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‘Let the Field Speak’: Re-visiting the Rules of Knowledge Production in Peace and Conflict Studies

Keynote speech by Prof. Navnita Chadha Behera (University of Delhi) for opening the workshop „All things change the same?“ and featured within the Bayreuth Peace Talks series.

The difference between who knows and whose knowledge counts often lies in mastering the rules of knowledge production. Beyond the scholarly debates, however, such quests have abiding consequences for the existential realities of people caught in the vortex of conflicts and in pursuing peace. In this context, ‘letting the field speak,’ calls for transforming the lines of inquiry in two fundamental ways. First entails understanding the ‘field’ not in a geo-political sense, as in including the voices of those located in the Global South but interrogating the episteme terrains of peace and conflict studies. Second draws upon Gayatri Spivak’s paradigmatic query of whether the subaltern can speak, in a way that ‘speaking’ is to understood as a ‘speech act wherein speaking and hearing completes the speech-act’. The lecture seeks to explore how this might be done.

Host: PD Dr. Florian Kühn (Universities of Gothenburg and Bayreuth)

Free, no registration required. The workshop „All things change the same?“ is organized by the research network Conflicts.Meanings.Transitions