Limits of an episteme: Conceptualizing epistemic voids within agricultural knowledge systems and future-making in rural Africa

This paper develops the concept of epistemic voids to theorize how structural absences within knowledge systems shape agricultural transformation and future-making in marginalized rural regions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with smallholder horticultural farmers in Namibia’s Zambezi Region, it examines how these voids emerge through material constraints, fragmented institutions, and uneven access to knowledge. Epistemic voids become visible in fractured seed systems, limited horticultural expertise, and the marginalization of farmers’ practical and experience-based knowledge, while simultaneously generating new forms of learning, experimentation, and adaptation – which in turn constrain and generate rural, agrarian futures distinctively. By integrating Foucault’s notion of the episteme, Scott’s theories of mētis and legibility, and insights from futures studies, the paper theorizes epistemic voids as relational, generative, and temporal conditions that mediate between knowledge, power, and future-making. Within these conditions, farmers mobilize local expertise, cross-border knowledge networks, and collective experimentation to pursue resilient, though often partial, agrarian futures. While grounded in agrarian transformation, the application extends beyond agriculture: epistemic voids characterize broader domains of socioecological and systematic transformation such as climate governance and technological transitions, where prevailing epistemes along with their material, institutional, and knowledge components encounter their limits. Recognizing the productive, political, and unending natures of absence, the paper advances epistemic voids towards more nuanced scholarly and policy understandings of how diverse epistemic resources and practices interact generatively. By moving beyond attempts to fill perceived ‘gaps’, epistemic voids open pathways toward more adaptive, just, and plural futures.