Transforming Knowledge

by Minnich, Elizabeth Kamarck

• ISBN13: 9781592131327
• ISBN10: 1592131328
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-11-26
• Publisher: Temple Univ Pr

Summary

This is a book about how we define knowledge and how we think about moral and political questions. It argues that the prevailing systems of knowledge, morality, and politics are rooted in views that are exclusionary and therefore legitimate injustice, patriarchy, and violence. That is, these views divide humans into different kinds along a hierarchy whose elite still defines the systems that shape our lives and misshape our thinking.Like the first edition of Transforming Knowledge, this substantially revised edition calls upon us to continue to liberate our minds and the systems we live within from concepts that rationalize inequality. It engages with the past fifteen years of feminist scholarship and developments in its allied fields (such as Cultural Studies, African American Studies, Queer Studies, and Disability Studies) to critique the deepest and most vicious of old prejudices. This new edition extends Minnich's arguments and connects them with the contemporary academy as well as recent instances of domination, genocide, and sexualized violence.Updated to consider recent scholarship in Gender, Multicultural, Postcolonial, Disability, Native American, and Queer Studies, among other fields of studyRevised to include an extended analysis of the conceptual errors that legitimate domination, including the construction of kinds ("genders") of human beingsRevised to include new materials from a variety of cultures and times, and engages with today's contemporary debates about affirmative action, postmodernism, and religion Author note: Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich is Core Professor at the Graduate College for Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, The Union Institute and University. She has spoken and consulted on developing more inclusive curricula at colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad. She has served as Chair of the North Carolina Humanities Council, on the Executive Committee of the Society for the Study of Women Philosophers, and the Committee on the Status of Women, both associated with The American Philosophical Association. In addition, she is the coeditor of Reconstructing the Academy: Women's Education and Women's Studies.

Author Biography

Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich is Senior Fellow, the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	xi
A Note on Sources	xi
A Note on Usage	xii
"We"	xii
"Black"/"White" and Entwined Racializations	xiv
Scare Quotes	xviii
Acknowledgments	xviii
Introduction: Still Transforming Knowledge	1	(47)
Thinking: An Introductory Essay	2	(23)
Thinking about Women, or, "Women's Work Is Never Done"	2	(1)
Thinking as Philosophical Fieldwork	3	(3)
Thinking in the New Academy	6	(4)
Some Reframings of Thinking from the New Academy	10	(4)
From the One to the Many-Abstract Singulars to Plurals	10	(1)
From Nouns to Verbs-Static to Active	11	(1)
From External (Additive) to Internal (Transactional) Relationalities	12	(1)
From Divided to Mutually Formative Theory and Practice	13	(1)
Questioning "Theory"	14	(5)
Returning to the Field	19	(6)
Still Transforming Knowledge: Circling Out, Pressing Deeper	25	(23)
Classifying Humans by Kind	25	(4)
Conceptual Errors as Psychotic Conceptualizations	29	(5)
Including Nature	34	(6)
Reordering Historical Time	40	(1)
Rights, Public/Private and Privatization	41	(4)
Religion	45	(3)
I. No One Beginning	48	(14)
Centering Critique	50	(1)
More Personal Beginnings	51	(3)
Speaking as and for Ourselves	54	(4)
Why Do Curricula Matter?	58	(4)
II. Contextual Approaches: Thinking About	62	(25)
Access to the Curriculum: Some Background	62	(3)
Contemporary Movements: Equality, Recognition	65	(5)
Early-and Continuing Questions	70	(6)
Scholarship versus Politics?	71	(1)
The Disciplines	71	(2)
"Lost Women"	73	(1)
"Add Women and Stir"	74	(2)
Critique and Reflexive Thinking	76	(11)
Thinking with and without the Tradition	76	(5)
Public/Private	81	(3)
'Philosophical Cultural Analysis; Psychotic Cultural Systems	84	(3)
III. Conceptual Approaches: Thinking Through	87	(16)
Conceptual Errors: The Root Problem	87	(3)
Dividing by 'Kind'	90	(3)
Some Examples from the Curriculum	93	(4)
A Traditional Story	97	(1)
Paideia	98	(2)
Novus Ordo Seclorum: Ideals and Practices in the "New World"	100	(3)
IV. Errors Basic to Dominant Traditions	103	(162)
Faulty Generalization and Hierarchically Invidious Monism	110	(44)
Useful Universals? Distinguishing Thinking from Knowing	113	(5)
Articulating the Hierarchy: Sex/Gender, Class, Racialization	118	(22)
Sex/Gendering	118	(6)
Class	124	(4)
Race	128	(12)
"Reverse Discrimination"	140	(5)
Taking the Few to Represent All	145	(4)
Markers of Particularity	149	(1)
Invisibility	150	(4)
Circular Reasoning	154	(15)
Faulty Standards	155	(3)
False Claims to Neutrality	158	(2)
Closet Platonism	160	(2)
Circular Definitions of Fields	162	(4)
Prejudice	166	(1)
From Classroom to Country	167	(2)
Mystified Concepts	169	(63)
Excellence	170	(4)
Judgment	174	(5)
Equality	179	(3)
Rationality, Intelligence-and Good Papers	182	(8)
Liberal Arts	190	(4)
Woman	194	(4)
Sex	198	(5)
Man	203	(2)
War	205	(10)
Gender	215	(17)
Partial Knowledge	232	(33)
Impartial, Objective Knowledge	236	(4)
Unanimity	240	(2)
Emotions, Animals, Morality	242	(3)
Undoing Partial Public Authority	245	(8)
Personal, Subjective, Located Knowledges: Relativism?	253	(2)
The Threat of Relativism?	255	(3)
Continuing Resistance to Transformation	258	(2)
Professionalization	260	(5)
V. Circling Back, Keeping Going	265	(12)
From Errors to Visions	267	(3)
Reclaiming Intimacy, Universality, Public Life	270	(2)
Thinking and Acting	272	(5)
Notes	277