The research project “Theorizing Epistemic Violence” (V 368-G15) was funded within the framework of the Elise Richter Excellence Programme run by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) in the period from April 2015 to July 2020.
My research, situated at the intersection of political theory and peace research, combines two desiderata: The weak epistemological reflection on broad definitions of violence – such as Galtung’s structural and cultural violence, Bourdieu’s symbolic and Bulter’s normative violence – within ‘Western’ debates on violence, on the one hand, and the occasional nature of consideration given to existing theories of violence within post- and decolonial research, on the other. Setting off from here, my work explores the preconditions, functions, and consequences of (scholarly) knowledge for globally asymmetric relations of power, dominance, and, ultimately, violence.
In December 2019, I earned my habilitation degree (Venida Docendi) for Political Science at the Faculty of Social Sciences with the University of Vienna.
In April 2020, my book Epistemic Violence. Knowledge and Power in the Colonial Modernity appeared [in German] in the monograph series ‘Edition Politik’ published by transcript (Bielefeld) – both as paperback and open-access.
For preliminary results of my research see Publications and Presentations.
Media Coverage
- Corona Demonstrates the Primacy of Figures [in German]
- Enquired: What is Epistemic Violence? [in German]
- On Doing Research Abroad [in German]
- When Knowledge Leads to Domination [in German]
- Violent Knowledge [in German]