
When last year I was selecting the theme of this year’s convention, I, of course, had aspirational goals in mind, thinking about how liberation was going to be hopefully meaningfully advanced this year. As reality has it, things are actually much more complicated than we had hoped and anticipated. In preparing tonight’s speech, I continued thinking about how we can address these very messy times, and, in the process, I thought about things serious and things that are perhaps a little more lighthearted, about things that help uplift us in these very, very difficult times.
Hence, this is my first suggestion:
Free your mind, and the rest will follow!
I’m quoting En Vogue—for those of you who might not be old enough to remember the extent of power of En Vogue as a vocal group in the early 1990s, let this be your research assignment. Paraphrasing the title of their famous song, knowledge is a pre-requisite of liberation. Liberation is impossible without first recognizing and understanding the patterns and practices of oppression and other forms of injustice.
On a more serious note, we need to remember and address the traumatic past. Some people in this room might know already that today is Holodomor Remembrance Day, which is always observed on the fourth Saturday in November. This day of commemoration honors the victims of all the terror famines, of which there were many—the one that we know by the name Holodomor, in Ukraine in 1932-1933, and also the victims of many other ones, and not only in Ukraine. We also think of Asharshylyk in Kazakhstan and other tragic events of this kind. Moving forward requires that we acknowledge and address these past traumatic events.
How do we practice the goal of liberation in our teaching, our research, our public engagement as academics? I tried to look far and wide, I found some tips from different places, and I would like to share them with you today.
First, some wisdom from a colleague who has a Ph.D. in higher education administration and who has worked for many years in different colleges and universities in the U.S., Keith Edwards. He has suggested that for liberation, we need to first understand that there are patterns of oppression which we are facing. Skipping an understanding of oppression will result in ineffective, superficial, and even harmful efforts at “liberation.” However, if all we ever do is learn about oppression—that oppression is real, how it works, how it hurts, etc.—that learning may actually do harm as it can undercut our individual and collective agency. In other words, we need to understand oppression, but we should not get stuck on oppression. Liberation work, says Edwards, certainly needs to be done at the systemic level, but we also need to help individuals function and thrive in an oppressive society as we progress towards justice and equity. In other words, we want to change the systems, but we cannot magically change them overnight. This is a process, and in the meantime, we need to practice self-care and care for others who are especially vulnerable to oppression.
With a knowledge of how oppression works, a liberation approach pushes us to consider brand new possibilities pushes us to consider brand new possibilities for ourselves, for other individuals, for social institutions, and society.
Here I would like to bring another important intellectual voice, bell hooks. This is from her keynote at the 2008 Women of Color Annual Conference, which took place at the University of Oregon. Hooks emphasizes that we need to move from the focus on casting blame, even though we need to know who are the agents of harms that are perpetrated, to cultivating transformation: “Even among liberal and progressive people,” she says, “we want to divide the world up into the binary of good and bad guys,” and when we do that, “we actually keep the dominator culture in place. Casting blame is a crucial component of dominator thinking. It helps promote a culture of victimization. When we are more energized by the practice of blaming than we are by efforts to create transformation, we not only cannot find relief from suffering, we are creating the conditions that help keep us stuck in the status quo. Our attachment to blaming, to identifying the oppressor, stems from the fear that if we cannot unequivocally and absolutely state who the enemy is, then how can we know how to organize resistance struggle?” In other words, we need to understand oppression, where it comes from, who are the forces perpetrating it, but in the work that we do, it is very important also to understand that organizing a resistance struggle and not getting stuck on casting blame is essential.
In developing the theme for this year’s convention, I was inspired by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonizing the Mind, and the topic I selected for the Presidential Plenary stems directly from one of his theses. I am glad that it was recorded and I’m deeply grateful to all the colleagues who took part in it; I urge you to watch the recording on the ASEEES YouTube channel. For me, Ngũgĩ’s message that as our decolonizing goal, we need to search for a “liberating perspective within which to see ourselves clearly in relationship to ourselves and other selves in the universe,” dovetails with the message of another highly important thinker whom we sadly lost this year, Fredric Jameson, and his idea of cognitive mapping.
