Conceptualizing epistemic violence: an interdisciplinary assemblage for IR

Abstract

While many forms of violence shape the global world order, the disciplines devoted to international politics are often content with reductionist concepts of violence; knowledge and knowledge production are more often than not seen as altogether antithetical to direct and physical harm. At the same time, global entanglements of knowledge with violence have increasingly come into view in the course of the ongoing (de-)colonial turn. After more than 30 years, Gayatri C. Spivak’s feminist postcolonial understanding of epistemic violence is still the preeminent theoretical touchstone for addressing this issue. By providing an interdisciplinary understanding of lesser known conceptions of epistemic violence, I open up additional routes for deploying the term in the analysis, theorization, and critique of international politics. Based on this assemblage, I frame epistemic violence along the decolonial concept of a coloniality of power, knowledge, and Being and finally consider how we can possibly undo epistemic violence while un/doing IR.

Centering and collaborating with community knowledge systems: piloting a novel participatory modeling approach

“…(1) Should have engaged in efforts within their community that included discussions with key informants, focus groups, and a diversity of voices and lived experiences (2) Hold formal positions in the community that is the focus of this study (3) Have knowledge relevant to the study, be willing to share this knowledge, and communicate well (4) Be unbiased or able to reflect upon their own biases (5) Due to timeline constraints, they should also be immediately available and easily accessible…”

“…Communities marginalized by systems of power can be further marginalized by being objects of research within those systems. Epistemic [1] violence [2][3][4][5][6] can occur along the knowledge production pipeline (i.e. funding; question framing and formulation; research paradigm selection; methodology, methods, and design; data collection; data cleaning, analysis, interpretation; publication and dissemination; impact and relationship to current knowledge, theories, policies, interventions; etc.)…”

“…funding; question framing and formulation; research paradigm selection; methodology, methods, and design; data collection; data cleaning, analysis, interpretation; publication and dissemination; impact and relationship to current knowledge, theories, policies, interventions; etc.) [3,7,8]. By the time a community on the periphery has been reduced to data and exits the knowledge production pipeline, reconstructed as an output of a centered system of knowledge, it may find its voice silenced, [2,6] may not recognize its representation [9][10][11][12][13] and the knowledge production effort might be seen by the community as extractive to benefit researchers, institutions, and academic enterprises that uphold existing systems of power [14][15][16][17][18].…”

“…A number of strategies have been proposed to co-produce with communities in a way that overcomes epistemic violence in research and policymaking efforts [3]. These strategies can be summarized as prioritizing fairness, agency, inclusion, and representation (which can be summarized with the acronym FAIR) in the research or policy making effort [4,7,8,21].…”

Listening-with the subaltern: Anthropocene, Pluriverse and more-than-human agency

“…Pluriversal conceptualizations emphasize the importance of thinking within those configurations of life that escape the ontological occupation of the OWW (de la Cadena 2015). In making visible the subjects which were once invisible, in listening to those who have been silenced, the pluriverse defies Western Modernity's epistemic violence 2 Dotson 2011;Brunner 2021) and its "practices of silencing" (Dotson 2011), proposing alternatives to its OWW model.…”