The purpose of this paper is to present a conversation about how impact has been seen and felt by youth and adult co-researchers in a long-term, school-based youth participatory action research (YPAR) project, "Courageous Conversations." To stay true to the epistemological commitments of YPAR, and in an effort to speak back to…

Scientific teleological explanations cite end states as causes to account for physical phenomena. Researchers in science education have noted that students can use teleological explanations in ways that are illegitimate, for example, by implying that inanimate objects are acting intentionally. Despite such cases, several examples of legitimate…

In South Africa, the scholarship of epistemic justice has taken on an historical gaze with higher education framed as a social institution that might ameliorate the historical traumas of colonialism. Undoing the legacies of colonialism has been framed as the democratisation of the knowledge project. Using the White Paper 3 of 1997 that posits…

Although there is ample literature that explores what SoTL is and offers guidelines on how to do SoTL, we have not paid enough attention to the fundamental assumptions that underpin systematic scholarly inquiry itself, regardless of the context or the object of study. Instead, we seem to have a narrative that relates SoTL to the disciplines and/or…

The field of applied linguistics is a remarkable case of deep intersection of the skewed geopolitics of knowledge (epistemic inequalities) and language (the ascendency of English as both a topic of research and academic lingua franca). The dominance of the Anglo-sphere through epistemology and language in applied linguistics renders the process of…

This paper considers what it could mean to say that epistemologies and methodologies are racially just or unjust. It has been argued that this has nothing to do with whether an individual researcher is racist: he or she could be anti-racist but still use an epistemology that is racially biased. To explore this issue, some pioneering research by…

This article's question is whether Spinoza understands the highest human perfection -- which he equates with both our highest good and the love of God -- as a theoretical state, consisting in having knowledge and the perfection of beliefs, or as a practical state, consisting in having virtue and the perfection of action. Consequently, the article…

This paper presents a tentative argument for the application of a unique methodological approach in researching convert Muslims in contemporary Britain. By throwing into relief some of the theoretical limitations of previous studies on the topic, a case is made for a dialectical model of thinking that foregrounds Islamic epistemology and places it…

This article proceeds from a consideration of what John Baldacchino calls 'viable ignorance', attempting to take leave from the critical and pedagogical obligations of certain elements of Barbara Johnson's 'positive ignorance'. It considers Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard and the composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen's reflections on modes of…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Qualitative Methods in PER: A Critical Examination.] Epistemic beliefs about physics are most often investigated using quantitative instruments that reflect binary conceptualizations of those beliefs. This study reports from a qualitative study which used continua to represent the epistemic beliefs…

In this forum paper, I grapple with critical questions about our understanding of science as a discipline and the education standards formulated within that framing. My exploration is contextualized in our current socio-political climate and is presented in discourse with Charity Winburn's "Meeting the needs of the individual student in the…

Transnational Education (TNE) has been a growing area of university business with a range of models developed to provide high quality educational products to partners across the world. However, given the changing geo-political environment, the continued rationale, efficacy, and legitimacy of current TNE partnership templates must be questioned.…

Philosophical descriptions of democratic music education frequently rely on "inclusion" and "participation" as the defining features of democratically oriented music programs. Democratic epistemic considerations, such as regulatory ideals of musical quality and excellence, however, are less commonly cited, if not actively…

Criticism of the foundational whiteness of western classical music's socio-cultural heritage remains relatively rare, and the field continues to export a prestigious self-image of cultural and technical superiority. Building on Ben Spatz' epistemology of practice, I argue that the foundational whiteness of western classical music is principally…

This article introduces an analytic strategy or thinking tool called the 'What's the Problem Represented to be?' (WPR) approach and suggests its usefulness for reflecting on important debates in music education. First developed as a mode of policy analysis, WPR has since been adopted in many fields and topic areas. The WPR approach consists of…