A Dilemma for Avant-Garde Epistemologies: Are Universities Ready for Them?

• In Event: Differences, Debates, and Dilemmas in Higher Education

Abstract

Using a comparative-historical approach, I explore a central paradox of avant-garde movements within Black Studies, Native Studies, and Disability Studies and their relationships with the modern university. The vanguardism of “outsider” epistemologies may be dulled by absorption into the university, but universities can also provide social legitimacy, which can in turn produce new knowledge. Combining archival research about the development of these disciplines in the San Francisco Bay Area, oral histories, and secondary sources by historians, sociologists, and critical higher education scholars, I historicize how colleges have successfully and unsuccessfully used “hybridity” when there are clashes between knowledge systems. I also build theory about how decolonial critiques and affective ways of thinking may help higher education imagine new futures.

Author

• David T. Bates, Stanford University