Intercultural knowledge production: against gender-based violence and towards epistemic justice

Introduction

There is a growing consensus that the intersubjective, intercultural, and decolonial realms have become emerging sites of knowledge production. In fact, as Maldonado-Torres (2016, p. 25) writes: ‘Knowledge and understanding are fundamentally inter-subjective affairs’. As sites of knowledge production, intersubjectivity and interculturality open possibilities for inter-epistemic knowledge exchange where subjects and cultures interface. Thus, intercultural knowledge production should be grounded in ‘a radical claim for epistemic rights rather than cultural ones’ (Aman, 2017, p. 69). It is therefore vital not only to question existing intercultural and intersubjective modes of knowing but also to imagine creative new ways of knowing to ‘address radical questions of epistemic healing, political intelligibility and accountability’ (Yohannes, 2020, p. 216). Understood as a liminal realm in which intercultural communication and inter-epistemic encounters combine to create the conditions for decolonial possibilities of knowing and knowledge, interculturality is emerging as a ‘discipline’ for questioning, thinking, and engaging in intercultural research (Monceri, 2022).

Thus, questioning, thinking, and engaging are, from an intersubjective and intercultural locus, the foundations of what Khan and Naguib (2019, p. 91) call ‘epistemic healing’, or the creation of ‘a space for the other and those willing to show solidarity with the other to engage in reconstructive surgery aiming to restore what has been lost or distorted, due to epistemic violence, in the other's knowledge’. Intercultural and decolonial scholars, however, warn that epistemic healing cannot be achieved without considering the colonial configuration of power, knowledge, and being (see Maldonado-Torres, 2016; Mignolo, 2007; Santos, 2016; Walsh, 2021a). The crux of the matter is that ‘thinking, creating, and acting together in various forms of community can seek to disrupt the coloniality of knowledge, power, and being and change the world’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2016, p. 29).

These scholars also warn against the reduction of the infinite pluriversality of knowledge to the totalising universality of Eurocentric epistemology, which is implicated in the unequal arrangement of knowledge-power relations. Santos (2016, p. 111)., for example, asserts ‘that the epistemological diversity of the world is potentially infinite and that each way of knowing grasps it only in a very limited manner’, demonstrating that some humans and their experiences and ways of being are ‘produced as non-existent’ and that it is necessary to imagine a ‘sociology of absences’ or ‘the act of identifying the ways of knowing that hegemonic epistemology reduces to nonexistent’ (Santos, 2016, p. 111). The scholarship produced by the decolonial scholars reveals the marked differences in the way knowledge produced in the Global North is perceived compared with knowledge produced in the Global South of the world (see Khan & Naguib, 2019; Maldonado-Torres, 2016; Mignolo, 2007). While the former is associated with ‘modernity,’ the latter denounces ‘modernity’ as a project of coloniality (Maldonado-Torres, 2016, p. 11).

The central line of argumentation is that ‘a singular modernity can never claim universal validity in a single language’ (Aman, 2017, p. 72). The question, however, is how to situate intercultural knowledge production beyond the ontic and epistemic registers associated with coloniality and its unequal (b)ordering regimes and geopolitical predicaments. Part of the answer to this question might be that new fields of decolonial imagination and vision are needed to shine a spotlight on the peoples and places that are reduced to precarious existence and whose knowledge is overlooked (Crosbie, 2014; Harvey et al., 2022a, 2022b; MacDonald & Ladegaard, 2022). Scholars of intercultural communication have already begun the work of resisting the temptation to adopt ways of knowing and being based on benign world views that often reproduce the colonial matrices of power and knowledge (see Aman, 2017; Crosbie, 2014; Ferri, 2022; Ladegaard & Phipps, 2020; Monceri, 2022). This work of bringing forth knowledge and modes of being from the margins is visible in the efforts of ‘colectivas’ in Mexico, shedding light on the everyday struggles of people and places entangled with criminality and impoverishment in Mexico, as well as in the Palestinian struggles for self-determination and freedom from occupation and violence. A common thread in the scholarship produced by these scholars in collaboration with their communities is the recognition that the process of initiating epistemic healing requires intercultural, interpersonal, and intersubjective knowledge production, along with linguistic hospitality.

Nevertheless, despite providing some theoretical grounding, these reinterpretations and reorientations of intercultural knowledge production alone are not enough. We must transition from imagining and theorising to practising. Transitioning to decolonial praxes requires the reparation and restoration of the ‘concealed histories, repressed subjectivities, subalternised knowledge systems and silenced languages’ (Aman, 2017, p. 63). It should be noted here that the decolonising of intercultural communication and knowledge production is not about the vengeful revisiting of the cannons of past miseries but about the reparation and restoration of what has been lost in the colonising process. Some of what has been lost lives on in memories, works of art, archaeological excavations, and historical archives, and foregrounding these and other destituted forms of knowledge would allow us to transition from destitution to restoration. The primary task before us, therefore, is not to contemplate the inhumanity of the past; rather, as Walsh (2021b, p. 477) articulates: ‘It is how to re-exist; how to re-exist against, despite, and in the fissures and cracks of the racialised, gendered, classed, territorialised, and generational de-existences of these times’.

