Who Has the Right to Know? Rethinking the Epistemology of Community Empowerment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55681/ijssh.v4i3.4274Keywords:
Community Empowerment, Epistemology, Epistemic Authority, Knowledge-Power Relations, Epistemic EmpowermentAbstract
Community empowerment is increasingly recognized as a key approach to promoting participation, agency, and social transformation in development. However, dominant practices often treat knowledge as a neutral resource transferred from experts to communities, reinforcing unequal relations of knowledge and power. This article critically examines the epistemological foundations of community empowerment through a critical conceptual literature review, drawing on perspectives from Paulo Freire, Michel Foucault, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Miranda Fricker, Donna Haraway, Jürgen Habermas, and others. The analysis argues that communities should not be viewed merely as recipients of scientific knowledge or sources of empirical data, but as epistemic subjects capable of producing, interpreting, evaluating, and mobilizing knowledge. Building on this perspective, the article proposes the concept of epistemic empowerment, comprising five interconnected dimensions: epistemic recognition, epistemic participation, knowledge co-production, epistemic authority, and epistemic agency. This framework extends conventional approaches to empowerment by emphasizing the redistribution of epistemic authority alongside access to resources and decision-making power.
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