Browsing by Author "Lauer, Helen"

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    Academic Integrity: the imperative of probity in African development research." Plenary paper delieverd 16th November, 2018. First Annual UDSM Two Day International Conference Enhancing Strategic Research For Inclusive Industrial Development In Tanzania SIDA-UDSM
    (2018-11-16) Lauer, Helen
    The international community refers to this as the era of post-truth. But for African scientific researchers investigating and theorizing African realities, there is nothing new about this era of relying upon stereotypes rather than evidence-based hypotheses to spin familiar falsehoods promulgated in the guise of scientific consensus. The global arena is rife with misrepresentations that sustain the bizarre yet incorrigible conviction that Africans require foreign expertise to direct research agendas and to move development policy in a sustainable direction. This is why academic integrity is so important to uphold particularly as individual researchers and knowledge producers representing academic excellence and proximity with facts on the ground, through your expertise and proximity to indigenous knowledge custodians in this part of the world. By academic integrity here I refer narrowly to truthfulness and rigour in the production of knowledge outputs and in the critical assessment, dissemination or rejection of products already in circulation. Key to this notion of integrity is the avoidance of plagiarism. But in the research sciences integrity entails sustaining the confidence to speak facts to fiction, to resist the overwhelming power of knowledge monopolies, where one’s access to research funding and potential career opportunities rest on one’s capitulating to profit-driven research agendas. This begins by correcting the widespread ignorance that passes as received knowledge and theoretical advice sustained by consensus in the global arena about Africans and the interpretation of long term implications of global capital expansion and resource extraction on the Two Thirds World. But the opportunity to forward such corrections will not be offered; it has to be seized, demanded, fought for. That is a struggle that requires courage and tenacity, it requires defiance and commitment and professional risk-taking.
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    Global Justice as Process: Applying Normative Ideals of Indigenous African Governance, Philosophical Papers
    (2017) Lauer, Helen
    This contribution explores correctives to several errors that Thomas Nagel (2005) and others presuppose in defending scepticism about global justice. Depending upon conventions of reconciliation and arbitration that survive in West Africa, to define global justice as a work in progress—not a fixed univocal formula, but an on-going collaborative effort, a project in perpetual renovation and inter-cultural reconsideration, by successive generations which presupposes a diversity of values and ways of sanctifying human life.
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    Implicitly racist epistemology: recent philosophical appeals to the neurophysiology of tacit prejudice
    (Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group., 2019) Lauer, Helen
    This essay explores why examples of mainstream philosophy of cognition and applied phenomenology demonstrate the implicit bias that they treat as their subject matter, whether the authors of these works intend or approve of their doing so. It is shown why egalitarian intuitions, which form the basis for ideal models of justice appealing to elites in racially stratified societies, provide an inadequate framework for illuminating and dismantling the mechanics of racial discrimination. Recently developed results in social choice theory are applied here to cases where racial bias is perpetuated through institutionally orchestrated collective decision making. The “discursive dilemma” theorem suggests why the analysis of subliminal attitudes is irrelevant to correcting the racial injustices presumed to follow from implicit bias in societies where negative racial stereotypes, ostensibly and explicitly deplored, are covertly and illicitly reinforced. Keywords colour-blind racist ideology; implicit bias; laissez-faire racism; racial oppression; whiteness; black self-identity
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    The Importance of an African Social Epistemology to Improve Public Health and Increase Life Expectancy in Africa, in Method, Substance and the Future of African Philosophy
    (2018) Lauer, Helen
    In most nations of Africa today, epidemic control strategies are dominated by the way health care needs are understood and addressed in the global health arena. A causal connection is exposed here which links (i) the disinformation about African morbidity and mortality promulgated worldwide, (ii) the prejudicial dismissal of locally affiliated African-based expertise, and (iii) the perpetuation of the very conditions that worsen both the mortality and morbidity rates in Africa. The global emergency response to the West Africa Ebola crisis of 2014-2015 is the case detailed as an example.
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    Philosophy without borders: Relocating African critical authority in the global knowledge society. forthcoming in Philosophical Foundations of the Humanities through African Perspectives
    (2018) Lauer, Helen
    Global advisory councils have urged the architects of higher education policy in African economies to help tackle their bloated rural and urban informal sectors by narrowing the application of scarce government revenues for the greatest possible short term success of making graduates employable, with the expectation of long term gains for sustainable development. I argue that the neo-liberal economists’ prescriptions for increasing the relevance of African public universities in their respective national agendas are unrealistic.
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    Talking Global Justice: The importance of critical social theory in the African business paradigm, in Corporate Social Responsibility and Governance, CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance,
    (Springer International, 2015) Lauer, Helen
    Cultural diversity is best regarded as a vehicle for discovering fundamental convictions about the possibilities for a trans-national meaning of economic justice rather than the main obstacle to its realisation. Guidance is taken from principles of indigenous models of good governance and diplomacy that characterise contemporary West Africa’s rich cultural diversity and which alleviate the severe economic pressures of its many histories.