In today’s world there is a lot of discourse devoted to the marginalization of certain peoples and ideas. This was not always the case–there used to be a time when marginalized voices did not even have a way of broadcasting their message to the population at large. Those with power held on to it with an iron grip, and only recently has that grip even started to loosen. Granted, the grip is still tightly interwoven into the fabric of the discourse, and we can really see this in the production of academic knowledge.

Knowledge as a system of power has been a basic assumption for many of the privileged classes throughout the ages. Disseminating knowledge allowed for a larger amount of people to come to their own conclusions of what was right and what was wrong, so the system for producing knowledge–academia, built up a system intertwined with the societal customs of the day to prevent knowledge from spreading to lower class citizens and women. Academia, especially academia in the European heritage, is highly skeptical of assumptions that do not come from their own pantheon, thus marginalizing knowledge that is perfectly valid in its own right, just unfortunate enough to either come from a different world view or from an author who is marginalized in their own right.

I think that it is extremely unfortunate that knowledge has been marginalized in academia throughout time. The fact that we are elevating some knowledge above others is somewhat worrisome to me because it privileges certain parties to have more influence and power over the world than they may get in a world where other academics are not marginalized. On the other hand, I am conflicted because we cannot inherently assume that all knowledge is created equal. There is some production of knowledge that is blatantly false and produced for the sole purpose of misleading others. In this sense, I do believe that there is some need for a system of determining if the academic text has been produced in a “true” manner, but I do not know how we would go about implementing it, as then we fall back into the rabbit hole of marginalizing certain academic texts.

I honestly do not know how this will influence my own future scholarship. I do know that I am in a position of privilege in the world of academia, so maybe if I produce some scholarship that is being prioritized over another author’s work when they are of equal standing (or if mine happens to be inferior), I hope that I can have some influence in helping to balance out the notoriety of the two works so that we can evaluate both works equally.