On the importance of (white) humility: Epistemological decentering as a positional orientation toward research

Abstract

Over the years I have reflected on how we know what we know, that is, on our individual and collective epistemologies. Epistemology underlies education as transmitting knowledge and research as generating knowledge. Further, the system of academia often treats knowledge and expertise as a currency. We make claims about engineering education in publications and take some ownership of the facts and contexts we present. We apply for grant funding that monetizes the act of creating intellectual merit. In producing this academic currency of knowledge, we are encouraged to project confidence and expertise. In the above, “we” includes many people across the JEE readership and engineering education community. If the description in this paper resonates with you, I encourage you to reflect on what that means for how you wish to act and interact in the world. It certainly includes myself: I acknowledge my received encouragement to participate in the same academic disciplinary culture. The need to project confidence and expertise can be a collective survival strategy in academia—needed for passing a dissertation, a tenure process, or winning a grant. Perhaps it also stems from the confidence with which engineers make claims about their built technologies, a vestige that engineering education as social science researchers should reexamine critically. Lastly and most centrally, my usage of “we” suggests an epistemological tendency I believe is perpetuated by people like me—white people and dominant demographic groups (e.g., men, middle or upper class, from developed nations, highly educated). In this editorial, I will use “white” as a shorthand both specifically for the White ethnic group and more generally for all dominant demographic groups. I will argue that white people have a collective and individual socialization in a positivistic and colonizing past, which both intersects academic and engineering educational culture, perpetuates it, and has a unique character within it. The reasons for these tendencies are likely more complex than I am characterizing; however, in this editorial, I am more interested in normative and pragmatic considerations (i.e., what is happening and what to do about it) than causal (why it is happening). I want to call into question how we as a research community know what we know, and to be reflective and strategic about that. With so many forces aligning toward a performance of knowing, I will argue for and suggest enactments of epistemological decentering, a counter-cultural approach within academia that may be beneficial to the community and particularly to dominant demographic (white) groups.