Between Doxa and Episteme: African American Womanist Epistemology as Distinct From Subaltern Standpoint

• In Event: Toward an Ethics of Relationality

Abstract

In shifting the geography of reason, this paper explores the knowledge construction paradigm of African American Womanism. African American Womanism gives expression to the gendered labor of racial advancement as a shared task that is particularly the woman’s undertaking quay woman. Generated from within the panoply of Black diasporic consciousness in the U.S., its constituency is primarily within the race and secondly outward facing. I argue that its social episteme emits from the self's racialized construction in the space of reasons. It involves onto-epistemological reasoning of a recursive knowledge system. Aspects are experiential truth claims and settled doxa of generation tested folk beliefs or ancestral wisdom. The generalizable possibilities for this race-based episteme are explored preliminarily for standpoint theory in education.

Author

• Sheron A. Fraser-Burgess, Ball State University
  Presenting Author