Nothing About Us Without Us! Reclaiming Knowledge About Europe’s East

Debates in/on the European past, present and future have long been conducted as if the Eastern parts of the continent were no sites of knowledge production worth familiarising with. A hierarchical East-West divide persists, centering the West as a source of ‘objective’ and reliable knowledge, rendering the East as subaltern. The responses to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have further uncovered a dynamic of inter-imperiality across disciplines, that have theorised (post)occupied Europe’s East through Western dominating perspectives and in relation to Russia, through Russian-centric frameworks. In her book-in-progress, political philosopher Tereza Hendl argues that this epistemically imperialist knowledge production has perpetuated harm: both epistemically, through the denial of thinkers from Europe’s East in their capacity as knowers and materially, through the undermining of effective remedies to the problems faced by East-European populations, such as the ongoing legacy of Russian imperialism, but also Western extractivism.

This talk will present the preliminary work from Dr Hendl’s book Nothing about Us Without Us: Refusal as Theory and Practice. In this book, she theorizes refusal as both the refusal of imperialism in material reality and the knowledge production about this. In other words, refusal emerges as a powerful strategy of countering the material and epistemic imperialism that Eastern European populations have dissented to and resisted for generations. So far, some of the most powerful envisioning of refusal has been conceptualised by North American Indigenous thinkers, such as Eve Tuck. Yet, while building on this scholarship, decolonial work cannot involve taking a theory of refusal anchored in resistance against a historically specific colonial settler context and applying it to a very different region, with its own distinct socio-political past and present. What does it mean then, to envision refusal from Europe’s East? Which local traditions of thought, resistance and liberation movements are particularly relevant to this inquiry? And how can one build on and reconnect the knowledges silenced and suppressed by legacies of oppressive regimes and imperial violence, both from the East and the West?

Inspired by Anca Parvulescu’s research on Eastern Europe as a method, Dr Hendl is conceptualising refusal from Ukraine, as the current center of resistance against Russian imperialism. While herself being a researcher from a society that has resisted Russian-Soviet imperialism, but not at home in Ukraine, such approach then requires becoming more familiar with Ukrainian history, scholarship as well as practices of protecting people and heritage against annihilation, subjugation, destruction and erasure, across diverse Ukrainian populations groups, including Indigenous Crimean Tatars, Jews and Roma. Crucially, the imperative of producing collectively empowering and epistemically reparative knowledge that will genuinely benefit not further harm societies in Europe’s East, then presupposes that such research ought to implement methodologies that foster epistemic justice and humility, the re-centering of embodied knowledges through non-extractivist methods and de/anticolonial ethics. What are the requirements of such work? And which Ukrainian scholarship and legacies of dissent are crucial when conceptualising refusal? The talk and discussion will aim to address these questions as well as the exciting possibilities for the recentering, reclaiming and reconnecting of so far fragmented and silenced knowledges of dissent across Europe’s East and further regions that have resisted Russian imperialism, including the Baltic, Caucasus, Central and North Asia. To this end, Dr Hendl will be building on her experience as one of the founders of the RUTA Association for Central, South Eastern, and Eastern European, Baltic, Caucasus, Central and Northern Asian Studies in Global Conversation and the epistemic shifts put in motion through the epistemically reparative initiative.

This Seminar will be held in a workshop format. Researchers are invited to discuss scholarly projects, research at various stages of development, and completed research that is being prepared for publication.

Participation in the Urban Seminar requires preliminary reading and discussion of the researcher's text. If you would like to join the Seminar, please email Maryana Mazurak (m.mazurak@lvivcenter.org), and we will send you the materials in advance.

Credit

Cover photo: Tereza Hendl