Dr Kulpa spoke about "Thinking About the Geo-politics of Knowledge Production: Non-anglophone Epistemologies in/of Queer Studies" at Leibniz-Institut für Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Europa (GWZO), in Leipzig, Germany.
In his talk, Dr Kulpa reflected on the contemporary neoliberalization of research and academia, and on strategies of critical epistemological resistances to this myopic and constraining currents. Drawing on the decolonial (e.g. Quijano, Mignolo) and post-colonial & post-soviet (Tostanova) debates, Dr Kulpa called on the need to change the dominant practices of knowledge creation in the research sector. By reflecting on queer studies and the geo-temporal, political and cultural ‘unsettlement’ of Central and Eastern Europe in the occidental (and occidentalist) imaginary as the case example, Dr Kulpa pointed to epistemological inequalities in academic recognition, gatekeeping, and policing practices that re-enact and reinforce dialectical framework that Stuart Hall has aptly captured as the dynamic of ‘The West and the Rest’.
The talk is another step in a consequent engagement of Dr Kulpa with questions of the geo-politics of knowledge production, on which he also wrote in “Queer Politics of post-Enlightenment: Beyond the Horizon of the Present” (2021, http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/output/2794836) or in “Decolonizing Queer Epistemologies” (2016, http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/output/2713810).