Jameson advances this idea both in its psychological and in its sociocultural and political sense. In other words, he proposes that we need to work on is developing “a pedagogical, political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system.” That practice and process is a way of making connections, of developing networks, of situating ourselves as both individual and collective subjects, which can advance the goal of social justice and liberation.
To recognize that and to address that, we need to talk about a topic that, as some of you know, I have been talking about a lot in the last several years, epistemic injustice and epistemic justice. Why it is highly important is perhaps evident to everyone in this room. The clearest example is Ukraine’s enduring resistance and the ways in which it shocked the global pundit class in the aftermath of February 24, 2022. Ukraine defied expectations, and many in the global expert community had to admit that they knew and understood little about Ukraine and had a habit of recycling uncritically absorbed stereotypes and ideological talking points, many of them of Russian imperialist origin. They were also forced to admit a history of marginalizing Ukrainian studies and ignoring or dismissing Ukrainian voices. In other words,
the failure to recognize the agency of Ukraine and Ukrainians and to appreciate their perspectives and concerns testified to the existence of an entrenched pattern of epistemic injustice towards Ukraine, while at the same time, the Russian military assault against Ukraine was prepared and has been accompanied by a campaign of epistemic violence against Ukraine.
I therefore would like to offer here a brief primer on the history of the concept of epistemic injustice. This is a very productive, burgeoning field of contemporary philosophical inquiry, situated at a cross-connection between political philosophy, ethics, and epistemology. It owes its growth and development especially to feminist philosophical inquiry (but also, intersectionally, to scholarship on race, class, sexuality, and disability). Its major milestones were Miranda Fricker’s monograph Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, published by Oxford University Press in 2007, and the comprehensive Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, edited by Ian J. Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr., which came out in 2017.
Its earliest origins are indeed in feminist inquiry. Sandra Harding’s concept of standpoint epistemology from her groundbreaking book The Science Question in Feminism (1986), and later, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (1991), and Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge that was formulated in a response to Harding, a milestone in understanding that all knowledge is produced from a specific situated position. And, of course, we need to remember that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak speaks of epistemic violence, a concept that is also essential for understanding the current tragic ongoing crisis, in her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988).
In her book, Fricker identifies two main types of epistemic injustice, which she calls testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. Taking a few seconds to look at them deeper would be helpful for us. Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word (examples could be a sexual assault victim’s testimony in a sexist society or a black person’s testimony in a racist society). In other words, it is caused by prejudice in the economy of credibility. She also talks about a special case of silencing, or preemptive testimonial injustice, caused by structures of social power—and that is when the more powerful knowers, the experts, the decision makers, do not even think that a person from a position X with a particular set of knowledge and experience could have anything valuable to contribute to the dialog, so they are preemptively silenced.
A different version is hermeneutical injustice, and that is when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their own social experience. Fricker speaks of the practice of sexual harassment in a culture that still lacks this concept being developed socially as a particularly fitting example. This is caused by structural prejudice in the economy of collective hermeneutical resources.
Fricker also identifies the corresponding virtues of testimonial and hermeneutical justice. For testimonial justice to be practiced, the influence of identity prejudice on the hearer’s credibility judgment needs to be detected and corrected for. For hermeneutical justice, I will quote verbatim because she put it so well; this virtue can be described as alertness and sensitivity to the possibility that “the difficulty one’s interlocutor is having as she tries to render something communicatively intelligible is due not to its being a nonsense or her being a fool, but rather to some sort of gap in collective hermeneutical resources . . . the speaker is struggling with an objective difficulty and not a subjective failing.”
There is also a third type of epistemic injustice, which was identified by Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. and which she termed willful hermeneutical ignorance. This is another highly important concept for us to spend a little time on. Pohlhaus challenges classical epistemology’s idea that an epistemic agent is nonsocial, both generic and self-sufficient. Feminist epistemology introduced the factor of sociality, as I have mentioned earlier. A knower is always situated, and knowers are in interdependent relations. Epistemic resources are by nature collective. The dialectical tension between these may lead to an expansion of possible knowledge but can also lead to a distinct form of epistemic injustice.
