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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: Jan 8, 2024 3:31 PM

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

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

Read Further: Marginalized Knowledge and Voices

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Multicultural and Marginalized Voices of Postcolonial Literature

Women and the word marginalization have never remained oxymoronic - the cross-cultural texts and Engels interest on subjugation make a perfect recipe for this incongruity. Multicultural and Marginalized Voices of Postcolonial Literature traces multifarious facets of marginalized literature across the world, giving a brilliant overview of the historical roots of multiculturalist and marginalized sections. The fourteen chapters relate key literary and cultural texts and cover a broad spectrum of historical, linguistic and theoretical issues. There are three sections in the book - section I has four chapters, dealing specifically theoretical constructions and representations. Section II consists of four chapters that offer varied spectrum of discourses on world literature, intersecting with the frameworks of literary theories. Section III comprises six chapters that explore the mind of dalits, subalterns, colonial women and gender issues of a variety of Indian English Writers and draw varied perspectives of it.

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Poverty, Inequality and Health

Poverty, Inequality and Health: An International Perspective raises new and critical issues about health inequalities. It is unique in that it provides the first truly international perspective on this problem, with contributions from the developed and developing world. The outcome of a Public Health Forum organized by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, this book brings together material from internationally recognized contributors from a wide range of disciplines and countries. The chapters reflect this diversity, ranging from the micro- to the macro-level, from aetiology to intervention. Topics covered include: the overarching concepts linking economic and social forces and health status the extent to which ethical concerns lie at the heart of the issue of inequalities in health and attempts to ameliorate them; macro-level features of inequalities in health within and between countries; an overview of the main body of work on inequalities in health in developed countries and those in transition within Europe; specific pathways and mechanisms at the individual level that link poverty and inequality to health status; the interaction of social and biological influences on health status throughout life; specific disease-specific links; and issues of policy and interventions aimed at reducing inequalities in health. The book brings together people from very varied disciplines to discuss an area of clear international interest and global importance. As such it will be of value to the broad public health audience as well as research epidemiologists, international policy analysts and policy makers and those concerned with economic development and health.

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Marginalized Voices in Music Education

Marginalized Voices in Music Education explores the American culture of music teachers by looking at marginalization and privilege in music education as a means to critique prevailing assumptions and paradigms. In fifteen contributed essays, authors set out to expand notions of who we believe we are as music educators -- and who we want to become. This book is a collection of perspectives by some of the leading and emerging thinkers in the profession, and identifies cases of individuals or groups who had experienced marginalization. It shares the diverse stories in a struggle for inclusion, with the goal to begin or expand conversation in undergraduate and graduate courses in music teacher education. Through the telling of these stores, authors hope to recast music education as fertile ground for transformation, experimentation and renewal.

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Mothers at the Margins

In the last two decades, maternal scholarship has grown exponentially. Despite this, however, there are still numerous areas which remain under-researched, one of which is the experiences of marginalised mothers. Far from being a sentimental, feel-good account of mothering, this collection speaks with the voices of mothers through the application of a matricentric lens. In particular, it speaks with the voices of those mothers who feel alienated or stigmatised; mothers who have been rendered invisible; mothers who feel they have been silenced. These are the voices of mothers who, through a perception that they do not fit the accepted and expected norms of motherhood, have been relegated to the margins. In recovering these "lost" voices, the attuned listener may hear tones that resonate, and are dissonant, angry or full of joy. This book explores the experiences of mothers from broad and diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, thus expanding understandings and appreciations of the complexity of maternal experiences. It challenges narrowly constructed ideas of maternal identity, countering the homogenous collection of voices which speak in normative tones and of predictable values on the subject of motherhood and mothering. Recovering the marginalised voice of mothering and the voices of marginalised mothers reveals not only structures of alienation, oppression and marginalisation, but also strategies of resistance and love that such mothers develop through negotiating the challenges encountered in their living realities.

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American Silent Film: Discovering Marginalized Voices

Gregg Bachman and Thomas J. Slater present an array of essays that reveal the incredible complexity of silent films and the era in which they were produced. Essentially, silent films conjure the names of Mary Pickford and a few white men, including Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith. These eleven essays, however, demonstrate that minorities and women other than Pickford also responded to the times through film. The contributors deal with changing American society at a crucial time, examining our hopes and fears as a nation during the silent film era. Opening new vistas, this book introduces us to people, films, issues, and concepts that few of us have encountered. One example is screenwriter June Mathis, who wrote more than one hundred scripts, brought Rudolph Valentino to stardom, and supervised all productions at the Goldwyn Studios in 1923. Equally intriguing is Nita Naldi, whose career and tragic life speak volumes about America's combined fascination with and fear of ethnic minorities. Other key players in the drama of silent films include John Randolph Bray (animated cartoons), Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, and female producer, writer, and director Nell Shipman. Contributors are Kay Armatage, Jean Chateauvert, Maureen Furniss, Mark Langer, Anne Morey, Diane Negra, George Potamianos, Joanna Rapf, Thomas J. Slater, Sam Stoloff, and Judith Thissen.  Seventeen illustrations enliven this study of silent film.

