Editing Knowledge "inclusion"

It is important to first reiterate here again what can be seen as ‘meaningful’ inclusion, through the paradigm of agential realism. To be meaningfully included within a phenomena like scientific knowledge, is to be an agential force that contributes to the determining cut that distinguishes between what is included and what is excluded from the properties and meanings of such a phenomena. In this case, to be meaningfully included, means to co-determine the meaning of ‘scientific knowledge’. Without meaningful recognition or consideration of different knowledge systems within the phenomena of ‘science’, for example, the properties of ‘science’ become intelligible only through the agential cuts of one philosophical paradigm. In scientific wildlife co-management and research this is usually the cut of post-positivist western natural sciences and its understanding of the world through representative data (Brook, 2005; Smylie, 2014). 

Scientist seeking to make IQ ‘’intelligible’’ within this performance of western natural sciences, either need to break it down into such representative data, or placed IQ completely outside of the phenomena of Science to become intelligible as ‘another phenomena’ like; values, beliefs, ethics or cultural identities. Neither of those cuts can be considered meaningfully co-constituted with Inuit ways of knowing and being. Making IQ intelligible only as a category that can exist outside of science, continues a form of erasure in which the west views itself “as the centre of legitimate knowledge, the arbiter of what counts as knowledge and the source of ‘civilized’ knowledge” (Smith, 1999, p. 63). While the breaking down of IQ into a reductionist western version of TEK, constitutes an ‘insidious form of cultural assimilation’ in which IQ is appropriated under the guise of knowledge co-production and co-management (Stevenson, 2004 ; 2006).