Book Workshop
Nothing About Us Without Us: Justice and Knowledge Making
by Dr. Tereza Hendl
Debates on Europe have long been conducted as if its Eastern parts were not a site of knowledge production worth familiarizing and engaging with. A hierarchical East-West divide persists, centering the West as the source of ‘objective’ and reliable knowledge while rendering the East a subaltern semi-periphery. Recent responses to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine have further uncovered a power dynamic of inter-imperiality across many disciplines that have theorised (de)occupied Europe’s East, the Baltics, the Caucasus, and Central and Northern Asia from Western-centric perspectives and Russia-centric frameworks. Such debates have not only fallen short of accounting for the impact of imperialist domination on directly affected populations but have also contributed to its enabling. In response, this seminar will explore a book in progress by Dr. Tereza Hendl, who takes a closer critical look at the dominant patterns of inter-imperiality in theory and lived reality, alongside the rich lineages of East European dissent and resistance to both epistemic and material forms of injustice.
Together with responding authors Dr. Melanie Altanian (Philosophy, Freiburg), Dr. Selbi Durdiyeva (International Law and Conflict Studies, Marburg), Dr. Iuliia Skubytska (History, Potsdam) and Prof. Dr. Annette Werberger (Literary Studies, Frankfurt), we will envision a path toward epistemically just and reparative forms of knowledge-making and discuss why they are so crucial for epistemic and material justice in Europe and beyond.
Tereza Hendl is a philosopher working on issues of global health justice (University of Augsburg). Her research examines concerns of oppression, refusal, justice, and solidarity, as well as the ethics and epistemology of health technologies and interventions, and East–West hierarchies of knowledge. Some of her recent work explores European East–West inequalities and their effects on health and well-being, also considering the impacts of Russian and German imperialism on directly affected populations. With Daniel James and Morgan Thompson, she has received the 2025 Charles Mills Prize from the Journal of Applied Philosophy, for their paper on the ethical-epistemic issues in German migration and the collection of racial or ethnic data, and with Olga Burlyuk, Míla O’Sullivan and Aizada Arystanbek, the 2025 Bernard Brodie Prize from the journal Contemporary Security, the 2024 Best Article Prize from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies, and a 2024 Honorable Mention in the Heldt Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS), for their paper on (en)countering epistemic imperialism and “Westsplaining.” Tereza Hendl is a member of the Independent Resource Group for Global Health Justice (IRG-GHJ), founder of the Central and Eastern European Feminist Research Network, and one of the founders of the RUTA Association for Central, South-Eastern, and Eastern European, Baltic, Caucasus, Central and Northern Asian Studies in Global Conversation—initiatives that amplify and (re)connect marginalized knowledges and contribute to epistemic reparations.
Selbi Durdiyeva is a socio-legal interdisciplinary researcher. She formerly held postdoctoral roles in the project “Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict” and was an Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability (AHDA) Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University and Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre Visiting Fellow. Selbi obtained her PhD from the Transitional Justice Institute at the University of Ulster. She authored a monograph, The Role of Civil Society in Transitional Justice: The Case of Russia (Routledge) and several other peer-reviewed publications.
Iuliia Skubytska is a historian of the Soviet Union and Ukraine specializing in history of childhood, oral history, and public history. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. Currently, she is working on a book titled Artek: Ultimate Soviet Utopia, which analyzes the reshaping of the utopian imagination in the post-war USSR.
Annette Werberger is a literary scholar specialising in the literatures of Central and Eastern Europe and Jewish Studies. Following positions at the Universities of Tübingen and Konstanz, she has been teaching as a professor at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) since 2012. Her research focuses on literary history, theories of world literature and the history of ideas. She is a member of the SFB 1512 “Intervening Arts” and spokesperson for the BMWTR research group “European Times”.
When: Wednesday, 01.07.2026, 17:15-19:45
Where: Participation is limited. To register and receive room instructions, send an e-mail to melanie.altanian@ucf.uni-freiburg.de
Organisation: Dr. Melanie Altanian
In cooperation with the De/Coloniality Now Centre at Universität Freiburg