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Disrupting the Digital Humanities

All too often, defining a discipline becomes more an exercise of exclusion than inclusion. Disrupting the Digital Humanities seeks to rethink how we map disciplinary terrain by directly confronting the gatekeeping impulse of many other so-called field-defining collections. What is most beautiful about the work of the Digital Humanities is exactly the fact that it can't be tidily anthologized. In fact, the desire to neatly define the Digital Humanities (to filter the DH-y from the DH) is a way of excluding the radically diverse work that actually constitutes the field. This collection, then, works to push and prod at the edges of the Digital Humanities - to open the Digital Humanities rather than close it down. Ultimately, it's exactly the fringes, the outliers, that make the Digital Humanities both lovely and rigorous. This collection does not constitute yet another reservoir for the new Digital Humanities canon. Rather, our aim is less about assembling content as it is about creating new conversations. Building a truly communal space for the digital humanities requires that we all approach that space with a commitment to: 1) creating open and non-hierarchical dialogues; 2) championing non-traditional work that might not otherwise be recognized through conventional scholarly channels; 3) amplifying marginalized voices; 4) advocating for students and learners; and 5) sharing generously to support the work of our peers. TABLE OF CONTENTS // Cathy N. Davidson, "Preface: Difference is Our Operating System" Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel, "Disrupting the Digital Humanities: An Introduction" I. Etymology Adeline Koh, "A Letter to the Humanities: DH Will Not Save You" Audrey Watters, "The Myth and the Millennialism of 'Disruptive Innovation'" Meg Worley, "The Rhetoric of Disruption: What are We Doing Here?" Jesse Stommel, "Public Digital Humanities" II. Identity Jonathan Hsy and Rick Godden, "Universal Design and Its Discontents" Angel Nieves, "DH as 'Disruptive Innovation' for Restorative Social Justice: Virtual Heritage and 3D Reconstructions of South Africa's Township Histories" Annemarie Perez, "Lowriding through the Digital Humanities" III. Jeremiad Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo, "Gold Star for You," "Mongrel Dream Library" Michelle Moravec, "Exceptionalism in Digital Humanities: Community, Collaboration, and Consensus" Matt Thomas, "The Trouble with ProfHacker" Sean Michael Morris, "Digital Humanities and the Erosion of Inquiry" IV. Labor Moya Bailey, "#transform(ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethonography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics" Kathi Inman Berens and Laura Sanders, "DH and Adjuncts: Putting the Human Back into the Humanities" Liana Silva Ford, "Not Seen, Not Heard" Spencer D. C. Keralis, "Disrupting Labor in Digital Humanities; or, The Classroom Is Not Your Crowd" V. Networks Maha Bali, "The Unbearable Whiteness of the Digital" Eunsong Kim, "The Politics of Visibility" Bonnie Stewart, "Academic Influence: The Sea of Change" VI. Play Edmond Y Chang, "Playing as Making" Kat Lecky, "Humanizing the Interface" Robin Wharton, "Bend Until It Breaks: Digital Humanities and Resistance" VII. Structure Chris Friend, "Outsiders, All: Connecting the Pasts and Futures of Digital Humanities and Composition" Lee Skallerup-Bessette, "W(h)ither DH? New Tensions, Directions, and Evolutions in the Digital Humanities" Chris Bourg, "The Library is Never Neutral" Fiona Barnett, "After the Digital Humanities, or, a Postscript" Conclusion Dorothy Kim, "#DecolonizeDH or A Practical Guide to Making DH Less White"

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Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance

Despite its importance to literary and cultural texts of resistance, theater has been largely overlooked as a field of analysis in colonial and postcolonial studies. Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance seeks to address that absence, as it uniquely views drama and performance as central to the practice of nationalism and anti-colonial resistance. Nandi Bhatia argues that Indian theater was a significant force in the struggle against oppressive colonial and postcolonial structures, as it sought to undo various schemes of political and cultural power through its engagement with subjects derived from mythology, history, and available colonial models such as Shakespeare. Bhatia's attention to local histories within a postcolonial framework places performance in a global and transcultural context. Drawing connections between art and politics, between performance and everyday experience, Bhatia shows how performance often intervened in political debates and even changed the course of politics. One of the first Western studies of Indian theater to link the aesthetics and the politics of that theater, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance combines in-depth archival research with close readings of dramatic texts performed at critical moments in history. Each chapter amplifies its themes against the backdrop of specific social conditions as it examines particular dramatic productions, from The Indigo Mirror to adaptations of Shakespeare plays by Indian theater companies, illustrating the role of theater in bringing nationalist, anticolonial, and gendered struggles into the public sphere. Nandi Bhatia is Associate Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.  

