Epistemic Resistance and the Politics of Knowledge

• In Event: Toward a Spacious Comparative Politics: Knowledge Production & Outsiders Within

Abstract

In graduate school, I joined an ongoing struggle to create a subfield in race, ethnicity, and politics (REP). Our collective aim as faculty and graduate students was to create an intellectual space in which normative, empirical, and methodological dimensions of inquiry are brought together rather than separated. In the struggle to create a new subfield in REP, I received an informal education in the discipline’s deeply racist and colonial approaches to difference where difference could be accepted as an analytic category, as a variable to be operationalized and measured while being rejected as a normative and political category. This rejection enabled the faculty and students in the department to hold onto the myth of political science as apolitical—as a site that does not take up questions about colonial and imperial histories and presents, racial and gendered hierarchies, and epistemic violence and injustice. It was at this critical juncture that my initial schooling in political science as an object of inquiry began. With time and reflection, I understood that the norms of science were being used to police and surveil the REP collective, to exclude and isolate us, and to marginalize and oppress us because we were challenging dominant epistemologies and methodologies while making visible the racialized nature of these very norms that sought to contain our epistemic resistance. These very norms of science were also being used to police the study democracy by actively overlooking lived experiences of unequal democracy and the systems of hierarchy that undergird them, thus ensuring a skewed understanding of democracy. I also understood that we were engaged in a larger battle over the politics of knowledge in which feminist, race, and decolonial scholars have struggled and continue to struggle to be recognized in academic communities and to have their arguments included as valid forms of knowledge.

Author

• Natasha Behl, Arizona State University