Political Theory

H01 - Reaching across worlds: political epistemology, coloniality, and pluriversality

Date: Jun 3 | Time: 08:30am to 10:00am | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Elaine Coburn (York University)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Abraham Tobi (Centre de Recherche en Éthique, Université de Montréal)

Political epistemology operates within a deeply diverse world, criss-crossed by epistemic injustices and oppression, and marked by the unequal and unfair epistemic landscape of coloniality. In doing so, it must contend with formidable obstacles related to understanding and dialoguing, and thereby attend to the difficult process of knowledge production and political theorization. Many political thinkers have engaged with the limits of political epistemology in such contexts: Charles Mills has written about White Ignorance, Vimalassery and co-authors about Colonial Unknowing, Kristie Dotson about Epistemic Oppression and Bad Magic; and thinkers associated with decoloniality about ‘adaptive truths-for’ (Sylvia Wynter) associated with Western Modernity and the disqualification and destitution of lifeways and cosmovisions. The members of this panel seek to continue the work of theorizing and practically engaging across worlds, working against and challenging these limits. To borrow from María Lugones, they believe robust and honest political theorizing should strive for modes of world-traveling that accommodate pluralities and contradictions, both within and between worlds. The contributors will engage this concern in resonant ways but with distinct focuses. They will promote theoretical questions pertaining to conceptual schemas that fail to account for the risks of misrepresentation and mischaracterization; they will engage methodological approaches for learning across epistemological chasms; and they will identify practical challenges to operationalizing these epistemological considerations. In sum, this panel seeks to reflect on how political theory can invite greater epistemic reflexivity (Dotson) beyond the familiar metaphors of bridging divides or navigating new waters.

Rethinking how to Think about Thought: Elsewheres, Appropriation, Attunement: Didier Zúñiga (University of Alberta)
Abstract: This paper addresses ethical and political challenges associated with thinking in and with the world, producing knowledge about such world, and accessing and understanding thought and knowledge formed ‘elsewhere.’ These challenges include questions about where thought comes from, whether one can be said to own it, and the possibilities and limits of moving across the spatio-temporal locations where thought is produced and put to use. The paper argues that thinking, and therefore knowledge formation, is not the exclusive prerogative of the human animal mind. Taking issue with the modern dualisms of subject and object, mind and body, and nature and culture, among others, the paper proposes an understanding of thinking and knowledge that is attuned to the larger whole of which all life is a part. This approach underscores the ethical significance of how we think and know, as our actions are guided by how we make sense of the world around us. The paper’s central argument is that rethinking thought in attunement with the broader whole that unites all life has radical implications for how we think of ourselves in relation to the rest of nature, and, consequently, how we navigate and orient ourselves within it.

A Great Ox Sits in Your Mind: Decolonial Cautions about Epistemic Reparations and the Right to be Known: Yann Allard-Tremblay (McGill University)
Abstract: In presenting the right to be known, Jennifer Lackey argues that epistemic reparations must be provided to “victims” who are “rendered invisible, vilified or demonized, or systematically distorted” (2022, 56). Such epistemic harm is indeed part of settler colonialism and thus admittedly calls for epistemic reparations. Yet, alluding to Yael Farber’s Molora (2008, 22), who herself takes from Aeschylus, I suggest that ‘a great ox sits’ in the minds of those subjectified as settlers. It must be moved before the right to be known can be properly and genuinely pursued. Specifically, I argue that epistemic reparations in settler colonial contexts risk being both unproductive and pernicious without deep structural and subjective transformations. They risk being unproductive because of the various epistemic features and technologies of settler colonialism. These constitute “settler colonial epistemic ecologies [which] are intergenerationally layered through,” what Shelbi Meissner and Bryce Huebner, following Kyle Whyte, refer to as “vicious sedimentation” (Meissner and Huebner 2022, 223; Whyte 2018). Thus, one’s right to be known cannot be fulfilled precisely because one cannot properly be known without clearing the sedimented settler epistemic ecology, and the various mechanisms that ongoingly produce it. They risk being pernicious when epistemic harms that require reparation are framed as extraordinary and exceptional. Instead harm, in settler colonial contexts, should be perceived as ordinary and built into the very fabric of the social order. What is called for is therefore deep transformation of the very context that makes such harms possible.

Old Dogs Teaching New Tricks: A Philosophical Methodology for Cynics and Shapeshifters: John McGuire (University College Dublin)
Abstract: As part of a larger project to facilitate dialogue across intellectual traditions, I use a conceptual reconstruction of ancient Cynicism to engage the persona of the Trickster within North American Indigenous thought. Diogenes of Sinope’s notoriously ‘dog-like’ (kynikos) contrarianism denigrates elite discourse and disparages societal convention (Mazella 2007; Branham 1996). Cynical speech emerges when words fail, when ideals become vacuous or hypocritical. In this regard, Cynicism suggests points of contact with Indigenous personifications of the Trickster, including the Lakota Spider Iktomi, or the Ojibwe shapeshifter Nanabozho (Moore 2017). Both the Cynic and the Trickster share a predilection for subversive language games, unrestrained pursuit of bodily pleasures, and the breaking of social norms. Both personas interrogate the value of ‘civilisation’ against the ‘natural’ interests of human and nonhuman beings. By respecting the independent authority of the Trickster as well as elevating points of friction, we can initiate a deeper questioning of the self-understanding of Western Cynicism and the range of its intellectual practices: from the ‘historicalisation’ of mythopoetic figures like Diogenes; to the elevation of certain ‘fictive practices’ (Platonic dialogues, thought experiments) over creation stories. In discussing this, I will draw inspiration from Brian Burkhart (2019), who has developed a sophisticated philosophical methodology from the Spider Trickster, using epistemic medicine to encourage us to “get out of the web of our own making,” confronting local obstacles to moral-political agency, as well as the denigration of Indigenous knowledge recovery and production.

The Pluralizing Epistemology of Tragic Drama: Larissa Atkison (Dalhousie University)
Abstract: This paper considers tragic drama as an epistemological alternative to the androcentric legacy of Athenian democracy, and subsequently the inheritors of this legacy throughout the Western canon. It is not new to say that Attic tragedy embodies a distinct epistemology, but its distinctiveness is often treated as a derivative expression of Athenian democratic ideology (Hall, Euben), or as its moralistic appendage (Aristotle). I argue that Attic poetry performatively enacts a radically democratic epistemology that served to challenge Athenian exclusion and exceptionalism, and the traditional philosophic view of political and practical judgment as possessions of an educated elite. Attic tragedy was remarkably cosmopolitan: its audiences were heterogeneous masses, comprised of citizens from all classes, as well as foreign friends, enemies, slaves, and women. Likewise, the tragic stage extended a form of practical wisdom to silenced and marginalised characters and collectives. Political collapse, by contrast, is shown to be a result of the insatiable and obstinate instincts of figures who fail to heed the advice of others and refuse to recognize their dependence upon a natural order to which all things must eventually yield. I argue that attending to the specific ways of knowing and acting that Attic drama enacts (as opposed to the self-regarding and imperialistic worldview it obviates) can help contemporary readers imagine a more radically egalitarian, aspirationally unbounded, yet collectively situated past—and to reevaluate what it is we know and what we aim to do within our troubled present.