Travelling Knowledge: Global Epistemologies and the Political Novel in Europe

‘If we ignore what other people are thinking, or have thought in the past, then rational discussion must come to an end, though each of us may go on happily talking to himself’ (Karl Popper, cited in Jonathan O. Chimakonam, ‘African Philosophy and Global Epistemic Injustice’)

Many scholars have noted what Chimakonam calls the ‘exclusions and lopsidedness in global epistemic discourses’ that privilege Western European and white North American traditions of thought. Significant gaps in knowledge ensue. Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr describes how ‘dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally’. That refusal has a strategic function, permitting ‘dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world.’ In a Eurocentric arena of knowledge, knowers are too often, in Pohlhaus’s words, ‘captivated by a distorted picture of the world’. Within Europe and globally, epistemic authority is further inflected by geography, class, gender, and many other factors.

The third CAPONEU consortium conference, 15-18 September 2025 (on zoom), explores perspectives on how cultural and geopolitical knowledge travels in the political novel. Our approaches take in but also go beyond Western European and North American epistemologies; intersectional approaches; and/or explorations of novels as political in the sense that they have an epistemologically transformative impetus. If knowledge can travel across class barriers, time, space, and communities, how might political fiction be its vehicle? In the European context, how can we better apprehend travelling knowledge, and the political impetus and potential it brings with it?

Keynote speakers

Day 1: Shambhavi Prakash

Day 2: James Ogone

Day 3: Divya Dwivedi

Day 4: B. Venkat Mani

Contact: Dr Tara Talwar Windsor (ttw24@cam.ac.uk)