by Pippa Sterk
read Pippa’s reflection on re:wave’s peer review process
- Universities both thrive on and perpetuate social stratification.
- Universities are spaces where people can learn to identify, challenge, and organise against social stratification.
I am wondering if there is a non-confessional way to declare my status as a university teacher. I am not ashamed of it, nor do I want to distance myself from my sector, as if I am a beacon of virtue tragically stuck in a bucket of rotten eggs. But, in answering an open call titled ‘Against Western Knowledge Production’, I am aware of the irony, being a knowledge-producer based at a university in the West. It’s like a bad joke — it insists on being acknowledged before we can move on.
The nature of my field (sociology) is both to teach students through conventional academic norms and to resist these norms. On the level of form, the joys of sociology lie in seeing whether you can stretch conventions to (or beyond) breaking point, and to examine the political, historical and social background of how these conventions came to exist in the first place.
Teaching sociology, you become accustomed to moving with(in) seeming contradictions. But, teaching sociology, you also become accustomed to seeing contradiction in 3D: not just the furrowed brows of one arrow pointing to the right and one to the left ( → ← ), but rather an ever-moving interaction of ideas, values, and systems of thought. Sure, they may converge at times, but this convergence does not need to be a fight with a winner and a loser. Convergence can be a rewarding process, but only if we accept that it changes what we think we know about ourselves and the world. In Judith Butler’s words: “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something” (Butler, 2004).
(Perhaps less ‘contradiction’, and more ‘tension’? In this article, I want to think with/through/in tension)
It is exactly this potential for reward that makes it so frustrating when the language of resistance is used to collapse tension. I deeply believe in ways of viewing the world that are pluralistic, that open up possibilities for understanding how we can be in relation to each other. But we cannot deny the fact that the many terms that supposedly facilitate this are too often used in simplistic or self-serving ways — ways that reinforce and obscure, rather than unsettle and illuminate, the processes by which power reinforces itself through knowledge-production (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Instead of new ways of seeing, they become instructions, a simple right and wrong that proclaims that we already know what we are seeing, so don’t bother looking for yourself.
In plain talk, I’ve seen too many people (students, academics, activists, artists, authors, people who occupy multiple of these positions) name any old shit ‘decolonial’ and call it a day.
- Many academic fields have a semi-solidified ‘canon’ and conventions of working that are inextricably bound up with a privileging of the West.
- Knowledge-production outside the West also draws on canons and conventions that privilege certain subjects, places, and demographics over others.
- Subaltern and anti-oppressive knowledge-producers exist within the academy.
I frequently find myself in conversations with people who will proclaim a variation on ‘...but of course, the mainstream media aren’t talking about this!’ about any social issue du jour. When I, know-it-all that I am, point out that it was literally BBC headline news, the caveats come:
Well yeah, they’re talking about it NOW, but…
Well yeah, but that’s biased reporting.
Well yeah, but that’s just ONE news source.
These can all be true, but they are not the same as ‘not talking about something’. Just admit you don’t read the news, bro.
The same tendency is found in how people talk about research. Have you ever heard someone use the phrase ‘historians will say they are just friends’ about a queer couple from the past? I always imagine that for queer historians, it is kind of frustrating to be portrayed as the cause of, rather than a potential solution to the social and archival erasure of queerness.
It is attractive to dismiss a field out of hand by imagining the entire field as equally oppressive, imagining that anyone even slightly marginalised would have been pushed out. By not having to consider everyone who has gone before us, we can imagine ourselves as the pioneers of knowledge. There are no perspectives like ours in the world, nobody who has looked at this, nobody who is talking about this.
The drive for novelty, for claiming intellectual territory, for
And we’re doing it to ourselves! Grant applications and manuscript proposals invite us to boast novelty and boast it fast, even when we are doing the-same-as-usual-but-slightly-different at most (Back and Puwar, 2012). We couldn’t possibly see the value in providing updates, additions, alternative perspectives, or even just more data to existing knowledge-bases — we have to pretend that we are somehow completely renovating the field that we are in.
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Vice versa, by imagining Western academic knowledge-production as uniquely oppressive, and ‘non-Western’ knowledge-production as the remedy to this oppression, we miss how the latter can maintain its own epistemological marginalisations.
When we talk about ‘the West’, what are we even talking about? Many of us will have instinctive ideas about which countries do and do not belong in the West, but let’s be real, this dichotomy collapses real quick when you ask the average person in the UK to name five Serbian intellectuals, or the last time they read an article in Dutch. When we name the forces that shape knowledge-production, we should be precise. Is the focus of a study ‘Western’, or is it USAmerican? Is the global language of scholarship ‘Western’ or is it Anglophone? Is our philosophical canon ‘Western’ or largely West/Central European?
We should be equally precise when it comes to naming who has the most access to positions of knowledge-production outside the West. I have met, cited, and worked with amazing scholars from countries that are still grappling with the devastations of colonialism. Yet these scholars would be the first to acknowledge that they are, by and large, not the ones hardest hit by colonial ramifications. Access to knowledge-production outside the West is also easier for the upper-middle class, for those who belong to the majority ethnicity of a country/region, for those who speak the majoritarian language. We should name these dynamics, rather than flattening the concept of ‘non-Western’ into a singular subjugated position, where everyone is equally affected.
