Optional theme
Knowledge and indigenous societies
How knowledge is held, transmitted and validated in indigenous societies, including knowledge embedded in place, practice and oral transmission, and the questions raised by its documentation by outsiders.
IA prompts that fit this theme
The wording is the guide’s, exactly. A student who changes a word of it loses marks, so quote it as it stands.
- IA prompt 14Does some knowledge belong only to particular communities of knowers?The clearest fit of any prompt to this theme, and the place where community ownership of knowledge is most substantive.
- IA prompt 21What is the relationship between knowledge and culture?Knowledge embedded in place, practice and language rather than in propositions.
- IA prompt 26Does our knowledge depend on our interactions with other knowers?Oral transmission makes knowing explicitly dependent on interaction with other knowers.
- IA prompt 29Who owns knowledge?Ownership frameworks built for individual authorship fit collectively held knowledge badly.
- IA prompt 33How is current knowledge shaped by its historical development?Whose historical development counts as the history of knowledge is itself the question.
A school selects two of the five optional themes alongside the core theme. All six themes.