Beyond the war: Essays on loss, resilience and Hope. Introduction to a “Ukrainian section”

Abstract

This short essay examines epistemic injustice within contemporary hierarchies of knowledge, and it argues for more insightful, sensuous, and grassroots forms of knowledge production “from the edges” to shine a light on the persistent inequality between ways of knowing and ways of (de)valuing different epistemologies. It introduces ten contributions to the special “Ukrainian Section” that emerged from the workshop “Writing from the Edge(s). Writer. Editor. Reader.” The essays gathered here demonstrate how knowledge produced under conditions of interruption and violence in Ukraine can generate valuable testimony as well as theoretical and ethical insights that speak beyond the Ukrainian context that originally inspired the essays. In doing so, the section argues for the importance of situated, emotionally engaged, and ethically reflexive forms of knowledge that challenge dominant hierarchies between “global theory” and supposedly “local” experience.