Transforming Knowledge

by Kamarck Minnich, Elizabeth

• ISBN13: 9781592131310
• ISBN10: 159213131X
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-12-03
• 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

Introduction: Still Transforming Kowledge I

Thinking: An Introductory Essay Thinking about women, or, "Women's work is never done"

Thinking as philosophical fieldwork

Thinking in the New Academy

Some reframings of thinking from the New Academy: From The One to The Many, From nouns to verbs, From external (additive) to internal (transactional) relationalities, From divided to mutually formative theory and practice

Questioning "Theory"

Returning to the field II

Still Transforming Knowledge: Circling Out, Pressing Deeper Classifying humans by kind

Conceptual errors as psychotic conceptualizations

Including nature

Re-ordering historical time

Rights, public/private-and privatization

Religion Preface and Acknowledgments A note on sources A note on usage: "We", "Black"/"white" and entwined racializations, Scare quotes Acknowledgments

No One Beginning Centering critique

More personal beginnings

Speaking as and for ourselves

Why do curricula matter?

Contextual Approaches: Thinking About Access to the curriculum: some background

Contemporary movements: equality, recognition

Early-and continuing-questions: Scholarship vs. politics?, The disciplines, "Lost women", "Add women and stir"

Critique and reflexive thinking: Thinking with and without the tradition

Public/private

Philosophical cultural analysis; psychotic cultural systems

Conceptual Approaches: Thinking Through Conceptual errors: the root problem, Dividing by 'kind'

Some examples from the curriculum

A traditional story

Paideia -Novus ordo seclorum: ideals and practices in the "New World"

Errors Basic to Dominant Traditions Faulty generalization & hierarchically invidious monism

Useful universals? Distinguishing thinking from knowing

Articulating the hierarchy: Sex/gender, class, racializations

"Reverse discrimination"

Taking the few to represent all: 'Markers' of particularity, Invisibility, Circular reasoning

Mystified concepts: Excellence, Judgment, Equality, Rationality, intelligence-and good papers, Liberal arts, Woman, Sex, Man, War, Gender

Partial Knowledge: Impartial, objective knowledge

Unanimity

Emotions, animals, morality

Undoing partial public authority

Personal, subjective, located knowledges: relativism?

Continuing resistance to transformation: Professionalization

Circling Back, Keeping Going From errors to visions

Reclaiming intimacy, universality, public life

Thinking and acting

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.