inclusive, relevant, and social justice-oriented. Whether or not indigenous epistemologies and approaches offer alternatives that we can adopt within our varied research projects and interests, they nonetheless remind us of the colonial roots that remain a part of western scientific approaches and the value of engaging with relational ways of knowing. Recognizing these alternatives helps us to question the taken-for-granted moments when our research may misinterpret, misrepresent, and obscure important forms of knowledge production at the margins. These roots and routes of research are important for us to explore if we are to create more just and equitable futures through our work.

Deloria Jr. V. 1999. Spirit and Reason: the Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing. 

Recognizing Bias in the World Map-- Brainstorming for Geography Awareness Week

As geographers, many of us are aware that the world map we have been using for the past 500 years is erroneous, reflecting European bias and colonial interests. Unfortunately, most people don't see it that way. The current world map continues to be taught in schools and referenced in decision-making processes that impact our every day lives. So, I was delighted when I saw people discussing the following post on my newsfeed this morning:

We Have Been Misled By An Erroneous Map Of The World For 500 Years 

Perhaps we could develop an activity for Geography Awareness Week that gives students an opportunity to think about these issues?

Cultivating New Worlds: Feminism in science fiction

As Halloween approaches, many of us begin to think of its various, frightful incarnations – the supernatural, monsters, aliens, and the like.  To be sure, the month of October is littered with movies, television shows, books, and stories that evoke such powerful imaginaries: from Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie, Alien, to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein.  However, after Halloween Day ends, much of this chilling creativity rescinds into the depths of popular culture.  But, while science fiction remains crucial to our Halloween imagination, it also thrives outside of the Halloween season.  In particular, feminist science fiction has, for years, enjoyed relative popularity and posed formidable questions surrounding women’s (and men’s) roles in society.

Feminist science fiction has focused on a variety of topics, primarily, the social construction of gender, political and social implications of reproduction, gender inequalities, and the intersections of race and gender.  Much like feminism, as a set of ideologies or movements, feminist science fiction has also remained just as diverse and fluid.  For over a century, feminist science fiction has taken on a multiplicity of forms and themes through a number of authors.  Notable writers include Mary Shelley, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Joanna Russ, and many more.  Perhaps most importantly, feminist science fiction has served as a bridge between theory and practice.  The creations of feminist science fiction authors directly represent the variety of goals envisioned through feminism and gender studies: worlds that have moved beyond gender, worlds that have embraced the diversity of desire and sexuality, and worlds that champion the rights and equality of others.  Of course, dystopias are also critical to the broader feminist science fiction project.  For example, Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel, Kindred, explores the complex and troubling intersection of race and gender through a grim dystopic fantasy. 

In any case, feminist science fiction writes and creates at the center of theory and practice.  Their creations reflect desires, anxieties, traumas, and much more.  However, it must be noted that these ‘fictional’ worlds oftentimes reflect and represent ‘nonfictional’ scenarios and circumstances.  Feminist science fiction has provided critical opportunities to interrogate the complexities of this world and pose important questions about it.  Through these efforts, it is hoped that readers and authors alike may cultivate new worlds and new ways of being.

Recommended feminist science fiction reading

Remembering difference in our mission to support women in geography

As graduate students, most of us will end up teaching at some point; for doctoral students, we can pretty much count on it. Those of us who will teach will invariably draw from our personal and professional lives to help students engage with classroom material. Presumably, I am not the only one who considers personal anecdotes an effective and dynamic way to engage students in the classroom.

So as we teach, we make connections between our personal as well as professional lives in the classroom, asking ourselves: Is this story relevant? Do I feel comfortable sharing a story from my personal life with my students? Does it accurately illustrate the point I'm trying to make? Will the people I’m referencing be embarrassed or annoyed that I used them as an example in my class?

But it occurred to me recently that when I do begin teaching, I will also have to make a decision about disclosing the gender of my same-sex partner. While professors in heterosexual relationships can reference their partners without fear of hostility or judgment, I am confronted with some difficult questions, such as: Is this story about my partner worth the potential disruption of sharing it? Is there value in disclosing my sexuality to my students, especially to queer students who may require role models and mentors? Will my students notice or even care?

