The objectivity of local knowledge. Lessons from ethnobiology

This article develops an account of local epistemic practices on the basis of case studies from ethnobiology. I argue that current debates about objectivity often stand in the way of a more adequate understanding of local knowledge and ethnobiological practices in general. While local knowledge about the biological world often meets criteria for objectivity in philosophy of science, general debates about the objectivity of local knowledge can also obscure their unique epistemic features. In modification of Ian Hacking’s suggestion to discuss “ground level questions” instead of objectivity, I propose an account that focuses on both epistemic virtues and vices of local epistemic practices

“I Want to Look Transgender”: Anti-Assimilation, Gender Self-Determination, and Confronting White Supremacy in the Creation of a Just Judaism

AbstractIn this article, I consider transgender identity and white Jewish identity to argue that “passing” or normative assimilation is a trap, in that it extends the offer of privilege to individuals who can “successfully” conform within the confines of normativity, while leaving intact, or even reifying, the oppressive systems that are at work. As a corrective to normative assimilation, I consider alternative models for Jewish life offered by nonnormative Jewish communities that resist these oppressive norms. I further argue for the normativity and privileging of “passing” to be replaced with a non-hierarchical approach that lets all genders, all Jewish (and other) identities, be treated as valid or “real.”</jats:p

Trans visibility and trans viability: a Roundtable

This Roundtable is crafted from the online event held on Saturday 20 November 2021 on Trans Visual Cultures. That event was organized to celebrate the recently published themed issue of Journal of Visual Culture on new work in transgender art and visual cultures, guest edited by Cyle Metzger and Kirstin Ringelberg, and suggested for the journal by Jill H Casid. The themed issue emerged from a session run at the College Art Association in New York, 2018, programmed by Metzger and Ringelberg. For the event in November 2021, some of the contributors to the journal's themed issue (Kara Carmack, Sascha Crasnow, Stamatina Gregory, Cyle Metzger and Kirstin Ringelberg) were joined by interlocutor Jill Casid, and respondent Jack Halberstam to share their thoughts on trans visual culture/s now, and to consider what it is to write trans visual culture, as well as to live in relation to transness. The event happened to fall on Transgender Day of Remembrance. Given the fraught or ambivalent feelings that many have about such a day, the event was also taken as an occasion to talk about ways of untethering trans visibility from what is lethal to trans viability. After the event, the organizers solicited a few additional reflections on concerns that emerged - in particular around matters of the visual, trans visibility, and lived experience. These are brought together to act as a refractive prism for what happens when we center thinking seriously with the implications and potentials of trans art and visual culture for trans hopes and fears, kinship and community, lives and loves. The publication of this Roundtable takes the themed issue as a crucial springboard for critical, transversal trans* imaginings of the variant worlds to be unfolded by undoing the lock of the gender binary and its settler colonial and white supremacist violences, and to further the demand that thinking with trans alters substantially the ways we approach the visual

Disambiguating the Role of Paradigms in Mixed Methods Research

In the mixed methods research (MMR) literature, the term paradigm is used in a number of ways to support very different accounts. This article aims to contribute to the ongoing dialogue about the relationship between MMR and paradigms by analyzing two main claims discussed in the literature: (a) MMR is a new paradigm and (b) MMR mixes different paradigms. Focusing on the notion of paradigms used to support each claim, it clarifies why MMR can be considered a new paradigm and discusses conditions under which it is possible to mix two or more paradigms within a single study. This clarification promotes a more clear-cut use of concepts such as paradigms and worldviews in the literature