Hence, a blog.
Damme, BE 12.2021
This website has been up and running since about a year ago. Yet it took me this long to finally realise that it would not solely host a portfolio of my academic work. For a couple of years, I had been looking for a space to play around with unfinished ideas and meandering reflections. With zero illusions about gaining an audience, I started looking for a platform to document my work that is impulsive and open-ended. More specifically, the idea was to find a space - and indeed time - to explore ideas outside the cycles of the academic publishing economy. In the five years since I completed my PhD, I have increasingly felt that the peer-reviewed paper leaves little room for the nuance of reflection, the non-disciplinary nature of thought, and the natural maturation of ideas. Our ideas are often elusive, disjointed, disrupted, unfinished, or even contradictory. What format could capture that? And as I do not engage on social media (hardly the place for nuance and reflection), I needed something else to document my unfinished and disjointed thoughts.
Thoughts about what then? The official discipline within which my academic work can be categorised is International Relations, and International Security more specifically. However, as a typical academic, I will be quick to add that it will depend on what you understand these disciplines to entail. And whether one could see my work indeed as making a significant contribution to them. So if something more specific is required, I would say that I write and teach on decolonial philosophy and critical international relations. However, the running narrative between these (perhaps unnecessary) fragmentations is that I am interested in the way our being in the world impacts our understanding of that world. If knowledge is always produced from a certain vantage point, then every form of knowing - whether personal, social, political, cultural, etc. - can never aspire to become universal, objective or even neutral. In an absolute sense, at least. And yet, we live in a world where knowledge often presents itself as universal. Historically, this was what has shaped and maintained colonial violence yet we can also be retrace it within, to quote bell hooks, the white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy that structures the contemporary world. How structures of inequality and oppression are made possible by the inequality and oppression of other forms of knowing is the central question from which most of my works departs.
I’ll leave it there for now. If you’re interested in seeing (and reading) more specific applications of this, the research tab on breaks this down more specifically while the publications tab list all my formal outputs. On that note, I am currently writing a book that conceptualises these politics of knowledge production as one of epistemicide, the murder of knowledge. Undoing Epistemicide will be published with Rowman & Littlefield International in 2023 and I will sporadically publish developments of this projects on this blog.
This, however, will not be a purely academic blog. The reason why I needed space for nuance and reflection is that I want explore things of general interest that potentially escape the academic mindset. This can involve ideas that have not matured enough to be domesticated by the peer-review cycle but also the way my personal being in the world reflection my understanding of that world. With the risk of reproducing the solipsism that tends to characterise Western thought, I am looking forward to create a space where I can peruse my interests and follow them wherever they take me.