Archives par mot-clé : études aréales

JE 10/10/2025 : Épistémologies féministes et études aréales

programme de recherche intersciplinaire (PRI) Sciences sociales et le monde

10.10.2025

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)
Aubervilliers. Salle/room 00.30 – rez-de-chaussée/ground
floor, Campus Condorcet Bâtiment Recherche Sud, 5 Cours
des Humanités, 93300 Aubervilliers, France

Équipe organisatrice/Organizing team:
Lucie Drechselová (EHESS-CETOBaC)
Fabio Giomi (CNRS-CETOBaC)
Camila Pastor (CIDE, Mexico)

Programme de la journée /
Workshop Program

9:00 Mots de bienvenue par l’équipe organisatrice / Welcome by the
organizers

9:30 Keynote Lecture:
Decolonizing Research/Politicizing Ethics: Learning from the Indigenous
Turn
Lila Abu-Lughod (Anthropology, Columbia University)

10:30-10:45 Pause café / Coffee break

10:45-12:45 Panel 1. Les Études Aréales Depuis les Féminismes / Area
Studies under Feminist Eyes
Chair and discussant: Capucine Boidin (Institut des Hautes Études de
l’Amérique Latine, Sorbonne Nouvelle)
“Situated in Difference: Intersectionality, Relationality, and Feminist
Knowledge in the Field”
Yeliz Kendir (Çankırı Karatekin University, Turkey)
“Dialogical Border Thinking: Feminist critiques across borders between
Central and Eastern Europe and Africa”
Zuzana Uhde (Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Sociology)
“What to Make of Contradictions? Reflexions on a Situated Ethnography
in Morocco”
Yasmine Berriane (CNRS, Centre Maurice Halbwachs, Paris)

12 :45-14:30 Pause déjeuner / Lunch break

14:30 -15:30 Panel 2. Articulations Optimistes d’Éthiques Situées :
Devenir Avec et Technologies Frugales / Optimist Articulations of
Situated Ethics: Becoming With and Frugal Technologies
Chair and discussant: Camila Pastor (Division d’Histoire, Centro de
Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico)
“Les savoirs situés dans les études critiques féministes de l’Intelligence
Artificielle”
Amaranta López (Philosophie, EHESS)
“Provincialiser la philosophie : réflexions sur la philosophie comme
études aréales”
Hye Young Kim (Philosophie, École Normale Supérieure)

15:30-15:45 Pause café / Coffee break
15:45-16:45 Panel 3. Archives of Possibility: Queering Gender Through

Visual Histories / Archives des Possibles: Queering le Genre par des
Histoires Visuelles
Chair and discussant: Jules Falquet (Philosophie, Paris 8)
“Joyland ou l’empowerment d’une femme khusra/trans au Pakistan”
Corinne Fortier (CNRS – Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale – LAS)
“Feminist Mediations: Artistic Knowledges in the Vernacular Context”
Karolina Majewska-Güde (Institute of Art History, University of Warsaw)

16:30-16:45 Pause café / Coffee break

17:00-18:00 Table ronde / Round Table : Pratiques féministes, pratiques
intellectuelles, pratiques éditoriales. Conversation avec les membres du
comité de rédaction de Clio. Femmes, genre histoire autour du numéro
Clio a trente ans! | Feminist Practice, Intellectual Practice, Editorial
Practice. Conversations with the Editorial Board of Clio. Femmes, genre
histoire on the special issue Clio is thirty years old!
(français / in French)

Avec Capucine Boidin (IHEAL, Sorbonne Nouvelle) et Fabio Giomi (CNRS, CETOBaC)

18:00-20:00 Cocktail de clôture / Closing cocktail
Espace de convivialité Faculty Club, Campus Condorcet, 1 cours des
Humanités – 93322 Aubervilliers

Working languages are French and English; participants will present in
the language of their talk title.

