Abstract
This paper examines the marginalisation of non-Western epistemologies in Australian higher education, drawing on Indian philosophical traditions through the lived experience and Sanskrit-textual knowledge of an Indian-Australian academic, and engaging in complementary ways with Persian philosophical and poetic thought through the cultural inheritance of a Persian-Australian academic. The study employs collaborative autoethnography (Chang et al., 2013) across ten structured fortnightly dialogic sessions in late 2024 and early 2025. We identify several epistemological resources that offer substantive alternatives to the individualist, instrumentalist orientations dominant in Australian universities: holistic knowledge integration, ethical-relational frameworks, communal learning, and the rigorous distinction between conception (taṣawwur) and assent (taṣdīq) in the Persian-Islamic tradition of al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā. Drawing on epistemological pluralism (Harding, 2015; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Smith, 2021), Gramscian hegemony theory (Mayo, 2015), and contemporary cross-cultural epistemology (Beaney & Lai, 2025), we propose five design principles for curriculum transformation grounded in critical epistemological pluralism rather than assimilative integration.
Keywords
Epistemology, university knowledge systems, critical participatory action research.