EPISTEMIC ERASURE


Epistemic Erasure examines why the knowledge of certain communities—such as peasants, incarcerated people, Indigenous people, colonized people, racialized people, people from peripheral geographies, people with disabilities, and others—is not respected, safeguarded, or acknowledged

Recognizing the crisis of objectivity that we find ourselves in today, as seen through the popularization of postmodern and posttruth paradigms, it is vital to reflect upon the genealogy of our structures of truth--within the academy, within our communities, and within the public sphere more broadly. It is clear if one attempts to perform a comprehensive analysis comparing those who are considered as legitimate carriers of knowledge to those who are not considered as legitimate carriers of knowledge, the significant indicators are the entangled points of class, gender, and race.

If we take seriously the epistemic consequences of longue durée exploitation and oppression on the basis of class, gender, and race, we’re forced to reckon with the ways that the academy’s epistemic-power structure justifies and reinforces the economic order.



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Webinar: What a Peasant Could Know: On the Path and Performance of Modernity in the Context of (Post-)Socialist (Ex-)Yugoslavia
Speakers: Olivera Jokić and Christina Novakov-Ritchey
Moderator: Rüya Kalıntaş

Time: Wednesday, December 15, 2021 at 7:30 pm Istanbul (GMT +3)
11:30 am New York
4:30 pm London
5:30 pm Central European Time

Olivera Jokić and Christina Novakov-Ritchey’s workshop examines the political and epistemological charge that marks existing accounts of “peasant life” and the knowledge it has embodied across the region that was until relatively recently the nation-state of Yugoslavia. The workshop will foreground the way scholarship on performance, in conjunction with insights from other interdisciplinary fields, makes available new knowledge about the region that has long been studied primarily in the rigid and masculinist terms of political history, from sovereign nations and empires to wars and urban political institutions.

Jokić will focus on the significance of biographies of three women born to peasant families in the 1910s. Their life projects shape the politics and performance of gender and urbanization in the region to this day, down to neo-traditionalist demands for a “return to normal” and repolarization of gender categories that would befit a free-market society. Novakov-Ritchey’s presentation proposes that the progressive repudiation of peasant ways of knowing and being from the early nineteenth century through the present constitutes an ongoing program of colonially-informed epistemic violence.

This webinar series and the “Staging National Abjection” research project are sponsored by a European Research Commission Starting Grant (ERC-2019-StG, Grant ID: 852216)