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Our established, age-old notions of knowledge have ceased to be meaningful in postnormal times.
What we define as true knowledge, and the ways in which we create it, have changed radically. The emergence of ‘Big Data’ and Artificial Intelligence, as well as ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’, ‘deep fake’, and ‘post-truth’ have changed the nature of knowledge production. Established disciplines, such as economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, have lost their significance. Revengeful capitalism, based on profit-driven algorithms, has not only led to environmental destruction, but has also ruined our understanding of what actually constitutes knowledge. In an era that defines societies by questions of knowledge, it becomes necessary and urgent to ask: how is knowledge produced, how is it distributed, and who decides what is true knowledge and what is not?
Emerging Epistemologies explores the changing nature of knowledge production and investigates how emerging epistemologies are transforming our perceptions of the present and the future. The contributors to the volume examine digital landscapes, zombie disciplines, higher education, the role of metaphysics, and epistemological justice; and argue that epistemology does not exist in a vacuum but is determined and embedded in the worldview and culture of society. The chaos and contradiction that accompanies our increasingly complex world requires us to see through ‘the smog of ignorance’, and seek new ways of thinking and creating knowledge that promotes sustainability, diversity, social justice and appreciates different ways of knowing, being, and doing.
Ziauddin Sardar, writer, futurist and educator, is an internationally renowned public intellectual. He has published over 50 books, including Rescuing All Our Futures (Adamantine, New York, 1998), Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures: A Ziauddin Sardar Reader (Pluto, London, 2003), and most recently, Future: All That Matters (Hodder, London, 2013). He was editor of Futures, the monthly journal of policy, planning and futures studies, from 1999 to 2012, and served as a Commissioner on the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission from 2006 to 2009. He is the Director of the Centre for Postnormal Policy and Future Studies.
