Proceedings of the 8th World Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities
Year: 2025
DOI:
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Examining the Scope of Diversity Across Disciplines and its Linkages with Whiteness and Epistemic Oppression in the Academy
Dr. Nathan Andrews
ABSTRACT:
While often considered to be objective and value-free, science is situated in social and political contexts that cannot be isolated. How then can we understand the implications of whiteness and epistemic oppression on how science is ‘done’ in the Canadian academic context? Using a triangulation of approaches, such as syllabi analyses, interviews, and event ethnography (of annual conferences for geosciences, political science, and neuroscience), this transdisciplinary study contributes to an understanding of the intersections of racism, whiteness, epistemic oppression, and their connection with the institutional inertia to diversity and meaningful transformation. The findings underpin the colonial roots of our academic disciplines and the marginalization of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and Persons of Colour) scholars, which manifests in faculty experiences of systemic barriers, the ‘leaky pipeline’, and disproportionate division of labour among other outcomes. This study emphasizes not only the importance of trans/cross-disciplinary work to better understand the nuanced impacts of racism, whiteness and epistemic oppression on BIPOC scholars in different fields but also highlights that these impacts can occur in both visible and hidden ways. The focus on Canada and the three specific fields of study investigated has broader implications for the global academy as a whole and should therefore inform practices that we undertake as researchers and teachers in respective academic disciplines.
keywords: epistemic oppression, higher education, scholarship of teaching and learning, academic dependency, critical pedagogy, EDI, decolonization