Leadership and Epistemological Responsibility 173perhaps a well-grounded rationale for addressing this issue – i.e. the
central core around which multiple initiatives can hang.
Finally, it would require the systematic codification of a language
and paradigm of articulation that is buttressed in human rights as
enshrined in the international Bill of Rights and International Customary
Law.
The implications of this initiative also had to be contemplated among
which would include:
- the questioning of the present definition of what constitutes
“Knowledge” with the intention of developing more inclusive
policies and strategies for generating, legitimising and
accrediting knowledge; - who is the “subject” and what constitutes the “object” of
scientific research with a view to humanizing research and
halting the extractive and exploitative tendencies in present
research regimes; - de-museumizing, and de-formaldehyding African culture as a
strategy of linking culture to science, and exposing the science
behind every culture, - scrutinizing the juridical domain within which science works in
order to make sense of the intolerance, indifference, and culture
of social triage that make scientists at times so oblivious to the
consequences of their work on people. - Even more than this, is to help draw attention to the manner in
which the exclusion of other traditions of knowledge by
reductionist science is itself part of the problem: at the
ontological level (in that properties of other knowledges are
simply not taken note of); at the epistemological level (in that
other ways of perceiving are simply not recognized even where
they should); and at the sociological level (in that the non-
specialist, the non-expert is deprived of the right both to access to