OSUN Faculty Publish Article on Epistemic Injustice in Global Development & Public Health

The Journal of College and Character recently published an article by a group of OSUN faculty on pedagogical lessons learned from teaching the network collaborative course on “Solving Each Other’s Public Health Problems.” In Teaching Critical Reflection on Epistemic Injustice: The Case of a Collaborative International Public Health Course, Elena Kim (AUCA/Bard College), Helen Epstein (Bard College), Jonas Ecke (Njala University), Joshua Bardfield (Bard College), Maha Husseini (Al-Quds Bard), Jia B.Kangbai (NjalaUniversity) & Elena Molchanova (AUCA), present pedagogical reflections on their experience teaching an undergraduate course about epistemic (knowledge) injustice that they developed and taught collaboratively from their campuses in Kyrgyzstan, Palestine, Sierra Leone, and the US. 

In the article’s abstract, the team writes that their course “enabled students to engage with epistemological power structures by playing the role of both international development donor and local beneficiary. By building on discussions of real world issues, fostering interpersonal relationships, modeling productive discourse through transparent feedback and providing intellectual space for self reflection and empathy, the course provides a pedagogically transformative framework for international collaborative education.”

Network Collaborative Courses (NCCs) are designed and taught simultaneously by several professors from multiple institutions, in person, to students at their home institution while the full global group of students meets online 3-4 times during the semester.

The goal of this particular NCC was to introduce students to key debates in international development studies with global public health as a lens to explore how social policies are developed and how they work in practice. The course embraced the critique that global development programs aimed at the Global South but originating in the Global North “do not always go as planned because their design is maladapted to local contexts.”
Course enrollees from each campus worked in groups developing a proposal to address a public health challenge in one of their countries. The preeminent goal was to provide a space for students to develop practical skills related to project design and evaluation. Another goal was for educators and students to learn to communicate more sensitively across different cultural and historical backgrounds about solutions to local development problems.

The professors found that “when students are given the opportunity to act as both the producers and beneficiaries of development programs, they learn about how the world is structured by the powerful, often to the detriment of the powerless…” They also found that discussing real-world issues and sharing self-reflective and self-critical feedback proved to be a useful pedagogical tool for fostering respectful professional engagement.

In the development beneficiary role, students often claimed their community was being misunderstood by peers acting as development donors, their public health problems were being misrepresented, and the proposed recommendations lacked practicality and relevance, writes Kim et al.

The authors also wrote that “In its effects, epistemic injustice not only leads to unsuccessful development projects; it may also undermine the integrity of individuals and societies and reinforce systems of power, such as racism, sexism and colonialism.”

According to the authors, “the course enabled students to experience, hypothetically, epistemic violence in the safe confines of the classroom, and then grapple with ways to mitigate it. Our students saw for themselves how dominant epistemologies have amassed material,
methodological, political, and infrastructural resources invested in their claims for universal application, but that, nevertheless, other ways of investigating the social and natural world are not inferior to them.”

Post Date: 07-03-2024