Academic Knowledge, Power, and the Social Sciences

Paper Summary:

This paper looks at the implications, for social anthropology, of discourses on knowledge and power by focusing on Foucault's ideas and by analyzing several ethnographic studies.

From the Paper:

"Social science knowledge informs the way in which people interpret their experiences, and can be empowering, as in the case of political and feminist discourses. However, knowledge, employed as discourse, can also be employed in ways that disempower, and this is the focus of much of Foucault's work. The implication for academic work is that social science knowledge can serve to either empower or disempower its subjects, sometimes both, and in all cases it has influence over its subjects and its audience, by virtue of being itself a discourse, albeit a scientific one."

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