Approaches to knowledge translation

This chapter examines the interface between knowledge and translation, focusing on the processes involved in creating and disseminating knowledge at different times and places. Its structure is circular: it begins in the present, with the episteme that occupies the center of the world system (Western Science), before moving back in time to Antiquity to examine the Platonic roots of this universalist understanding of knowledge. Thereafter it proceeds chronologically, looking at the epistemology that installed itself in the Medieval period when Latin was the lingua franca and knowledge was subsumed within the Christian worldview (Scholasticism), and then the arrival of Humanism and the Scientific Revolution in the Early Modern period. Finally, it returns to the present again to look at Science’s Others: the fortunes of the humanities in a world dominated by technocapitalism, and those even more marginal epistemes, the indigenous knowledges of the Global South. It suggests that we are poised on the brink of a major paradigm shift, impelled by ecological and other pressures, which will not only stimulate a move (back) toward a kind of knowledge that is once again embedded, embodied and performative but will also see translation foregrounded as the mechanism through which new knowledge is constructed at any given moment.