TOK situations about power
The capacity to shape what counts as knowledge, who is heard, and what gets funded, published or taught. Power is not only censorship; setting an agenda, controlling a platform or being granted authority all change the knowledge that a community ends up with.
What power means in TOK, and the IA prompts it is central to
- Africa
When a government doubted the virus
South Africa's government under Mbeki gave platform to AIDS-dissident scientists and delayed antiretroviral rollout, and later epidemiological studies…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Responsibility
- East Asia
Recognised as indigenous, at last
Japan legally recognised the Ainu as indigenous only in 2019, after generations of assimilation policy that had suppressed language and practice while…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- Southeast Asia
Batik and the question of whose heritage
UNESCO's recognition of Indonesian batik sharpened a recurring dispute with Malaysia, where related techniques also have deep roots, over who may claim the…
Enduring · The arts
- Power
- Culture
- India
A dance banned, then rebuilt
Colonial-era campaigns pushed hereditary temple dancers out of practice, and Bharatanatyam was later revived largely by urban reformers who reshaped its…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Power
- Culture
- India
Counting Bhopal's victims
Official, judicial and activist counts of deaths from the 1984 gas leak differ by tens of thousands, diverging on time windows, causation standards and whose…
Enduring · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Responsibility
- East Asia
Simplifying the characters
Mainland China's simplified characters raised literacy while severing visual links to older texts that Taiwan and Hong Kong retain, so the same classical…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- India
Demonetisation and the missing counterfactual
India's 2016 note ban was declared a success and a failure by credentialled economists looking at the same aftermath. With no parallel India that kept its…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Values
- Oceania
The painting that hides what it shows
When Central Australian artists began painting for outside markets in the 1970s, senior custodians adapted designs so that restricted ceremonial content was…
Enduring · The arts
- Power
- Culture
- Southeast Asia
Counting the drug war
Government figures and independent tallies of deaths in the Philippine drug war differed by tens of thousands, depending on which killings were classified as…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Africa
A song as a political argument
Fela Kuti's long-form Afrobeat pieces named institutions, described mechanisms and accused specific powers, and the Nigerian state responded with raids and…
Enduring · The arts
- Power
- Justification
- India
Rewriting yesterday's growth rate
When India moved to a new GDP methodology, recalculated back-series produced growth figures for earlier governments that differed sharply from the numbers…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Objectivity
- 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
- East Asia
An alphabet designed for everyone
King Sejong's fifteenth-century promulgation of Hangul gave Korean a script learnable in days, against the years Chinese characters demanded, and literate…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- Africa
The appetite plant and the patent
South African researchers patented an appetite-suppressing compound from hoodia, a plant the San had long used on hunts, without initial benefit-sharing;…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- Latin America
The inflation statistic nobody believed
After Argentina's government intervened in its statistics institute in 2007, official inflation ran far below every independent estimate for years, private…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Objectivity
- Latin America
The satellite data that cost a director his job
In 2019 Brazil's space agency published satellite figures showing sharply rising Amazon deforestation; the president called the numbers lies and the agency's…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Objectivity
- India
When a region goes offline
India records among the world's highest counts of regional internet shutdowns, imposed on public-order grounds. During each one, journalism, schooling,…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Latin America
Twenty-seven books, one afternoon
Diego de Landa burned Maya codices in 1562 as works of the devil, and only a handful of pre-conquest Maya books survive anywhere today. Much of what…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- India
The library that burned for months
Nalanda drew scholars from across Asia for centuries until its destruction around 1200, its manuscript collections reportedly burning for months. What survives…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- India
Reading Ashoka after two thousand years
When James Prinsep deciphered the Brahmi script in the 1830s, rock inscriptions across the subcontinent suddenly spoke, and Ashoka re-entered history after…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Interpretation
- The Middle East and North Africa
The music the state could not stop
Algerian rai emerged from working-class Oran singing frankly about desire, alcohol and constraint, and was suppressed at different times by state broadcasters…
Enduring · The arts
- Power
- Values
- India
The right to ask the state what it knows
India's Right to Information Act lets any citizen demand documents from public authorities, and activists have used it to surface everything from ration fraud…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility
- The Middle East and North Africa
The scrolls only a committee could read
For decades after their discovery, many Dead Sea Scrolls could be studied only by a small editorial team, while outside scholars waited on official publication…
Enduring · History
- Power
- India
Who designed the Taj Mahal?
The Taj Mahal's architect is credited variously to several named figures, with the documentary record thin and contested, while the thousands of craftsmen who…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Evidence
- Power
- 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
- India
The turmeric patent and the grandmother's proof
In 1995 a US patent was granted for using turmeric to heal wounds, a practice Indian households had relied on for generations. India's research council…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- 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
The textbook called Vedic Mathematics
The calculation shortcuts published in the twentieth century as Vedic Mathematics are useful and teachable, but historians of mathematics find no source for…
Enduring · History · Mathematics
- Power
- Justification
- Southeast Asia
A language that changed its alphabet
Vietnam's shift to the Latin-based quoc ngu under colonial influence enabled mass literacy campaigns, and within generations most Vietnamese could no longer…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- Southeast Asia
History taught by shadow puppets
Javanese wayang kulit performances retell epics through the night, with dalangs weaving in contemporary politics and local commentary as they go. Audiences…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Power
- Interpretation
- Culture
- India
A billion identities in one database
Aadhaar links welfare, banking and identity to biometric records for over a billion people, and when a fingerprint fails to match or a record misfires, the…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility
- Latin America
Telescopes on other people's mountains
The Atacama's dry altitude makes it ideal for observatories, and the same plateaus carry deep significance for Indigenous communities who were rarely central…
Current · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- Latin America
The vine, the lab, and the elders
As clinical interest in ayahuasca-derived compounds accelerates, Amazonian communities that developed and ritually govern the brew's use are often absent from…
Current · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- Africa
The bronzes and the museums
Thousands of Benin bronzes, seized in the 1897 British expedition, sit in Western museums that long defended holding them as universal stewardship, while…
Current · The arts
- Power
- Values
- India
Counting caste for the first time since 1931
India's 2027 census, its first fully digital one, will enumerate caste across all communities for the first time in nearly a century. Every design choice,…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Interpretation
- East Asia
A national border for information
China's filtering infrastructure produces an internet where searches, encyclopedias and archives return different results than elsewhere, and a generation has…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- India
Mapping rights onto a forest
India's Forest Rights Act asks communities to document customary use of land their ancestors never surveyed, converting remembered practice into GPS points and…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- East Asia
The exam that defines what counts
China's gaokao channels millions of students' entire schooling toward one sitting, and whatever the exam rewards, memorisation, speed, model essays, becomes…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Values
- Global
Languages the machines skip
Machine translation is strong between data-rich languages and weak or absent for thousands of others, so speakers of low-resource languages get worse search,…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- Oceania
Ancestors in the storeroom
Museums worldwide hold Maori and Moriori ancestral remains collected in the colonial era, and New Zealand runs a standing programme negotiating their return…
Current · History
- Power
- Values
- 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
- Global
The pirate library of science
Sci-Hub, built by a Kazakhstani graduate student, serves paywalled research papers free and is heavily used in countries whose universities cannot afford…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility
- Global
The encyclopedia's uneven world
Wikipedia's English edition dwarfs most others, and topics rich in one language sit as stubs or absences in another, so the same person consulting the same…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture