Knowledge hegemony and epistemic reclamation in Central Asian higher education: a community case study of Eastern scholastic heritage integration, sociological field dynamics, and the conditions for decolonizing economic reasoning across STEM and social science disciplines in Uzbekistan.

This community case study provides a broad sociological account of a pilot curriculum intervention conducted at a regional public university in Uzbekistan, in which modules drawing on Eastern scholastic economic heritage, specifically the thought of Ibn Khaldun, Al-Farabi, Al-Biruni, Al-Ghazali, and Yusuf Khas Hajib were integrated into the general education requirements of both Engineering and Social Science faculties (N = 148). Grounded in Bourdieu's field theory and theory of habitus, Fricker's account of epistemic injustice read alongside Spivak's and Dotson's accounts of epistemic violence and silencing, Connell's Southern Theory, the coloniality-of-power framework originated by Quijano and developed by Mignolo, and Wallerstein's world-systems analysis, the study situates the intervention within the layered structures of tsarist colonization, Soviet epistemic modernism, and post-Soviet Westernization that have marginalized Central Asian intellectual heritage in contemporary university curricula. The article makes three interconnected contributions. First, it offers a theoretically grounded account of the sociological mechanisms through which Eastern scholastic economic heritage is excluded from university curricula in post-Soviet Central Asia, arguing that this exclusion constitutes a form of symbolic violence with implications for students' economic mindset formation and professional habitus. Second, it documents the community dynamics of a 4-week heritage integration module, analysing the social processes of habitus disruption, the collapse of the epistemic division of labor between STEM and Social Science fields, and the emergence of epistemic reclamation as a collective social phenomenon. Third, it develops the concept of "field-licensed ignorance" the socially structured and institutionally reproduced disengagement of STEM students from ethical-economic reasoning as a theoretical contribution to the sociology of education. As a single-institution, qualitative case study conducted without a control group and relying substantially on self-report over a 4-week period, the study is exploratory: its findings are analytically rich rather than statistically generalizable, and they support correspondingly modest causal claims. With that caveat, the findings suggest that even brief, well-designed heritage integration interventions can initiate field-positional shifts among both STEM and Social Science students, though sustainable field-level change requires deeper institutional transformation. The study contributes to the literatures on decolonizing economics education, post-Soviet educational transformation, culturally relevant pedagogy in higher education, and the sociology of knowledge, while providing a replicable model for curriculum reform in resource-constrained university contexts across Central Asia and beyond.