The necessity and possibility of powerful knowledge Professor Sue Cleggs.clegg@leedsmet.ac.uk

Powerful knowledge Singulars and regionalisation – a Bernsteinian

framing Regionalisation looking outwards to new social

movements and epistemic challenges Beyond north/south binaries and cultural

relativism knowledge recontextualization in multiple contexts

Necessity of powerful regional knowledge and epistemic access

Structure

Critics drawing on social realism (Bernstein) and critical realist (Bhaskhar) ideas distinguish between ‘powerful’ and other sorts of knowledge

Young ‘provides learners with a language for engaging in political, moral and other kinds of debates’

Powerful knowledge Wheelahan ‘Powerful knowledge is powerful because of the access it provides to the natural and social worlds and to society’s conversation about what it should be like’

Powerful knowledge

Social realist (Young) distinguish ‘external’ social interest and ‘internal’ cognitive interest concerned with ‘production and acquisition of knowledge itself’

Recognition that all knowledge is socially produced (epistemic relativism) but this does not entail judgemental relativism

Critical realism transitive knowledge (epistemological) of an intransitive world (ontological) - in the social world only relatively enduring

Involves a defence of (always fallible) knowledge claims

Powerful knowledge

Epistemic access to powerful knowledge Esoteric (Durkheim's sacred) not everyday

(profane) Bernstein disciplinary knowledge singulars -

with ‘their own intellectual field of texts, practices, rules of entry, examinations, license to practice, distribution of rewards and punishments’ protected by strong boundaries and hierarchies’

Higher Education

Bernstein describes a process of regionalisation whereby new areas are created

Regions are constructed by recontextualising singulars (that is traditional disciplines) into larger units both in the intellectual field of practice and in the field of external practice

Examples of regions are engineering, medicine and architecture (powerful regional knowledge)

Which disciplines enter a region depends on the recontextualising principles and its social base

Newer regions look outward to the market

Regionalisation

Semantic codes (Maton) - semantic gravity - degree to which meaning is tied to context, and semantic density - the social condensation of meaning

Critics argue that high semantic gravity ties meaning to context cannot be generalised to other contexts in same way as powerful knowledge – an issue of epistemic access

Inequalities – Wheelahan on vocational education

Critique of vocationalisation

‘This professional/ occupational hierarchy reflects the class structure in society more broadly. The professions are dominated by the social elites, while at the other end, lower VET qualifications in new fields are dominated by students from low socio-economic backgrounds’

VET - high semantic gravity and less access to powerful knowledge

Hence the importance of powerful regional knowledge

Inequalities

Looking outward not toward market but to knowledge produced by new social movements

Produced newer better accounts (powerful knowledge)

Example feminist and other movements critique of masculinist, neo-colonial and other biases of conventional (especially social science and humanities) knowledge

A knowledge argument not a simply a voice argument (although are valid sociology of knowledge arguments about knowledge production)

Radical regionalisation?

Opens up the debate of what had become known as north/south divide - Southern Studies etc

Powerful sociological critique of how and where knowledge produced

Need to be careful Naidoo ‘combined and uneven’ south/south imperialisms and also huge differences within counties

But raises question knowledge question about the possibility powerful regional knowledge in a geographic sense of knowledge produced in and about different contexts

Radical roots of regionalisation

Not a reduction to ethno-anthropological thinking Eg in African context there is an argument for the

development of African-centred knowledge as a productive space ‘between the polarization of the bad place of Eurocentrism and the immoveable rock of Afrocentricism’

Examples include carefully re-configuring of health curriculum to make it more powerful in context

Powerful regional knowledge in both Bernsteinian and geo-political sense

Cultural relativism?

Questions of epistemic access in stratified systems New students should have access to powerful

regional and disciplinary knowledge not generic ‘vocationalised’ knowledge

Questions of social justice and student agency and identity as knowers

Wheelahan argues instrumentalism in Official Recontextualization Field (ORF) and constructivism in Pedagogic Recontextualization Field (PRF) limit epistemic access by producing curricula with limited access to powerful knowledge

Why does knowledge matter