What Is Knowledge?: Thoughts from a Baha’i Working Group in Africana Studies

Layli Maparyan, Anthony Outler, Angelita Reyes, Masud Olufani, Derik Smith - 2020 ABS Conference (online)

This roundtable emerges from an Association for Bahá'í Studies seminar focusing on disciplinary “methodology,” broadly conceived. Among those participating in the seminar was a group of scholars and artists involved in Africana fields. While exploring the premises and commitments of methodologies that hold sway in Africana Studies, the group repeatedly returned to a discussion of the concept of “knowledge,” which will anchor the remarks of roundtable participants.
For the Africana Studies roundtable, a discussion of the definition, the value, and the consequence of knowledge will follow from Shoghi Effendi’s insistence that “the Cause needs more Bahá’í scholars... who can correlate its beliefs with the current thoughts and problems of the people of the world.” Roundtable discussants will foreground the “problems of the people” as they also reflect on the implications of statements by the Universal House of Justice indicating that “the enterprise of building a prosperous world civilization” requires that all people be involved in the “generation, application, and diffusion” of “knowledge.”
Informed by their work in Africana Studies, which often encourages expansive definitions of knowledge, the discussants will think through questions like these: What constitutes knowledge? What is the purpose of our pursuit of knowledge? How can we develop knowledge-advancing praxis programs that are truly inclusive? How do we reconcile individualizing paradigms of knowledge-production that shape academia and romanticized intellectual pursuits, with the collectivist ideal of knowledge-production that can be discerned in guidance from the Universal House of Justice?