Authority: World Views and Voices
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.
Land Acknowledgement Statement
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
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.
- Project ImplicitProject Implicit is a nonprofit organization from international researchers of implicit social cognition. Part of this research includes tests to find out about your own implicit associations on a wide range of topics: from race and gender to exercise and marijuana.
Further Guides
Black Lives Matter
Dive deeper into topics involving suppressed voices, systemic racism and the authority of lived experiences by visiting the Black Lives Matter Research Guide.
Creative Commons
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.