A BOOK LAUNCH AND CONVERSATION WITH DR ALEXANDER STINGL
How are academic knowledge practices implicated in histories of colonialism? And what would it mean to decolonise the university and the knowledge systems it produces?
In his book, Care, Power, Information, former ISRF Fellow Alexander I. Stingl argues that decolonising the university means confronting the structure of Western knowledge from the beginning. Stingl traces the coloniality of power and Being that lies inherent in Global Northern academia and Western sociology back to the Athenian concept of the oikos.
Inspired by decolonial thinkers, feminist theorists, and Africana philosophers, he describes an alternative epistemology as a thinking together with one an-Other before-and-beyond oikos.
Stingl suggests that decolonial knowledge structures would help confront three related features of the contemporary period: post-factual mediatisation of political and social life, the accelerated digital financialisation and assetisation of social being, and the precarisation of a wide range of employment. Writing with his distinctive originality and energy, Stingl shows unexpected connections between decolonial practices and reimagining contemporary politics, economics, and academia.
Alexander Stingl offers an overview of his book with a response from Lewis R. Gordon, Professor and Head of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut and author of Fear of Black Consciousness (2022). Questions and a discussion follow, moderated by Professor Christopher Newfield, ISRF Director of Research.
This is the thirteenth in the ISRF’s series of Book Launches.