The Knower's Lens
Perspective
The position from which a knower encounters something, made up of their history, training, interests and situation. A perspective is not only a limitation: it can make features of a problem visible that no view from nowhere would pick up.
How the knower shapes knowledge. These concepts ask what the knower contributes to what is known, and why two careful people looking at the same thing can arrive somewhere different.
Situations that raise perspective
All 10 situationsReal cases a class can argue about, where this concept is what is actually at stake.
- The ruins colonialism refused to attributeAfrica
- Calculus before Newton, in KeralaIndia
- The map that inflated the northGlobal
- The first woman to win the Fields MedalGlobal
- Paintings that refuse the vanishing pointThe Middle East and North Africa
- Reading the colonial archive against itselfIndia
- One event, two national textbooksEast Asia
- A person is a person through other personsAfrica