Transforming Knowledge

This is a book about how we define knowledge and how we think about moral and political questions. It argues that the prevailing systems of knowledge, morality, and politics are rooted in views that are exclusionary and therefore legitimate injustice, patriarchy, and violence. That is, these views divide humans into different kinds along a hierarchy whose elite still defines the systems that shape our lives and misshape our thinking. Like the first edition of "Transforming Knowledge", this substantially revised edition calls upon us to continue to liberate our minds and the systems we live within from concepts that rationalize inequality. It engages with the past fifteen years of feminist scholarship and developments in its allied fields (such as Cultural Studies, African American Studies, Queer Studies, and Disability Studies) to critique the deepest and most vicious of old prejudices.This new edition extends Minnich's arguments and connects them with the contemporary academy as well as recent instances of domination, genocide, and sexualized violence. It is updated to consider recent scholarship in Gender, Multicultural, Postcolonial, Disability, Native American, and Queer Studies, among other fields of study. It is revised to include an extended analysis of the conceptual errors that legitimate domination, including the construction of kinds ("genders") of human beings. It is revised to include new materials from a variety of cultures and times, and engages with today's contemporary debates about affirmative action, postmodernism, and religion.Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich is Core Professor at the Graduate College for Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, The Union Institute and University. She has spoken and consulted on developing more inclusive curricula at colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad. She has served as Chair of the North Carolina Humanities Council, on the Executive Committee of the Society for the Study of Women Philosophers, and the Committee on the Status of Women, both associated with The American Philosophical Association. In addition, she is the coeditor of "Reconstructing the Academy: Women's Education and Women's Studies".