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Girls and Their Comics

In America, comics and comic books have often been associated with adolescent male fantasy muscle-bound superheroes and scantily clad women. Nonetheless, comics have also been read and enjoyed by girls. While there have been many strong representations of women throughout their history, the comics of today have evolved and matured, becoming a potent medium in which to explore the female experience, particularly that of girlhood and adolescence. In Girls and Their Comics: Finding a Female Voice in Comic Book Narrative, Jacqueline Danziger-Russell contends that comics have a unique place in the representation of female characters. She discusses the overall history of the comic book, paying special attention to girls comics, showing how such works relate to a female point of view. While examining the concept of visual literacy, Danziger-Russell asserts that comics are an excellent space in which the marginalized voices of girls may be expressed. This volume also includes a chapter on manga (Japanese comics), which explains the genesis of girls comics in Japan and their popularity with girls in the United States. Including interviews with librarians, comic creators, and girls who read comics and manga, Girls and Their Comics is an important examination of the growing interest in comic books among young females and will appeal to a wide audience, including literary theorists, teachers, librarians, popular culture and women s studies scholars, and comic book historians."

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Homecoming Queers

Homecoming Queers provides a critical discussion of the multiple strategies used by queer Latina authors and artists in the United States to challenge silence and invisibility within mainstream media, literary canons, and theater spaces. Marivel T. Danielson's analysis reveals the extensive legacy of these cultural artists, including novelists, filmmakers, students and activists, comedians, performers, and playwrights. By clearly discussing the complexities and universalities of ethnic, racial, sexual, gender, and class intersections between queer Chicana and U.S. Latinas, Danielson explores the multiple ways identity shapes and shades creative expression. Weaknesses and gaps are revealed in the treatment of difference as a whole, within dominant and marginalized communities. Spanning multiple genres and forms, and including scholarly theory alongside performances, films, narratives, and testimonials, Homecoming Queers leads readers along a crucial path toward understanding and overcoming the silences that previously existed across these fields.

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Public Health Ethics

This Open Access book highlights the ethical issues and dilemmas that arise in the practice of public health. It is also a tool to support instruction, debate, and dialogue regarding public health ethics. Although the practice of public health has always included consideration of ethical issues, the field of public health ethics as a discipline is a relatively new and emerging area.  There are few practical training resources for public health practitioners, especially resources which include discussion of realistic cases which are likely to arise in the practice of public health. This work discusses these issues on a case to case basis and helps create awareness and understanding of the ethics of public health care. The main audience for the casebook is public health practitioners, including front-line workers, field epidemiology trainers and trainees, managers, planners, and decision makers who have an interest in learning about how to integrate ethical analysis into their day to day public health practice.  The casebook is also useful to schools of public health and public health students as well as to academic ethicists who can use the book to teach public health ethics and distinguish it from clinical and research ethics.                                                                                                           

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Women in STEM Careers

Adopting an international perspective, this book draws on current research from the United States, Australia and Europe to examine women's participation, advancement and leadership in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields.The book explores the nature of STEM careers across industry and academia, and presents the latest thinking on successful individual, organizational and educational initiatives related to women in STEM. Along with a select group of international contributors, Diana Bilimoria and Linley Lord provide a fresh perspective, based on success stories and successful initiatives, augmenting contemporary perspectives on the barriers and issues that women in STEM careers continue to face.Women in STEM Careers is a positive and insightful outlook on gender relations, which will be an invaluable resource for scholars, practitioners and policy-makers in organizations, human resources, academia, and government, as well as for women aspiring to or presently working in STEM fields.

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Breaking In

Why is it that, while women in the United States have generally made great strides in establishing parity with their male counterparts in educational attainment, they remain substantially underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)? Why is it that, in proportion to the PhDs they obtain in STEM, they attain fewer administrative and managerial positions in academia and industry than their numbers warrant and, moreover, are more likely leave the field once started in their careers? In the culture and context of women's advancement and satisfaction with careers in STEM, the data show that many challenges and obstacles remain. By showcasing the stories of eight women scientists who have achieved successful careers in the academy, industry and government, Breaking Inoffers vivid insights into the challenges and barriers that women face in entering STEM while also describing these women's motivations, the choices they made along their paths, and the intellectual satisfactions and excitement of scientific discovery they derive from their work. Breaking Inunderscores issues aspiring women scientists will encounter on their journeys and what they can do to forestall potential obstacles, advocate for change, and fulfill their ambitions. And it speaks to the question: What can be done to encourage more women to specialize in science, mathematics, and engineering? In doctoral granting institutions, where women must start if they hope to earn advanced degrees, Breaking Incan serve both as a student text and as guide for department chairs and deans who are concerned about organizational climate and culture and their impact on retention in STEM fields. At a broader level, this book offers advice and inspiration to women contemplating entering STEM fields, as well to the teachers, researchers, and administrators responsible for nurturing these women, growing enrollments in their disciplines, and developing creative and intellectual capital that the nation needs to compete in the global marketplace.

