2025/07/13 by Marco Garrido · 2 voices
Social Sciences · #Asian Studies and History #Migration, Refugees, and Integration #Philippine History and Culture
paper · doi:10.1177/07352751251350963
openalex publication_date 2025/07/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
For scholars of the Global South, epistemic struggle happens in the particular, that is, over the course of debates around particular models of reality. To illustrate, I reconstruct debates around an influential model of Philippine politics, arguing that the model is premised on a set of “bad words” and that these bad words have real effects. These bad words produce a prison of misrecognition. Delving into this literature yields a finer-grained picture of epistemic struggle. Specifically, we can discern three kinds of blindnesses: ontological, epistemological, and sociological; two kinds of pain: feeling stuck in a cognitive prison and worse, feeling one deserves to be stuck there; and one kind of agency at stake: not just the capacity for action but also the capacity for subjects to act within the parameters of their own reality.