Cosmopolitics, Heteropolitics, and Epistemologies of the South:

Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Participation in workshop, seminar, course

Description

This workshop will be organized by the initiative Decolonize Hellas, under the cluster of Cosmopolitanisms/Cosmopolitics. Within this context and, more broadly, within our critique on the self- and hetero-colonizing processes of the hegemonic discourse of Western epistemology and white supremacy, we look into the meanings and transformations of classic Cosmopolitanism, as they have appeared in the era of Colonization and as they survive in the present. In the wake of postcolonial critique and intersubjective multiculturalism, while also counter-pointing the classical or more contemporary notions of cosmopolitanism, we aim to bring in discussion the notions of race and racism, patriarchy and colonial technologies along with intersectional, feminist and other transindividual and embodied activist experiences of heteropolitics – an effort inspired by glocal movements of decolonization and sustains an open dialog with the epistemologies of the South. We look for cosmopolitical practices in social movements, anti/counter-courses, research perspectives and artistic interventions, in planning and cooperative projects, in politics enacted differently. We attend to subaltern voices and histories, as they survive in marginality or in a constant state of borders and liminality, forming the politics of everyday life, knowledge and questioning of academic thought and practice.
We will answer questions such as:
1. Could we find nearby examples of local and supralocal epistemologies, analogous to the epistemologies of the South, that are entangled with cosmopolitical practices of decolonization?
2. How do the categories of familiar precarity (minorities, refugees, migrants, women, precarious lives and other forms of exclusion), as well as the reflective observation of the boundaries of exclusion, conjoin creatively past cosmologies and technologies, mingling practice with theory?
3. How can all the parallel familiar histories of personal experiences, local cosmologies, ethnographic research, oral history, and feminist methodologies be articulated with art, technical knowledge and technology?
4. To what extent do practices of inclusion, care and heteropolitics talk back to personal self-interest, to the capitalist exploitation, the colonial matrix of structural racism, of occupation and enclosures, of patriarchy, and of domination over nature?
5. What leeway do we have for decolonizing knowledge and politics in Greece and its neighborhoods, referring to the values of humanism but also in search of a universal ideal that will not divide but instead include?
Participants: Michalis Bartsides, Alexandros Kioupkiolis, Ioanna Laliotou, Iris Lykourioti, Penny Travlou, Fotini Tsibiridou, Aimilia Voulvouli, Miltiadis Zerboulis.
Convenor: Professor Fotini Tsibiridou
Period9 Jun 2021
Event typeWorkshop
LocationThessaloniki, GreeceShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • cosmopolitics
  • decolonisation
  • Global South
  • participatory action research
  • ethnography
  • Greece
  • Latin America

Documents & Links

Related content