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Gender Equality at Work

Gender Equality at Work is a practical, easy-to-implement guide for HR practitioners on how to use gender mainstreaming as a strategy to address gender equality in the workplace. Gender Equality at Work will show you how to circumvent many of the barriers to implementing gender mainstreaming. You'll also learn how to create a more enabling environment at work for gender equality initiatives, as well as how to:

  • Get senior management buy-in
  • Implement company gender policies and practical corporate guidelines
  • Develop a gender equality action plan
  • Operationalize gender equality
  • Implement sustainable gender equality campaigns
  • And more!

This is an essential handbook for any executive who wants to change the gender equality initiatives in their organization. Unlock practical, easy-to-implement solutions to address gender equality in the workplace.

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Inequality and African-American Health

This book shows how living in a highly racialized society affects health through multiple social contexts, including neighborhoods, personal and family relationships, and the medical system. Black-white disparities in health, illness, and mortality have been widely documented, but most research has focused on single factors that produce and perpetuate those disparities, such as individual health behaviors and access to medical care. This is the first book to offer a comprehensive perspective on health and sickness among African Americans, starting with an examination of how race has been historically constructed in the US and in the medical system and the resilience of racial ideologies and practices. Racial disparities in health reflect racial inequalities in living conditions, incarceration rates, family systems, and opportunities. These racial disparities often cut across social class boundaries and have gender-specific consequences. Bringing together data from existing quantitative and qualitative research with new archival and interview data, this book advances research in the fields of families, race-ethnicity, and medical sociology.

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: Indigenous, Traditional and Local Knowledge

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The American Indian Mind in a Linear World: American Indian Studies and Traditional Knowledge

This book presents an ethnohistorical examination of American Indian thinking and philosophy and strives to explain the complexity of the American Indian mind in its traditional cultural and natural environment and in contrast to the American mainstream linear world. It is argued that Indian thinking is visual and circular, concerned with the relationships among all things. This includes both human and nonhuman entities embedded in both the physical and metaphysical realities, maintaining a focused on achieving balance both within oneself and in the community.

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What Is Indigenous Knowledge?

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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Local Science vs Global Science

While science has achieved a remarkable understanding of nature, affording humans an astonishing technological capability, it has led, through Euro-American global domination, to the muting of other cultural views and values, even threatening their continued existence. There is a growing realization that the diversity of knowledge systems demand respect, some refer to them in a conservation idiom as alternative information banks. The scientific perspective is only one. We now have many examples of the soundness of local science and practices, some previously considered "primitive" and in need of change, but this book goes beyond demonstrating the soundness of local science and arguing for the incorporation of others' knowledge in development, to argue that we need to look quizzically at the foundations of science itself and further challenge its hegemony, not only over local communities in Africa, Asia, the Pacific or wherever, but also the global community. The issues are large and the challenges are exciting, as addressed in this book, in a range of ethnographic and institutional contexts.

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Contextualizing Indigenous Knowledge in Africa and Its Diaspora

This volume proposes a wholesale adoption of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS) as a paradigm for Africa's renewal and freedom from the whims of foreign interests. These systems, as argued here, involve balancing short-term thinking and immediate gratification with longer-term planning for future generations of Africans and the continent's diaspora. The book will be of interest to anyone concerned with development studies in Africa and its diaspora, as it offers plausible solutions to Africa's chronic developmental problems that can only be provided from within Africa, rather than through the intervention of external third parties. As such, it provides vital contributions to the ongoing search for viable answers to the challenges that Africa faces today.

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Reclaiming Indigenous Knowledge Systems: Towards Sustainable People-Forest Relationships in Kenya

Conservation has, over the last couple of decades, coalesced around the language of 'community-engagement'. Models that seemed to prop up conservation areas as those emptied of human presence are cracking under their own weight. This book grounds our understanding of people-forest relationships through the lens of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) in the Nyandarwa (Aberdare) forest reserve in Kenya, home to the Agĩkũyũ people. It confronts the history of land dispossession in Kenya, demonstrates that land continues to be a central pillar of Agĩkũyũ indigenous environmental thought, and cements the role of the forest in sustaining the struggle for independence. It also shines a light on seed and food sovereignty as arenas of knowledge mobilization and self-determination. The book concludes by showing how IKS can contribute to forging sustainable people-forest relationships.

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.

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