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Record W4415959529 · doi:10.36615/vfc2ns66

Epistemic Freedom: Itineraries of a Concept

2025· article· en· W4415959529 on OpenAlexaff
Sabelo J. Ndlovu‐Gatsheni

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Thinker · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAfrican cultural and philosophical studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Calgary
Fundersnot available
KeywordsContext (archaeology)Power (physics)Scale (ratio)DecolonizationGlobal South

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The concept of epistemic freedom, which I introduced in Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization (2018), is elaborated in this article to give it context and to highlights its itineraries. This reflective article provides five problematic epistemes that necessitates struggles for epistemic freedom. These are racist, (en)slave, colonial/imperial, endocentric/patriarchal, and capitalist/neoliberal epistemes. These inextricably intertwined epistemes are constitutive of Eurocentric epistemologies and its reproductions at a world scale and make it difficult for alternative epistemologies from the Global South to flourish. They also underpin contemporary global economy and its asymmetrical power dynamics, which continues to marginalise decolonial ways of thinking, seeing, and praxes.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.017
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.023
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.017
Threshold uncertainty score0.090

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0170.023
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0040.003
Science and technology studies0.0070.126
Scholarly communication0.0150.027
Open science0.0010.014
Research integrity0.0050.009
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.033
GPT teacher head0.306
Teacher spread0.273 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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