TOK situations for knowledge and politics
How political arrangements decide which knowledge is produced, funded, taught and believed, and how claims to knowledge are used to justify the exercise of 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
- 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
- India
A film, a queen, and a fight over the past
Protests over the film Padmaavat turned on a figure known mainly from a sixteenth-century epic poem rather than contemporary chronicles. Crowds defended the…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Truth
- 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
- 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 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
- 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
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
Origins, evidence and access
Investigations into COVID-19's origins produced assessments hedged at low confidence and split between agencies, with early data incomplete and access to sites…
Current · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Certainty