As of yet, I have not been forced to confront these issues, and with the advances made possible by struggles for LGBT rights, they might be on their way to becoming non-issues. However, it is important to remember that women in geography (and science in general) come with a wide range of backgrounds, needs, concerns, and challenges -- all of whom need supporting. Through such support, I hope that we can work together to tackle issues related to gender, as well as sexuality in academia.

Just a few reasons that I appreciate and support the participation of women in our discipline

This week's post is by SWIG member Steven Allison

As a dude working with a women’s group, I’ve considered the reasons for supporting women in Geography. Spending time and money for the benefit of others with no clear benefit for yourself is pretty much the foundation of volunteering, so it shouldn’t be so strange that a man would encourage women in this way. Yet, some might argue that drawing funding and resources away from myself and towards others is foolish in the hyper-competitive and poorly funded world of academia. Slashed budgets and full schedules mean university life can be a kind of archaic zero-sum game in which any resources directed towards others are, therefore, not going towards you. I obviously don’t agree, and there’s a laundry list of reasons for spending at least a little bit of my day working collaboratively with others, but for today I’m gonna go ahead and play this zero-sum game and look at how supporting women in Geography actually has some pretty direct benefits for me.

Anyone studying Geography at SDSU knows the program wouldn’t exist without one woman in particular, Alvena Storm. The university was originally a simple teacher training college, and when Alvena joined the department after graduating from Berkeley in 1926, Geography was not the kind of place to send young impressionable students into the desert or some distant mountain to get their boots muddy. The department certainly wouldn’t have paid for infusing the classroom with a little adventure. Not so for Alvena! Our own campus library is full of tales of wild, Depression-era field trips where students trapped rattlesnakes and honed their survival skills. By the time I arrived, muddy boots fieldwork was de rigueur for SDSU. Denied a PhD herself (cause she was a woman), she developed the SDSU Geography department and its relationship with her former UC campus into the doctoral-granting powerhouse it is today. That’s why the Geography building will retain the name “Storm Hall” even after the remodel is over.

This story is not intended to suggest that only I reap the benefits of elevating women to positions of power in my own little department. For example, many Geographers are critical of the turn-of-the- century theorist Ellen Semple because she promotes environmental determinism. However, among her less noted accomplishments is her profound contribution to making American Geography legitimate in the eyes of the international community. As one of the first and most prolific translators of Friedrich Ratzel (the godfather of Geography, I guess), she maintained a firm stance on the importance of theory in any investigation. Her insistence on theoretically informed research brought a new vigor and seriousness to the discipline, sparking sophisticated debates about the theories she advocated. The international recognition she received has a direct influence on my own ability as a man to conduct fieldwork in Asia- and this is one small example of her legacy.

No matter where I look, from the foundation of my own department to the broader debates that form the backbone of my discipline, I can see the very real ways powerful women in Geography make life better for men and women alike. So to respond to the idea that volunteering for a women’s organization does nothing for me, I can only say it is, in fact, an errant misunderstanding of our discipline. Viewing the intellectual field as a competitive, closed environment, only heightens my sense that advancing women in geography is sure to yield great returns for not just the field in general, but also myself on a personal and professrional level.

Learn more about Alvena Storm and Ellen Semple here:
http://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/alumni/ellen-churchill-semple.html
http://library.sdsu.edu/scua/raising-our-voices/sdsu-history/faculty/alvena-storm

New York Times Article - Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?

This will be a short blog posting, but I wanted to quickly share an article that was recently forwarded to me. "Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science":
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/why-are-there-still-so-few-women-in-science.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2

A couple of brief reactions:
-I'm not sure that any professors actually encouraged me to go to graduate school. I know that once I was in a master's program, I was definitely encouraged to continue to a PhD, but I don't recall my undergraduate professors suggesting grad school. I think a big part of my decision to pursue a graduate degree actually came from hanging out with graduate students on the triathlon team at UCSD. They made grad school seem like a reasonable thing to do. The author brings up several times that she was not encouraged to pursue a graduate degree (and somewhat discouraged from applying to a prestigious program), but it makes me wonder about how other people decided to go to grad school. Was anyone else specifically encouraged to go to graduate school by undergraduate professors?

