Knowledge, Education and Epistemic Justice (KEEJ) is a research collective at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Its agenda begins with the explicit implication of pluriversality. Rather than seeking to define this notion, KEEJ plots connections and tensions between varying epistemic locations to advance a collective notion of social justice.
Embedded in this starting point is an unsettling of coloniality and its ongoing forces on/over knowledge, justice and power. Through this lens the collective attempts to think, question and sense the assumptions that inform ethical and methodological practice.
Epistemic plurality and the confrontation with the deep entrenchment of colonial norms/ledgers in the university context demand approaches that recursively connect and advance collective knowledge cultivation and coalitional praxis.
Undertaking these conversations requires a constant renegotiation with the idea and feeling of 'epistemic justice' and its limits, particularly how it necessitates a rethinking of our approaches to research, teaching/learning and artistic and political practice.
Through its engagements, KEEJ hopes to stimulate conversations beyond the bounds of this specific collective as these learnings hold implications for engagements in/outside of the ivory tower.
Rethinking of our approaches to research, teaching/learning and artistic and political practice
Fostering linkages with arts and theory
Extending from this position KEEJ aims to foster the linkage with arts and theory as a generative space for knowledge cultivation. Art makes legible and possible encounters with ephemeral, monstrous, plural, co-learnings/creating that offer situated and cultivated engagements that rupture disciplinary bounds.
The artworks showcased on this site are indicative of shared creative encounters and collective makings that disrupt ontological, epistemic and methodological (b)orders. They allude to alterities of justice and knowledge paradigms, that sit in liminal grounds, the margins that exist in dissident relations with the formative notion of epistemology and epistemic justice.
The KEEJ collective seeks these encounters that challenge and demand renegotiation with or refusal of grammars/orders that reify hierarchies and colonial differences. To foster the intersections of communal and collaborative work towards more complex and life-affirming sensings of modes of knowing and doing justice.
KEEJ seeks to root its engagements with these questions not primarily within academic debates but within social struggles that trespass the modalities of modern/colonial epistemology.
The researchers thereby refuse commonplace discussions that are either removed from struggles or turn them into objects for value extraction and profit generation. They approach the social struggles in which many of them are involved as sites of living and knowing otherwise, outside of the confines of disciplinary and authoritative knowledge that continues to produce death and destruction.
Topics KEEJ is engaged with
Pertinent topics the KEEJ researchers collectively rethink and engage with:
- Entanglement of (coloniality of) power and knowledge, questioning of colonial borders in knowledge (e.g., gender, environment/sustainability, education, humanitarianism, crisis responses)
- Explicit notion and praxis of epistemic plurality
- Ethical and methodological questions (e.g., transformative and participatory approaches to research, teaching, political practice)
- Connections between epistemic and social justice, between epistemology and materiality
- Positionality in the research and policy context
- Praxical challenges (theory and practice as enmeshed)
- Convergences and tensions between decoloniality and degrowth (and other similar movements)
Community of care
In line with its research agenda and question, KEEJ seeks to unsettle the hierarchies that warp and frame research, meaning it actively moves away from expert positions and authoritative voices/dynamics.
Since the researchers arrive from diverse epistemic perspectives, translanguaging, active listening and unlearning are needed to find crossroads and connections. They also seek to change the rhythm of scholarly engagement, by moving away from the precedence of productivity and competition towards deep engagement and collaboration. KEEJ therefore aims to cultivate a space of generative dialogue (engaging/nurturing carefully these tensions and synergies) for collective study in line with Moten and Harney's Undercommons.
Emphasizing a slow praxis means cultivating spaces for critical conversations on ethics, methodologies, and pedagogies, moving towards shared and collective possibilities of team-oriented research, publications, workshops, reading groups, events and conference attendance/creation.
KEEJ members
This team’s participants and coordinators are comprised of diverse people at different moments in social and workplace lives, which implies that the collective recognizes the varying needs and desires of people and community.
KEEJ notes there is no universal framework or pathway for good research, PhD progress or good supervision; these ideas are dependent but can be supported by a strong and present collective framed by relational accountability.