Appel à contributions/Call for Papers Workshop : JE Épistémologies féministes et « études aréales », PRI Sciences sociales et le monde

 

“privilege of the partial perspective”?
On feminist epistemologies and “area studies”

October 10, 2025, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Aubervilliers

The workshop will be held in English and French. Submissions should include a 500word abstract as well as a short bio, in English or French, to be emailed to the following three members of the organizing team before June 30, 2025:
Dimitra Douskos: dimitra.douskos@wanadoo.fr

Lucie Drechselová: lucie.drechselova@ehess.fr

Camila Pastor: camila.pastor@cide.edu

The authors of selected submissions will be notified before mid-July. Limited funds are available to support travel to participate in the workshop in particular for early career scholars.

Donna Haraway’s essay on “the science question in feminism” became a reference as soon as it was published, in 1988, through its call to dislodge a supposedly disembodied and omniscient epistemic viewpoint, a patriarchal “God’s trick”, ideally set above contingencies and capable of seeing through materialities. It argued for replacing this paradigm “tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism and male supremacy” by something different than its relativist flip side, the erstwhile discourse
theories: a necessarily corporeal and thereby positioned, one-sided and partial “feminist objectivity”, one that leaves purportedly universal or relativist science behind to the benefit of the advent of “situated knowledges”. Such knowledges would be revolutionary, insofar as they might at last challenge the long incontestable masculine
monopoly on science.
A travelling concept par excellence, a notion that can leave much of its body, its soul, or both of them behind without entirely dissolving in the hands of other disciplines, temporalities, geographies and power differentials, the term “situated knowledges” did noticeably well, in contexts strongly marked by feminism. Or less so. In this workshop,
we set out to explore its numerous and diverse “contact zones” with other scholarly worlds also engaged in the epistemic challenges of producing “situated knowledges”.
Nearly forty years after the publication of this essay, we wonder whether there is any sort of common ground between “the privilege of partial perspective” and the paradigm of so called “area studies”. Do the latter’s aspirations to spatial neutralisation elide the feminist concerns with finitude, corporeality, situated difference, and inequity at the
heart of the concept’s formulation? Or do they hold their own, stand their ground, find a place? How do scholars working on the geographical, sexual or gendered margins see it?

For the 2025 workshop of the EHESS Interdisciplinary Research Program Social
Sciences and the World, we invite a collective discussion on questions such as:
1. Situated knowledges as an epistemological tool: usage, scope, limits
The concept of situated knowledges deeply marked western feminist
epistemologies, but does it have a history in area studies debates? What do scholars with research defined by a geographical location other than Euro-American « centers » and for whom gender constitutes a fundamental category of analysis think of the encounter of a militant concept and a long-established problematic category? Do they notice it? Are situated knowledges explicitly mobilized and what epistemological reconfigurations do they undergo and/or imply in different contexts?

2. Circulation of concepts: translating for the South, from the South?
Concepts need mediation to circulate, and their contours are shaped by
linguistic and theoretical translations – too often into or from English in north Atlantic academic circuits. Which languages and concepts emerge when one “South” looks at another “South”, de-centering earlier legitimating circuits and the cardinal role of the English language? Which are the intended and actual audiences and routes of circulation of such knowledges? Do they find their way into research agendas privileging inter-areal formations, such as transregional studies, connected histories or mobility studies?

3. “Situated” feminist approaches and epistemic injustice
When trying to think over epistemic parallels and gaps between area studies and situated knowledges one cannot help wondering whether partial perspective is a privilege, as Donna Haraway claimed, or perhaps also still a form of confinement. How do researchers bridge the gap between the extraterritoriality of their institutional affiliation and their field location? How does it shape the understanding of their work by their academic and lay publics, and the subjects discussed and represented by research? Is it really different from Haraway’s “God’s trick” and is there an institutional career impact of the situated position?

4. Feminist studies, secularisms and religious contexts
How does feminist research on confessional contexts and practices successfully engage (or not) with a concept with a significant secular
genealogy? Noted publications show that there is room for feminist scholarship in clusters that bring together in their questioning the compatibility of spirituality, religious normativity and secular analytic frameworks. But how do feminist concepts and science-making travel within such lay-and-religious assemblages? Which strategies do scholars mobilize to achieve this?

5. Fictions, arts and the production of situated knowledges
Works of fiction – visual, literary or performative – can extend, displace or contest the production of scholarly knowledge. When does artistic/fictional production “complete” the blind spots of scientific discourse? Can one consider such work as forms of situated knowledges in their own right?