Putting Southern perspectives to work

A Theoretical Framework to Bridge Knowledge Cultures

“…Our contribution to the understanding of KC in CURP contexts builds on the groundwork of Knorr Cetina, who defines KC as "the set of practices, arrangements and mechanisms bound together by necessity, affinity and[/or] historical coincidence" (2007, p. 363). This view of KC is echoed in Connell's (2022) notion of a knowledge formation; that is a set of concepts, information and intellectual procedures that provides the framework for many specific knowledges and applications and knowledge [that is also] a socially realised episteme [that] involves the set of social practices, organisations and institutions through which the episteme is brought into being, sustained, and developed. (p. 3) Similarly, Somers (1999) identifies different varieties of KC, that could describe certain practices: KC as the narrative structures that arrange relational elements in temporal and location patterns; KC as patterns of distinction or opposition, such as what criteria determine what is natural versus not-natural; and KC as metanarratives, i.e., naturalised cultural forms, no longer accountable to otherwise applied standards of rigor, and thus becoming "more foundational" knowledge than other knowledge(s) (p. 132).…”