In this event, we publicly launched South/South Movement by way of a conversation around decoloniality and publishing with the founding members of Decolonial Subversions, a platform for the creation and dissemination of written, acoustic and visual knowledge from the margins.
This encounter tackled the politics of knowledge hierarchies from the vantage point of postgraduate students and early career researchers whose scholarship lies outside mainstream and western approaches. It brought to the fore the practicalities of publishing more critical, decolonial, heterodox, subversive or non-textual works.
About our fellow travellers:
Dr Romina Istratii is UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the School of History, Religions and Philosophies at SOAS University of London. She is Principal Investigator of the UKRI-funded project “Bridging religious studies, gender & development and public health to address domestic violence: A novel approach for Ethiopia, Eritrea and the UK” and creator of project dldl/ድልድል. In 2019, she initialised the Decolonising Research Initiative under the aegis of the SOAS Research Directorate and in 2020, she co-founded (with Monika Hirmer) Decolonial Subversions, an open access, multilingual, peer-reviewed publishing platform that aims to subvert western epistemology and to promote the diversification of knowledge production. She is the author of the monograph Adapting Gender and Development to Local Religious Contexts: A Decolonial Approach to Domestic Violence in Ethiopia (Routledge, 2020).
Monika Hirmer is a PhD candidate at SOAS, University of London, in the Department of Religions and Philosophies, where she also worked as teaching assistant for the course ‘The Margins of Philosophy: Postcolonial, Gender and Queer Epistemologies’. Trained as an anthropologist at the University of Hyderabad, India, from where she obtained her MPhil, her research is at the intersection of ethnography and philosophy, to which she applies a decolonial perspective. Before co-founding Decolonial Subversions in 2020, she has been co-editor of The SOAS Journal of Postgraduate Research from 2016. Her research interests lie in South Asia, anthropology, decolonial studies, Tantra and Śrīvidyā, Goddess traditions, ontology and gender. Monika can be reached at mh121@soas.ac.uk.
Danilo Babić joined the Institute of International Politics and Economics in December 2019. The main areas of his academic interests are Postcolonial and Sub-Saharan Africa studies, with a focus on the role of China and India in Sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, Danilo analyses international relations in the Balkans from a postcolonial perspective. Currently, Danilo is a Ph.D. candidate at the International and European Studies at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade, where he earned a master’s degree. Danilo acquired his bachelor’s degree at Economics Faculty, University of Novi Sad. During 2017 and 2018, he participated in the research project conducted by the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals, under the auspices of the Office for Kosovo and Metohija Government of the Republic of Serbia, wherein he contributed (as a co-author) to a study: “Privatization of Socially-owned Enterprises in Kosovo under the Auspices of the UNMIK Administration”. Danilo authored several articles in domestic academic publications, he also participated as a panelist in CEEISA-ISA 2019 international conference in Belgrade.