TOK situations about 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.
What perspective means in TOK, and the IA prompts it is central to
- Africa
The ruins colonialism refused to attribute
Colonial administrations in Rhodesia promoted foreign builders, Phoenicians, Arabs, anyone but Africans, for Great Zimbabwe, and at times pressured…
Enduring · History
- Perspective
- Evidence
- Power
- India
Calculus before Newton, in Kerala
Mathematicians of the Kerala school, beginning with Madhava in the fourteenth century, derived infinite series for pi and trigonometric functions centuries…
Enduring · History · Mathematics
- Perspective
- Truth
- Global
The map that inflated the north
The Mercator projection, ideal for navigation, wildly inflates land near the poles, so generations of classroom maps showed Greenland rivalling Africa, which…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Perspective
- Interpretation
- Global
The first woman to win the Fields Medal
Maryam Mirzakhani, Iranian-born and educated through Tehran's olympiad system, became in 2014 the first woman awarded mathematics' highest honour, in a…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Perspective
- Culture
- The Middle East and North Africa
Paintings that refuse the vanishing point
Persian and Mughal miniatures show multiple viewpoints at once and scale figures by importance rather than distance. European art history long described this…
Enduring · The arts
- Perspective
- Interpretation
- India
Reading the colonial archive against itself
The Subaltern Studies historians argued that South Asia's archives, largely produced by colonial administration, recorded peasants and rebels only at the…
Enduring · History
- Perspective
- Objectivity
- East Asia
One event, two national textbooks
Japanese and Chinese school treatments of the 1937 Nanjing atrocities have differed for decades in wording, casualty figures and space allotted, and textbook…
Enduring · History
- Perspective
- Power
- Africa
A person is a person through other persons
Ubuntu, articulated across southern African thought, treats personhood and understanding as constituted through relations with others rather than achieved…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Perspective
- Culture
- East Asia
Who influenced whom
Japanese woodblock prints reshaped late nineteenth-century European painting, and the story is usually told as European artists discovering Japan. Told from…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Perspective
- Power
- India
Editing the national textbook
Successive revisions of India's national school textbooks have added, trimmed and removed episodes, with each round defended as correction and attacked as…
Current · History
- Perspective
- Power