Engaging Knowledge Diversity/Introduction

Knowledge diversity is an epistemological perspective which recognizes the legitimacy and value of a wide range of ways of knowing while also challenging power dynamics that cause some ways of knowing to be considered more legitimate or valuable than others. It is an alternative and oppositional perspective to that which has dominated western academia (Rowell and Feldman, 2019), and it affirms the intellectual value of knowledge that is localized, culturally embedded, co-productive, and rooted in lived experience.

The Knowledge Diversity living document introduces readers to concepts, debates, and initiatives in the field of knowledge diversity. The aim of this document is to detail the historic and present challenges people have faced in their capacity as knowers and to highlight ways of knowing that are often disregarded as illegitimate for lacking rigor or intellectual value according to Eurocentric epistemological frameworks that systemically devalue and dismiss Indigenous knowledges and community-based research. Furthermore, because research and initiatives striving for knowledge diversity are being developed across the world, the scan includes resources from parts of the Global South, such as Africa and Latin America, to highlight important work conducted outside of the centers of knowledge production.

This collection has been crafted to not only cover core concepts related to knowledge diversity but to also reflect the values and principles embedded in it. The scan includes a variety of sources, including traditional academic articles, blog posts, websites, and videos. The editors made a conscious effort to include pieces that were not heavily dominated by jargon or technical terms. Sources that are foundational to their respective field that do employ such language were included in this scan, and brief definitions of such terms were provided either within the annotation or in the separate “Definitions” subsections for each respective theme.

This collection is intended to be a resource for academic and non-academic audiences. It may be especially valuable for librarians, community activists, citizen scholars, educators, community-based researchers, and anyone else seeking to make their research more community-engaged.

The Knowledge Diversity living document weaves together a breadth of topics that are connected through their commitment to making space for a variety of ways of knowing. The selected resources are divided into five themes: Epistemic Injustice, Bibliodiversity, Indigenous Knowledges, Community Knowledge and Co-Inquiry, and Steps Towards Knowledge Equity. Each theme is divided into three sections: Definitions, Resources, and Initiatives and Organizations. For select themes, the Resource section has been broken down into further topics (i.e., Epistemic Injustice is broken down into a Core Concepts subsection and an Epistemic Injustice Across Areas of Study subsection).

The first section, Epistemic Injustice, sets the foundation for understanding the various ways knowledge systems and knowledge holders have been and are currently disregarded as unreliable due to prejudicial factors. At its most fundamental level, epistemic injustices are the wrongs done to someone in their capacity as a knower (Fricker, 2007). Building on the foundational work of Miranda Fricker, the articles included in this section explore a range of mechanisms through which communities are wronged in their capacity as producers of knowledge and receivers of knowledge. The section explores epistemic injustice from multiple perspectives, including a disability perspective, trans* perspective, intersectional perspective, and feminist perspective. It also addresses how epistemic injustice can manifest in several spaces, such as data science technologies, scholarly communication, and social media.

The Bibliodiversity section explores the meaning behind this term and surveys a variety of strategies and proposals for fostering greater diversity in the publishing and scholarly communications ecosystem. The term, largely regarded as originating from independent Chilean publishers in the 1990s (Hawthorne, 2014), applies the core concepts of biodiversity to the world of publishing. In the foreword to the first issue of Bibliodiversity, Étienne Galliand (2011) describes bibliodiversity as the capacity of the publishing industry to produce diversity, especially regarding the diversity of epistemological stances (Hawthorne, 2014), languages, and publishing infrastructures (Shearer et al. 2020). Authors working on bibliodiversity critique the hegemony of English in scholarly communication (Beigel and Gallardo 2021; Rovelli 2021; Snijder 2022) for preventing the publication of scholarship on local issues, furthering the commercialization of knowledge, and excluding the contributions of authors from the Global South. Therefore, this section also surveys strategies, initiatives, and proposals striving for greater bibliodiversity, multilingualism, and more robust research evaluation metrics.

The Indigenous Knowledges section introduces the core principles of Indigenous Knowledge systems, the problems with how western knowledge traditions have characterized and attempted to erase Indigenous Knowledges, and Indigenous research methodologies. This section has been divided into two subsections: Core Concepts and Indigenous Research Methods. We talk about knowledges in plural to avoid homogenizing diverse Indigenous knowledges and methodologies, as the definitions and initiatives discussed in this section are grounded in the ways of knowing of each community. While developing this section of the research scan, differences in terminology across geographic location and time emerged as a core challenge. After much discussion, our team made the decision to default to the terminology used by the source to accurately represent the author’s work. This means that out-of-date terminology has been used in places; these terms have been placed in quotation marks upon first use. All instances of the term “Indigenous” and its derivatives have been capitalized.

The Community Knowledge and Co-Inquiry section offers insight into the underlying values of co-inquiry, best practices for community-based research projects, and the historical, social, political, and economic challenges of research that engage academic and “non-academic” actors. By combining theoretical scholarship on co-inquiry and specific case studies of co-inquiry projects, this section examines specific research strategies for community-based and participatory action research while placing them in their broader social context.

The Steps Towards Knowledge Equity section is explicitly action-oriented and focuses on practices that can be implemented to promote inclusion of a variety of ways of knowing. Annotated resources describe practical approaches to challenging dominant epistemologies and addressing systemic biases that exclude the knowledges of minorities in several spaces. Examples of these approaches include the creation of safe spaces for collective memory work (Blanco Borelli and Sorzano 2021), reflecting on whose ideas are legitimized through citations (Mott and Cockayne 2017; Carlier et al. 2022), and highlighting African Indigenous knowledge systems through critical digital pedagogy (Gonye and Moyo 2023). This section is divided into three parts: Knowledge Equity in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM); Knowledge Equity in Research Methodology and Sharing; and Knowledge Equity in Education.

This wide range of topics shows the complexity of valuing diverse ways of knowing and challenging Eurocentric epistemological perspectives within and beyond academia. The efforts highlighted in the collection to generate localized, culturally embedded, and/or co-produced knowledge show that there is not one universally valid way of knowing, but rather that there are multiple forms of advancing understanding. While it is far from an exhaustive list of initiatives in knowledge diversity, this collection seeks to inspire readers to reflect on their assumptions about which knowledges are valuable and to encourage further action to address epistemic injustices, promote knowledge equity, and rethink who are considered legitimate knowers.