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Authority: World Views and Voices

This guide will help you better understand authority in the context of research and information and provide you with methods of evaluating an information source to determine its authority.
Last Updated: Jul 14, 2025 10:13 AM

Marginalized Knowledge

Authority Is a Relative and Culturally Constructed System

The voices of certain peoples have been disregarded as insignificant or peripheral in many disciplines for much of history. This process of marginalization in information creation has caused and continues to reinforce systemic biases.

There are many examples of this across the humanities, social sciences and STEM with regard to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

These systems can be unintentionally perpetuated when we are not aware of them and our own implicit biases.

How does your discipline work to incorporate marginalized voices into research and application?

How do you ensure you have incorporated these voices in your research?

What are your own perceptions that influence your selection and use of information?

Does your source of information include a cross-cultural comparison?

Does your source make colonializing or culturally supremacist claims?

Indigenous, Traditional, and Local Knowledge

Indigenous, traditional, and local knowledge are often marginalized. These terms broadly refer to knowledge systems from the cultural traditions of regional, indigenous, and/or local communities. This includes a variety of knowledge and technologies involved in crafts, midwifery, ecology, traditional medicine, climate, and more.

This knowledge is expressed and disseminated in a variety of means, but is often part of generational oral traditions over centuries or even millennia. The communities such information originates from often follow traditions of custodianship over it.

 

Be Aware of How you Perceive Information

Have you ever thought you were devoid of bias?

It takes a lot of work to identify and acknowledge the biases within ourselves, many of which we may not be aware of. These are implicit biases and everyone has them.

We perceive the world through a series of lenses influenced by our backgrounds, cultures, location, education and so much more.

Before you continue your research, take a moment to ask yourself what your lenses are.

What parts of yourself influence the way you think, perceive, produce and consume information around you?

The tool below can help you start to identify and acknowledge some of these biases.

Read Further: Marginalized Knowledge and Voices

Mark My Words cover art

Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping our Nations

UB Author Mishuana Goeman from the Department of Indigenous Studies

Read Further: Indigenous, Traditional and Local Knowledge

Land Acknowledgement Statement

Haudenosaunee Flag/Iroquois Confederacy Flag with Hiawatha Belt design

Image attribution: "Flag of the Iroquois Confederacy" by Himasaram and Zscout370, released into the public domain

We would like to begin by acknowledging the land on which the University at Buffalo operates, which is the territory of the Seneca Nation, a member of the Haudenosaunee/Six Nations Confederacy. This territory is covered by The Dish with One Spoon Treaty of Peace and Friendship, a pledge to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. It is also covered by the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, between the United States Government and the Six Nations Confederacy, which further affirmed Haudenosaunee land rights and sovereignty in the State of New York. Today, this region is still the home to the Haudenosaunee people, and we are grateful for the opportunity to live, work, and share ideas in this territory.

UB Office of Inclusive Excellence, Indigenous Inclusion
The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, Indigenous Land Acknowledgement

Learn more about Indigenous Studies at UB and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy:

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