Willful hermeneutical ignorance does not describe a thwarted epistemic agent who is not believed or cannot make sense of her world. Instead, it describes instances where marginally situated knowers actively resist epistemic domination through interaction with other resistant knowers; however, dominantly situated knowers nonetheless continue to misunderstand and misinterpret the world. It is an “epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions,” and it is simultaneously an agential and a structural injustice.
Moving further, another noted feminist philosopher, Kristie Dotson, talks about epistemic agency and epistemic oppression from a systemic approach. Epistemic injustice, Dotson argues, is a subset of epistemic oppression, and we need to proceed from the assumption that there may be types of epistemic exclusion that have not yet been conceptualized and that diverge from Fricker’s model. And then she gives us very clear definitions. Epistemic oppression refers to persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one’s contribution to knowledge production. Epistemic exclusion is an unwarranted infringement on the epistemic agency of knowers. Epistemic agency is the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources within a given epistemic community in order to participate in knowledge production and, if required, the revision of those same resources.
What is the roadmap for changes for us as we acknowledge these problematic conditions? Here is what Fricker suggests. Change begins at home, and starting with oneself is not a bad approach. Fricker encourages reflexive critical awareness of the likely presence of prejudice, leading to active critical reflection. This is a goal that each and every one has to practice; in other words, we need to start with ourselves. There is no clear algorithm here, but there is a clear guiding ideal. The creation of what she calls a more inclusive hermeneutical microclimate between hearers and speakers, conducive to reducing the effects of hermeneutical marginalization.
In her discussion of epistemic agency under oppression, Pohlhaus goes further to suggest for us a more systemic approach, providing a set of suggestions. A systemic approach, like the one proposed by Dotson, is crucial for understanding epistemic harm associated with colonization. Structures of oppression frame knowers from within the oppressing class as ideal capable knowers and knowers from the oppressed class—and class here is used not in the Marxist sense but in the sense of a group of knowers sharing certain distinct characteristics—as less able or incapable knowers. How do we address then testimonial injustice? Is it best to correct an individual within the system or are there ways of recalibrating the system so that it cannot be misused in this fashion? She argues that we need to shift away from solutions that rely on individuals to self-correct and towards changes that prevent testimonial exchange from being discounted based on identity prejudice. While those who have previously been excluded are uniquely positioned to identify gaps in the system, individual knowers can only do so much. Filling those gaps may require cooperative efforts from others who do not notice the gaps in their epistemic systems as keenly. Recognizing and addressing prior willful hermeneutical ignorance is key.
We also have the problem of exploitative inclusions, calls upon others that are then followed by not listening to them. This is a de dicto inclusion and a de re exclusion, which simultaneously exploits and discounts the labor. This is something those who are in a minority predicament know very well—the ways this can be a burden that is incredibly hard to deal with. Then, Pohlhaus follows the Argentinean decolonial thinker María Lugones in talking about “horizontal” vs. “vertical” directionality of epistemic work. “Raising awareness”—the vertical directionality—is not enough. Focusing on agents and not on systems may very well be an oppressive epistemic system in itself.
I would argue that coalition building is essential for liberation—intellectually, educationally, and socially.