Furthermore, decolonising intercultural knowledge production entails restorative integration, which emerges from intersubjective encounters, intercultural communications, and interepistemic relations. In the realm of intercultural knowledge production, it must be acknowledged that integration becomes inhumane when it entails receiving nothing from the Other. In fact, as Emmanuel Lévinas astutely demonstrates, reducing the Other to ‘us’ or ‘like-us’ constitutes the gravest inhumanity one can commit (see Lévinas, 2011). Restorative integration suggests that interculturality, intersubjectivity, and decoloniality serve as realms of hospitality, allowing the Other to emerge as ‘a subject that begins to regain its humanity by reaching out to others without masks’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2016, p. 25). This emergence of the Other as a human with language and culture, as Maldonado-Torres (2016, p. 25) puts it, ‘is a condition of possibility for the emergence of non-decadent speaking, writing, and theorizing’.

This special issue draws from the work of Migration for Development and Equality (MIDEQ), the world's largest migration research project, which focuses on South-South migration, and Culture for Sustainable and Inclusive Peace Network plus (CUSP N+), a network plus research project focusing on cultural work for sustainable peace. The issue explores creative, multilingual, and intercultural ways of moving towards non-violent epistemologies, aesthetics, sensibilities, and integration. It demonstrates forms of intercultural communication, aesthetic creativity, epistemic healing, and safeguarding principles that can be used against epistemic violence and towards achieving the restorative integration of languages, cultures, knowledge, and ways of being. In particular, the issue focuses on the role of intercultural dialogue, decentring, and decolonising knowledge as ways of destituting gender-based violence. These practices destitute conflicts from beneath their origins and extend beyond surface-level issues through arts-based, culturally congruent, community-centered, and restorative approaches. This issue is aimed at scholars interested in decolonial and peripheral forms of knowledge production, those keen to learn from examples of multimodal knowledge production and creative methods, and those who are uncertain about how the decolonial and creative turns impact normative sociolinguistic, applied linguistic, and intercultural communication studies.

The collection of articles in this special issue is produced through collaborative, interdisciplinary, and intercultural engagement with communities and scholars involved in the everyday process of peacebuilding. The articles highlight the role played in peacebuilding by arts-based practices, such as arts-based community workshops, storytelling, multilanguage learning, cultural festivals, and intercultural events. These artistic and collaborative methods counteract knowledge extractivism and promote knowledge exchange and mutual sharing. The articles in this special issue provide examples of knowledge production from the peripheries, which opens up new spaces for LAIC.

The special issue distils:

• A critically reflective study drawing from a collaborative intercultural project titled ‘Welcoming Languages: Teaching a ‘refugee language’ to school staff to implement the principle of integration as a two-way process’.

• An intensive fiction-writing training programme hosted at the Islamic University of Gaza in Palestine, involving capacity-building training for students and recent graduates from various universities in the Gaza Strip. As a direct result of the programme, participants produced a total of 87 short stories, with a strong emphasis on themes such as gender equality, women's rights, and children's rights. The study assesses participant satisfaction and conducts a thematic analysis of these stories, revealing storytelling that celebrates diversity and inclusivity, with a particular focus on the experiences of children and women.

• Scholars from the Gaza Strip engaging in social semiotic analysis conducted exclusively with women. This analysis enables an understanding of violence against women and modes of resistance, as illustrated in Palestinian films.

• A collaborative study that centres on the lived experiences of students from various Mexican high schools, asserting that geography education can contribute to the prevention of gender-based violence (GBV). The study encompasses urban public, private religious, and small-town public high schools, using the concept of cuerpo-territorio to analyse structural violence and advocate for the collective transformation of violent spatial environments.

• Embodied work that focuses on unincorporated, informal ‘colectivas’ of women in Mexico and the structural, communicative, and linguistic barriers they face when attempting to advocate for the dignity of migrants, women, indigenous, and other marginalised communities.

• A theoretical and dialogical analysis of an encounter between Father Pierre, a Dominican Missionary, who reinforces historical misrecognition and cultural hierarchy, and a local teacher named Carlos, who insists on the presence of a radical Other in the hegemonic space, both presenting and unpacking ‘past and present equivocations’ between multiple epistemic and subjective positions.

