Public Talk: Global Epistemic Justice, Post-Development and Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences

This talk will focus on the question of global epistemic justice. Global epistemic justice means to take seriously epistemic interventions from 'most of the world' in a way that matters epistemically. Some elements of global epistemic justice will be outlined and illustrated by Prof. Dr. Sumi Madhok drawing on her long-standing ethnographies of subaltern struggles over rights and "development". These subaltern struggles for/and over development are important epistemic sites for knowledge production on development and post development. And, in particular, for envisioning radical political imaginaries of citizenship, justice and rights.

Sumi Madhok is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies. Quite unusually, she is a feminist political theorist with an ethnographic sensibility. She is an anticolonial, transnational and an interdisciplinary scholar, and her teaching and scholarship lie at the intersection of feminist political theory and philosophy, coloniality, transnational activism and social movements, rights/human rights, citizenship, developmentalism and feminist ethnographies. Professor Madhok’s scholarship goes beyond producing critiques of Eurocentrism and develops new concepts, theoretical frameworks and methodologies, which contribute to setting a new direction for the social sciences focused on epistemic interventions from the Global South.

Her research and writing combines theoretical, conceptual and philosophical investigations with detailed ethnographies of the lived experiences, political subjectivation, and political struggles for rights and justice, specifically, in South Asia.