We will not be in a minority if we work in coalitions. Horizontal epistemic work, as suggested by Lugones, is in fact coalition building. And I would like to introduce one additional concept for my roadmap for changes. It borrows from Chandra Talpade Mohanty and her book Feminism without Borders. She proposes what she calls “knowing without borders” as a decolonial epistemic practice, investigating the contingent and current borders that enable and disable knowing in particular instances, recognizing that the epistemic borders we create, we breathe life into, have effects on others, and we need to consider what changes are needed to work across or reshape epistemic borders, and work collectively to enable such shifts. Without borders, however, does not mean ignoring borders. We need to know that borders exist, the reasons why they exist, and how they can evolve. The solution that Mohanty proposes is practicing solidarity. She develops an idea of “self-reflexive solidarity,” not a solidarity secured in advance as a basis for struggle but struggle as the basis for solidarity, and based on a vision that the “differences and borders of each of our identities connect us to each other, more than they sever. So the enterprise here is to forge informed, self-reflexive solidarities among ourselves.” Knowledge is not assumed but achieved among knowers struggling together in resistance. The learning experiences need to be democratized further.
For far too long, Ukraine has been “small” on people’s mental maps. We can counteract the epistemic violence that is part of the current Russian aggression in Ukraine by addressing epistemic injustice in regard to Ukraine in our academic environments. We are already making great strides in this direction, but much more needs to be done.
There is a need for an epistemic paradigm shift. We need to recognize and confront entrenched anti-Ukrainian prejudice, and we should not approach this as a temporary problem in need of a temporary solution. Returning to the status quo ante is impossible.
I call on colleagues in academic institutions across the entire world to recognize and confront entrenched anti-Ukrainian prejudice. Please do not approach this as a temporary problem in need of a temporary solution. Returning to the status quo ante is impossible. We need to create comprehensive resources for, and encourage the pursuit of, studies of Ukrainian language and culture. And by culture, I certainly do not only mean literature: classical music, for example, is an area with a highly problematic history of enduring problematic exclusion and suppression of Ukrainian voices and identities. This belief that “we just don’t know that there are any Ukrainian composers worthy of inclusion” unfortunately can still be an answer you get from leading US and international symphonies in late 2024.
We need seek out Ukrainian readings not only on Ukraine-specific topics, but also on global, regional, comparative, theoretical topics and encourage our colleagues to do so. Taras Shevchenko’s 1845 poem “Caucasus,” for example, which thanks to Alyssa Dinega Gillespie we now have in a great new contemporary translation into English, should gain a much wider recognition as a pioneering articulation of anticolonial solidarity of the oppressed that anticipates the anti-colonial writings by Frantz Fanon and others by well over a century. Lesia Ukraïnka should certainly be recognized widely as an outstanding feminist writer of global relevance, and thanks to the efforts, among others, of the publishing program of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute we now have more of her work available in contemporary English translations. Ivan Dziuba’s Internationalism or Russification? (1968) deserves much greater attention as a dissident Marxist critique of Russo-imperialist features of the Soviet project; its neglect by the global left to me is stunning. We have made a lot of strides in our efforts to stop the practice of mislabeling Ukrainian artists and intellectuals as “Russian” and of many periods of Ukrainian history being uncritically subsumed into Russian history. There were excellent convention panels earlier today where this very topic was articulated really well.
In my view, our main appeal to intellectuals and politicians, and to people of good will worldwide should be the following: Please listen to the Ukrainian voices. Please understand that the work of undoing any ignorance or unconscious bias on your part is not their burden, but yours. Please be respectful and ethically responsible in your inquiries, and please do not retraumatize them. Most importantly, practice solidarity.
Vitaly Chernetsky is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas, where he also served as CREES Director from 2015 to 2020. He is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization and of numerous articles on modern and contemporary Russian and Ukrainian culture where he seeks to highlight cross-regional and cross-disciplinary contexts. A monograph in Ukrainian, Intersections and Breakthroughs: Ukrainian Literature and Cinema between the Global and the Local, is forthcoming from Krytyka, Ukraine’s leading academic publisher. His other publications include an annotated Ukrainian translation of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism and translations of the novels The Moscoviad and Twelve Circles by one of Ukraine’s leading contemporary authors, Yuri Andrukhovych; both were awarded the AAUS translation prize. A native of Odesa, Ukraine, Professor Chernetsky received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a past president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) and the current First Vice President of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. He is the editor of the Ukrainian Studies book series at Academic Studies Press and serves on the board of nine periodicals.