-The math books for girls mentioned in the article are fascinating. You can find the first book here:
http://www.amazon.com/Math-Doesnt-Suck-Survive-Breaking/dp/0452289491/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

I'm not sure if I think the books are awesome or terrible. The Amazon reviews are mostly positive, although several of the negative reviews voice the issues I have with this style of book.

Tell me what you think in the comments!

updated:
On the issue of encouraging undergraduates to go to graduate school, I realized that I didn't make an explicit link in my original posting between encouraging undergrads to go to grad school and our organization (Supporting Women in Geography). I think that graduate students could have an important role in encouraging undergrads to pursue a graduate education. This is why I am excited about the joint Geography Graduate Student Association and SWIG effort to host a workshop on applying to grad school! This will be a great way to encourage undergrads and show them that grad school really is a viable life path for a diverse assortment of people (including women!).

Equality and community through enhanced perspective

This week's blog post is from SWIG member Manny Storey.

Of the many issues feminists might find important, I find particularly interesting the role of biases and categorical judgments in daily life. We tend to construct notions about how or who other people are and what their behavior means. Sometimes our judgments are critical and in other moments perhaps we become mesmerized or appreciative – either way, we lean toward or recoil from certain impressions. Some scholars would suggest that these tendencies are natural, and reflect various components of our psychological nature. Unfortunately, our notions about others can often result in misleading assumptions with adverse consequences, and in some cases cruelty and discrimination. I am going to suggest that the progress of humanity toward true social equity and justice will require a thorough examination of the thinking which underlies our assumptions.

Let’s consider two very different types of daily activity. The first is that of unhindered observation. For instance, a graduate student attends a lecture by a visiting professor whose research domain is quite unknown to the student. Because the student is unfamiliar with the subject, the content of the lecture requires careful listening for comprehension. Through the course of the talk, the student becomes very interested, and at the moment that the speaker reveals the key breakthrough accomplished through the study, the student is captivated. This is to say, the student becomes a wholehearted participant in the action of learning through sensory experience and forgets all preconceived notions. Time and experience are then synched directly through acute, real-time observation.

In contrast, let's imagine a corporation hosting an annual staff party at a local sports bar. Some employees are more inclined than others to go, some more or less extroverted. A certain supervisor gets a little bit boisterous after a few drinks, yet still in good humor, and those at the table are entertained. Realizing the attention, this person gets carried away, and forgets to observe that others are unable to participate in the interaction as such. A little observation would have revealed this, but instead another process happened: momentary blindness and deafness were induced by a failure to be attentive in real-time. In this case, it would seem that nothing terrible happened, yet it did: instead of observing the others at the table as living beings, the others became like objects in the view of that person, as a haze of drunken delusion set it.

By examining these two types of activity, there is quite a distinction. Perhaps we can apply this difference in approach to the way we view others – particularly with issues like gender bias and interpersonal conflict. It is all too easy construct mental models about other people (especially what they should be doing) which serve our own interests. These are subtle and often go unnoticed, but we need to really pay attention to them. We might like to think that we really have a solid idea of who people are, yet I suspect that we know very little about even our closest friends. Seeing through lenses of our own perspective really hinders our clarity, and we need to be responsive to the potentiality of the circumstances which arise in order act upon our values.

How do we give other people the space and freedom to truly be themselves? How do we abolish our own biases and really begin to learn about others as completely unique individuals? In what way can we relate with one another so that genuine humanity and community are expressed? Although there are no simple answers, it would be healthy to consider these type of questions more often.

It seems to me that a path toward true equality will only come through recognition of how little we actually know, and a keen desire to observe. To quote philosopher Alan Watts:

“You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as … I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it. ” 
― Alan Wilson Watts

This view reflects the kind of observation I am referring to: one that values people as inherently complex, unique, wonderful, and mysterious expressions of nature. Thus, perhaps we can begin to dissolve the power struggles that have caused so much suffering for humanity, and to build closer relationships based on a deep sense of respect. If we can wake up and really listen to and see others with clarity, perhaps our own lives will even become more vivid and meaningful.