Of Words and Sounds: Curating an Epistemically Plural Anthropology Symposium

This video essay argues and shows a form of academic symposium curation that works to combat epistemic coloniality. Convened by Caroline Gatt and Valeria Lembo, the symposium held in Aberdeen in May 2018 was called “Of Words and Sounds”. Gatt and Lembo organised this symposium with the explicit aim of holding space for different ways of knowing and acknowledging their scholarly value. Epistemic coloniality delegitimises and attempts to erase a wide variety of ways of knowing. The university has been and remains key in what has also been referred to as epistemicide. It is the institution of the university which consecrates the epistemologies considered properly scholarly, and defines for instance Indigenous, non-Western, performative, gendered, neurodiverse, poor ways of knowing as mere culture or belief. In other words, as forms of non-knowledge. Collaboration was the basis of the principles of the way Gatt curated the symposium; organising a meeting, where the most important underlying aim was to enable the participants to have meaningful encounters with each other. To share their work and experiences in ways that made sense on their own terms.