Let me be clear: I would never write this for an outlet with a primarily white readership. I would never want to run the risk of someone taking my argument and appropriating it into a shape that serves white, Western hegemony, or that would allow for this hegemony to excuse itself (“see, Brown people can be just as racist/classist/elitist, maybe even more so!”). However, when we do have the opportunity to talk among ourselves, I think we should take the opportunity to be honest about the dynamics within our own spaces.
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There’s a reason why world-wide, far right nationalist movements start by targeting universities and scholarship, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. There is a reason why the right is so eager to portray all academic work as ivory-tower-out-of-touch snobbery. There is a reason why so many protests the world over are student-led. Studying is not just about the content of knowledge-transfer, and the proof of this knowledge-transfer in the form of a degree. It is also about the experience of this transference, and the myriad of ways the process of this transference can open up new ways of relating to each other (Freire, 1996).
Of course, in an ideal future, the spaces where we create and share knowledge together will be far removed from the profit-driven university system we know now, perhaps so far removed that they can’t be identified as universities at all. But at the moment, for all their faults, universities (at their best) are spaces where you can interact with people, viewpoints, and concepts entirely outside of your own frame of reference. Of course, this does not only happen at university. There are many other places that facilitate this interaction. But it would be a shame to dismiss this function altogether.
This particular function of universities is a threat to authority, which thrives on social isolation, and which wants us to believe that we cannot meaningfully connect to anyone who doesn’t think, speak, and behave just like us. In Orientalism, Edward Said reminds us that the dehumanisation of ‘the Oriental’ relies exactly on seeing difference as intrinsic and unbridgeable (Said, 1979). How much easier it is to enact this dehumanisation in a world where institutions for knowledge-exchange are systematically destroyed!
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Talking about methodologies is unsexy. It conjures up a stuffy room, unintelligible procedures, or someone monotonously reprimanding you for colouring outside the lines. Methodology is something we might prefer not to think about.
But, we are engaging in methodology all the time when we decide what about the world is ‘true’. Which news items to believe. Which of our friends can be trusted to tell us truths about ourselves. What feelings we should indulge ourselves in, and which ones we should bury deep. We constantly decide what sources of information to trust, how we determine that trust, and what needs to happen for that trust to be lost.
A methodology is nothing more than an insight into a decision-making process. But it is also nothing less. When we talk about decolonial/feminist/queer/crip/indigenous/creative/subaltern methods of inquiry, we need to be clear about what we mean. Just as one can conduct a statistical analysis poorly by not considering what is being calculated and how, a feminist investigation can be done poorly if the focus and method of the investigation is unclear. Just as conventional scientific methods can be extractive, so can crip methods. Associating methodologies with marginalisation does not free them from oppressive consequences. We need to know how we are building our knowledge if we want to build any knowledge at all.
Just as we may draw on big datasets, interviews, and fieldwork observations, we may draw on intuition, creativity, sensuality, and ancestry as sources of knowledge. However, it would be a mistake to think that the latter (‘unconventional’) set is somehow intrinsically purer, more ethical, or less susceptible to oppressive frameworks than the former.
- When someone crosses the street to avoid a homeless person, they may be drawing on the ‘intuitive’ knowledge telling them that homeless people are dangerous.
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- When someone feels uncomfortable at the sight of a visibly disabled person, they may be drawing on their ‘sensual’ knowledge that disabled bodies are revolting.
- When someone waves a St George’s flag, they may be drawing on ‘ancestral knowledge’ that tells them that England is for the English.
Our senses do tell us something about the world, and this knowledge should not be ignored. But without investigation into how, why, and where this telling happens, we are likely just reproducing the most dominant lies of the world.
I don’t want ‘alternatives’ to academic knowledge-production to become synonymous with sloppiness, vagueness, or lack of reflexivity. Otherwise, the message we are sending the world is simply that lack of rigour is integral to epistemologies of resistance.
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“I wonder how it is that all the people I know are absolutely convinced that they are not in false consciousness, but can tell at the drop of a hat that everybody else is” (Hall, 2016, p. 83)
Changing our approach to knowledge is a slow process. Anyone who claims to have a quick way of ‘doing’ knowledge in an anti-oppressive, anti-colonial, anti-hierarchical way, is kidding themselves at best and actively hiding their complicity in unequal power divisions at worst.
I want my students, my colleagues, my communities (and myself — I am not immune to this) to engage in knowledge-production that is more than the term ‘production’ can capture. I want it to be fun, creative, curious, contemplative, exploratory! But I also want it to be thorough. I want anti-oppressive efforts to be a 3D-process — given the time, breadth, and depth they deserve — rather than a button to push to make one’s work more exciting, more fundable, and exempt from criticism. I want us to know (or at least want to know) what we mean when we say ‘Against Western Knowledge-Production’.
References
Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso Books.
Freire, P. (1996) Pedagogy of the oppressed. New rev. ed. London: Penguin Books (Penguin Education).
Hall, S. (2016) Cultural studies 1983: a theoretical history. Edited by J.D. Slack and L. Grossberg. Durham: Duke University Press (Stuart Hall, selected writings).
Said, E.W. (1979) Orientalism. New York: Vintage books.
Tuck, E. and Yang, K.W. (2012) ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1). Available at: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630 (Accessed: 24 September 2025).
Pippa Sterk is a Dutch-Indonesian writer and researcher, based in London. Their work uses creative and/or feminist approaches to critically interrogate queer community-building, pedagogy, and racialisation. They are a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Bristol, and they have published on issues such as linguistic racialisation, what it means to queer the university, and collective care in group work settings.
You can find Pippa here :
Instagram @pippasterk