Acceso usuarios
Hamza R'boul
This article introduces ‘Multiepistemicism’, theorising it as the condition and process whereby multiple epistemologies, which are simultaneously negotiated, entangled, contested, silenced, fragmented, disrupted, affirmed, and rearticulated, coexist and dynamically interweave, shaping conceptualisation, analysis, interpretation, and expression across different levels of social organization, from individual cognition to institutional structures, and across heterogeneous modalities such as linguistic, cultural, artistic, and performative practices. To exemplify this framework, the article investigates individuals’ epistemic labour within their multilingual habits, showing how using different languages and the dynamics between them (e.g. power struggle, local/foreign, instrumentality) shape the ongoing and multidirectional influence among language, epistemology, knowledge, and reality. This study draws on in-depth interviews with university students from several Moroccan universities where Arabic, French, and English serve as mediums of instruction. Findings reveal that (a) multilingualism actively contributes to multiepistemicism (in terms of epistemic plurality) at the level of knowledge reception and consumption, but not knowledge production (reasoning and generation of ideas), (b) the language used to learn and express certain knowledge does not entail any form of classification or ranking of that knowledge by the students, and (c) the power struggle among languages is not reflected in how students evaluate various perspectives and ideas they encounter.