The focus of this special issue promises to open up new avenues for exploration within intercultural communication as both a discipline and a subject of study, particularly emphasising forms of knowledge and practices that challenge colonial and enlightenment thinking. The emphasis on aesthetic creativity and epistemic healing, aimed at achieving restorative integration (of languages, cultures, knowledges, and ways of being), shifts the epistemological focus of LAIC further towards knowledge originating from and related to the peripheries and ‘fugitive spaces’ (Akomolafe, n.d.). These are spaces from which the representational knowledges of modernity can be unlearned and unmastered, while being situated alongside knowledge that have not traditionally formed the central foundations of existing frameworks. Theoretically, therefore, this issue builds upon previous work featured in LAIC, drawing from the scholarship of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2016), Corbett and Guilherme (2021), Harvey et al. (2022b), and Ros i Solé et al. (2020), Ferri (2023, 2022), and Phipps (2019). Through context-specific praxes, the contributors have significantly enriched this issue, not only through their papers but also through collaborative peer review deliberations and seminars. They have received peer review funding to support the development of decolonial forms of knowledge production, focusing on conflict transformation and intercultural dialogue in the Global South. Several contributors have also a history of working with LAIC in the past, such as Yohannes (2020), Imperiale and Phipps (2022), and Fassetta et al. (2017), and they have made valuable contributions to this issue with mentorship and leadership, especially from colleagues in the Global South.

Acknowledgements

We extend our warmest thanks to all the contributors of this Special Issue and their research participants for producing much-needed scholarship from the peripheries amidst unprecedented challenges such as funding cuts, war and violence, and soaring living costs. This Special Issue would not have been possible without the creativity, commitment, and ingenuity of the contributors and their research participants. We also express our gratitude to the contributors of the book reviews. We would like to acknowledge and thank the UNESCO Chair project manager, Jennifer McArthur, whose enabling coordination and facilitation made it possible for us to finish the Special Issue on time. Our appreciation also goes to the reviewers for their dedication, expertise, and commitment to ensuring research rigour and integrity. We are immensely grateful for the exceptional intercultural, multilingual, and hospitable space provided by LAIC in the process of producing this Special Issue. Our profound thanks go to the LAIC lead editors and administrators for their support and efforts in making the publication of this Special Issue possible. We acknowledge that this Special Issue would not have been possible without the funding provided to CUSP N+ and MIDEQ. The Culture for Sustainable and Inclusive Peace Network Plus (CUSP N+) is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant reference number: AH/T007931/1) as part of the UK Government's Global Challenges Research Fund. The Migration for Development and Equality Hub (MIDEQ) is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant reference number: ES/S007415/1) as part of the UK Government's Global Challenges Research Fund.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hyab Teklehaimanot Yohannes

Hyab Teklehaimanot Yohannes is an academic with a PhD in The Realities of Eritrean Refugees in a Carceral Age from the University of Glasgow. Currently, he works as a research associate at the University of Glasgow, where he conducts research, synthesises findings, and provides insights on theoretical, methodological, and policy-oriented questions. He is co-editing a Handbook of Cultures of Sustainable Peace for Multilingual Matters. Additionally, Hyab has recently signed a book contract with Routledge for his upcoming book titled The Coloniality of the Refugee. Hyab is also a member of the RSE Young Academy of Scotland.

Alison Phipps

Alison Phipps is the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts at the University of Glasgow and Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies. She is Co-Convener of Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network (GRAMNET). She was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Waikato University, Aotearoa New Zealand 2013-2016, Thinker in Residence at the EU Hawke Centre, University of South Australia in 2016, Visiting Professor at Auckland University of Technology, Visiting Professor at Otago University, NZ and Principal Investigator for AHRC Large Grant ‘Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language, the body, law and the state’ And now a co-Director of the Global Challenge Research Fund South-South Migration Hub. She is an academic, activist, and published poet.

Fernando Fernandes

Fernando Fernandes is co-director (non-executive) at Instituto Maria e João Aleixo (IMJA) and Reader (Community Education) at University of Dundee. He is a founding member of the Observatory of Favelas (Brazil). Fernando has been working, since 2001, in the interface between urban development, violence and human rights, with special interest on issues related to institutional racism and practitioner attitudes in public services. Other key areas of interest include peripheral/Global South epistemologies and creative approaches to research.

Jailson Silva

Jailson Silva is black, northeastern, migrants' son, born and raised in the peripheries in Rio de Janeiro and a public school student as well. He graduated in Geography from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (1984). He has also a master's degree and a PhD degree in Education from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and a post-doctoral degree from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice - City University of New York. A retired professor at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, Jailson founded the Observatório de Favelas in Rio de Janeiro. He was Secretary of Education of Nova Iguaçu, Executive Under-Secretary of the State Secretary of Social Assistance and Human Rights of Rio de Janeiro, founder, and current general director of the International University of Peripheries - UNIperiferias / IMJA. He has experience, studies and multiple publications and books on topics such as Education, Public Security, Representations, Social Practices and Urban Territories.