CfP: Bridging Techne and Episteme: Knowledge within and beyond the Academy
Concept Note
The ongoing transformations in the education sector, marked by the emergence of new enclosures of knowledge, privatisation and the accelerating AI-turn, have profoundly affected all arenas of ‘intellectual life’. Curricula, pedagogy, modes of research and intellectual labour are undergoing radical transformation both within and beyond the institutional framework of the university. One of the results of this change is the separation of techne from episteme - between the skills and labour involved in producing knowledge and a reflective understanding of how and why such knowledge is generated. In critically examining the process of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption, within and beyond the academy, it becomes crucial to interrogate how different practitioners contribute to knowledge making, critical thinking, and inaugurate newer forms of engagement. Taken together, these developments indicate that how we produce knowledge, and how we know (techne), is increasingly obscured in favour of what we produce and what we know (episteme).
In this shifting landscape of the academy, the writing centre becomes a paradoxical space, simultaneously concerned with questions of techne and episteme. We grapple with the paradox of being technicians of writing, even as we produce knowledge ourselves as academics, writers and teachers. In the South Asian liberal education context, for instance, we arrive at the writing centre from varied disciplinary backgrounds, and we engage with knowledge, thinking and writing concerns across disciplines. When our ‘place’ is brought into consideration alongside the neoliberal emphasis on knowledge production, the concerns that arise for us are oriented around bridging techne with episteme: how do we break free from the shackles of knowledge production as presently conceived within the current university set up, especially amid the expanding spread of AI? How do we think about these emerging constraints against existing ones, where knowledge or episteme is gate-kept within disciplinary boundaries, departments and conventions? And why is it necessary to broaden the scope of who produces knowledge within, between and beyond the academy? In short, the central question we pose is - who is the intellectual/ ‘expert’? And whose labour in knowledge production is and can be considered as constituting intellectual labour/ expertise?
In revisiting the figure of the intellectual, this conference turns its attention to the production, circulation, and consumption of ideas that occur within and beyond, and often in resistance to institutions claiming to be the repositories of knowledge. Against this backdrop, this inquiry seeks to explore and reimagine what it might mean to return to the Gramscian notion of the organic intellectual - whose vocation “can no longer consist in eloquence...but in active participation in practical life”.
The conference aims to initiate a dialogue that includes teachers, students, artists, independent scholars, journalists, podcasters, and content creators - voices operating both inside and beyond the academy - to explore alternative modes of theorising, teaching, and public engagement.
We invite reflections that interrogate the manner in which different sites - online archives, open-access journals, independent research collectives, podcasts, media platforms, to name a few - contribute to newer modalities of learning and awareness, radically altering and reconfiguring the ‘education’ landscape. The larger aim of the conference is to talk about such spaces that allow for critique and creativity to operate outside of institutional setups.
Themes may include, but are not limited to:
- Artistic and cultural collectives: Independent art spaces, film festivals, zines, and performance collectives as modes of political expression
- Alternative publics and intellectual spaces: Substack, Reddit, podcasts, YouTube, and independent publishing, and online magazines that democratise intellectual work
- Politics of knowledge creation: Power, legitimacy, and contestation in the production and circulation of ideas
- Infrastructures of knowledge: Archives, online knowledge communities, open access, and the politics of citation and visibility
- Reconfiguring intellectual authority: Who decides what counts as expertise?
- Knowledge beyond the university: Informal learning spaces, and community knowledge network
- Community and grassroots initiatives: Local reading groups, feminist circles, and activist networks as autonomous sites of learning
- Voices from the margins: Reclaiming indigenous, local, and subaltern knowledges from institutional erasure
- AI-driven learning: Scope, challenges and outcomes
- Role of Writing Centres in India