This round table gathers scholars from across disciplines to discuss issues related to epistemic inequality and injustice. From their distinct disciplinary locations, participants address these issues as epistemic justice in the Anglo-American philosophy, as the geopolitics of knowledge and epistemicide in the social sciences, as decolonizing knowledge in Southern Theory, and as perspectivism and cognitive justice in World Literary Knowledges. 

Why do we do what we do? Why do we labor to read, and teach students to read, slowly, attentively, philologically, and speculatively? What are literary studies’ practical epistemologies? Julie Orlemanski's hypothesis is that answers to questions like these are sedimented in disciplinary activity.

The statistical imagination of the west in the nineteenth century created the conditions of social classification whose ramifications we are still dealing with today. This workshop begins the hard task of unpacking this late nineteenth-century nexus, challenging in particular its data legacies. What conditions underwrote these codifications of race, gender, and development? What do they tell us about the prehistory of data in the centuries before, and what are the consequences of that transformation today?

Yousuf Saeed reflects on the challenges of making documentary films in India, and using them as a means of education and research. Saeed also talks about his experience as a visiting scholar at Stanford University and special film collections at Green library.