TOK situations about values
What a knower or a community takes to be worth pursuing, protecting or preferring. Values operate inside knowledge production and not just around it: they select the problems, set the acceptable risk of error, and decide which trade-offs count as costs.
What values means in TOK, and the IA prompts it is central to
- South Asia
Measuring national happiness
Bhutan reports Gross National Happiness through surveys spanning psychological wellbeing, culture and ecology, making a value system into an official…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Values
- Culture
- India
What the Chipko villagers knew
In the 1970s, Himalayan villagers, many of them women, embraced trees to stop commercial felling, arguing the forests' real yield was soil, water and air…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Values
- 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
- Power
- Evidence
- Values
- Global
The economy that does not count the household
National accounts exclude most unpaid household and care work by definitional choice, leaving activity that sustains every economy outside its headline…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Values
- Objectivity
- India
The Green Revolution's two ledgers
High-yield wheat varieties helped end famine-scale scarcity in India, and decades later the same programme is cited for depleted aquifers, soil damage and…
Enduring · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Values
- 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
- Africa
A film industry the textbooks missed
Nollywood grew into one of the world's most prolific film industries through straight-to-video economics, informal distribution and stories tuned to local…
Enduring · The arts
- Truth
- Values
- Culture
- 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
- Global
The purest mathematics, weaponised for privacy
Number theorists studied primes for centuries as the discipline's most ornamental corner, celebrated precisely for uselessness, until public-key cryptography…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Values
- Explanation
- 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
- Global
The crash test body was a man
Vehicle safety testing standardised for decades on dummies modelled on an average male body, and injury statistics show women faring worse in comparable…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Values
- Objectivity
- 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
- 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
- Europe
One temple, two national stories
Britain and Greece have argued for two centuries over the Parthenon sculptures, with legality, preservation and access marshalled on both sides of an unmoved…
Current · The arts
- Values
- Interpretation