Cornell Summer Seminar Asks: Should We Still Use Concepts Like 'Rationality' and 'Reason'?

DAVE HUBER
The College Fix
Jun. 26, 2019

A six-week seminar offered this summer at Cornell University will ask, among other things, "should we continue to use concepts like 'rationality' and 'reason'?"

The course, "Decolonizing Epistemology," is offered through Cornell's School of Criticism and Theory. The instructor is Hunter College's Linda Martin Alcoff whose research interests include feminism, decolonial theory, and the philosophy of race … and she's recently taught courses titled "Gender and Embodiment" and "New Feminist Epistemologies and Metaphysics."

At the beginning of the seminar's description, Alcoff asks

There is a widespread skepticism about many sorts of knowledge claims today, and this skepticism has been promoted from both the right and the left. The skepticism is largely based on the realization that knowledge is always connected to power. But there is uncertainty about what follows from this: is it still 'knowledge'?

If that question appears, well, worrisome, consider the following which "decolonial work in epistemology" must address (in addition to the questions about rationality and reason):

— Do social identities matter for knowledge claims? How, exactly?

— How is ignorance socially produced, and what is the solution?

— How can science be done in a decolonial way?

— How do we empower traditional and indigenous knowledges?

In order to "advance" the concept of decolonizing epistemology, the description continues, one must "explor[e] the ways in which the disenfranchised have been epistemically discredited [in order to] develop new insights and theories about the general nature of knowledge and of knowers."

Read More