Term 2
Instructor: Dr. Pilar Riaño-Alcalá
Title: Difficult Knowledge: Ethics and Praxis of Research in Challenging Settings
Description: What does it mean to engage with knowledge that unsettles us, generates discomfort, pain and the impulse to look away? To conduct the labour of challenging institutions, and individuals and collectives that deny, silence, or erase living histories of colonial and political violence? To learn and research on unceded territories marked by histories of dispossession and resistance? Difficult knowledge is a knowing that poses emotional and epistemological challenges to the individual or collective because of its connection to violence and atrocity. It is embodied knowledge, a felt theory or way of being in the world that is rooted in unsettling experiences or challenging truths, and that poses challenges of communicability and representation. It is also haunting, a violent past that persists and insists on justice. In this course, we consider what makes knowledge difficult, and the institutional ways such knowledge is marginalized and denied. We advance this exploration through the tracing of the question of what makes knowledge difficult in the work of memory (remembering and forgetting) and archives while considering issues of time, silence, and othering. We draw on forms of theorizing about difficult knowledge that are visual, poetic, felt and embedded in the everyday. And finally, we reflect on ethics in research, codes of conduct and praxis in the reach towards transformative justice.