International Center for Cultural Studies

2025/05/22｜ABOUT POWER, WAR AND GENDER: AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL APPROACH

2025-05-22

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ABOUT POWER, WAR AND GENDER: AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL APPROACH

(Formerly titled “NEW EPISTEMOLOGIES AT THE 'END OF THE WORLD')

⏰Time: 2025/5/22, 2:00 - 5:00 PM

📌Venue: Room 103, HA Building 3 (人社三館), Hsinchu Guangfu Campus, NYCU

🔗 Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82368725419?pwd=NECrsmngCC6jp1LG29LOKgeTMijH6A.1

Meeting ID: 823 6872 5419

Passcode: 573304

🗣️Format: Hybrid (In-person & online)

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✴︎Speaker: Rada Iveković (Professor Emerita University of Paris-8, Philosophy Independent Researcher)

✴︎Moderator: Joyce C. H. Liu (Director/Professor, International Center for Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University)

✴︎Discussant: Yuan Horng Chu (Professor Emeritus, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University)

✴︎Introduction: Merima Omeragić (Postdoctoral Fellow, International Center for Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University)

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▌Agenda

2:10–3:10｜Talk

Rada Iveković

．New Epistemologies at the 'End of the World' 

．Civil War, Just War: Yugoslav Wars and the Aftermath

3:10–3:30｜Coffee Break

3:30–4:00｜Responses (15 min each)
．Merima Omeragić: Personal Experience and Observations Through Literature

．Yuan Horng Chu: The Chinese Civil War and the Current Situation

4:00–5:00｜Open discussion

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▌Abstract

The exhaustion of the so far west-dominated model of the world is undeniable, but west-bashing alone will not help. Changing the way of thinking and language usages will be necessary, which implies a new epistemological project for a new living together in solidarity, at what looks a lot like an end of the world. The feeling of the “end of the world” is not new, but here it is again. I shall investigate in this talk how our epistemologies might have to change in order to bypass the feeling and decentre us. We now need shared and intertwined, reciprocally open but admittedly incomplete and imperfect knowledges (in the pl.), with inputs from all sides, and decentred, at this late hour of humanity. The starting observation is that any knowledge owes a lot to ignored or unexpected “elsewheres” that had not yet been thought about. One of the many critics of western centrism and more in our times, the recently disappeared Bruno Latour, warned that our thinking and language, as well as the sciences we practice to study our world, are in fact all from within that world itself (which, let’s add, is west-dominated). This is usually forgotten, but it helps us understand shared dependences and the illusion of ideas of sovereignty. Upon the latter and connected ideas and their interrelations, i rely heavily but implicitly also on early Indian philosophical buddhism.

▌Speaker Bio

Rada Iveković, born in Yugoslavia, is a political, feminist, philosophy of language-and-translation researcher of the Indian pluriverse, of Indian and western philosophy, of the latter’s unthinkables. She lives in Paris. She taught at universities in Yugoslavia, in France, at Indian universities, at NUS, Singapore etc., was visiting professor at the International Institute for Cultural Studies at Chiao-Tung-University in Hsinchu (2019). Some of her books include: Migration, New Nationalisms and Populism (Routledge, London 2022), Politiques de la traduction. Exercices de partage, (preface by É. Balibar, Paris, TERRA-HN 2019, online: http://www.reseau-terra.eu/IMG/pdf/-5.pdf), L'éloquence tempérée du Bouddha. Souverainetés et dépossession de soi (Paris, Klincksieck, 2014).

⚪Organizers:

International Center for Cultural Studies, NYCU—Sub-project 6: Social Intervention and Artistic Production

National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University International Master's Degree Program in Asian Cultural Studies (IACS, NYCU)