Chapter 5: Evaluating and Positioning Knowledge Sources
Lea Sansom, Kathryn Holmes, Heather Campbell, Ashley McKeown, and Britney Glasgow-Osment
Learning Objectives
By the end of this Chapter, you should be able to:
- Assess knowledge sources for bias, harm, cultural appropriation, intent to mislead, and falsifying information, considering the creator’s positionality in relation to the topic at hand.
- Evaluate collections of knowledge for breadth, diversity of perspective, and underlying epistemologies.
- Apply chapter strategies to make informed decisions about a real-world case study.
Introduction
In the previous chapter, we looked at strategies for finding voices that may be hidden or obscured within dominant western knowledge systems. In this chapter, we decide which knowledge sources are trustworthy and meaningful. For example: How can we determine the reliability of a social media post before liking or sharing it? Whose perspectives should we choose to amplify when chatting with our friends or family? Who should we cite in our course assignments and academic work? This chapter shares evaluation strategies to help us answer these questions.
Evaluating sources takes time – a commodity that your authors recognize is in short supply. In a world that moves at lightning speed, and where our attention spans have been shaped by algorithmic feeds, slowing down to critically assess a knowledge source requires conscious, deliberate effort. Evaluation, in this sense, is a disruptive act: it’s a refusal to accept information at face value just because it’s popular, familiar, or packaged as trustworthy. It’s also a complicated endeavour: as we learned in the previous chapter, knowledge justice asks us to build relationships and learn to understand others’ perspectives and lived experience.
We (your authors) continue to use the definition of knowledge justice from Chapter 3 to guide our thinking. All knowledge sources have edges or limits, including those we consider credible or trustworthy. Even well-intentioned, carefully-created sources are shaped by particular worldviews, values, and goals. Knowledge justice asks us to recognize these boundaries rather than ignore them. Each source has a role to play, but no single source tells the whole story.
The goal of this chapter, in other words, is balance. We’ll learn to consider sources not just for accuracy, but for purpose, perspective, and potential harm. We’ll practice looking beyond surface-level credibility to ask deeper questions about whose knowledge we’re listening to and why that matters.
