The decolonization of education and research in Belarus and Ukraine: theoretical challenges and practical tasks
Abstract
A conference held at the European Humanities University (Vilnius, Lithuania) in late September 2023 brought together scholars and practitioners from countries directly implicated by Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The conference's rationale was to re-examine the social structures and content of knowledge production and dissemination in countries that used to be categorized as "the post-Soviet region" at a time when the former metropole weaponizes the humanities for justifying the war and re-colonizing newly occupied territories.
With reference to the agenda formulated by such decolonial scholars as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Madina Tlostanova, and Walter Mignolo-to "decolonize the mind" and to delink from hegemonic narratives and structures of power-knowledge imposed from the imperial centre-the participants discussed possibilities for future cooperation in a de-centred, horizontal manner, and they attempted to outline new epistemologies that derive from re-discovering themselves and communicating their emergent identities outwards. Standing as a decolonizing gesture itself, the conference created a multilingual space where participants communicated in their mother tongues to express perspectives embedded in their local experiences.
The conference was co-sponsored by the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv) and Charles University (Prague) with the financial support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, administered by the American Council of Learned Societies.