Call for Papers: Epistemic Equity

What counts as knowledge and what knowledge counts?

European Summer School for Cultural Studies (ESSCS), 2026.

Epistemic injustice haunts so much of history, especially in its progressivist and modernist forms. What knowledge is valued, and whose knowledge is discarded or discounted across the longue durée of what we now call 'knowledge producing practices'? In what ways can this lost and repressed knowledge be surfaced and explored, articulated and legitimated – even deployed? To explore epistemic equity is to invite just thoughts, and to imagine new forms of collaboration, knowledge production, and care. What kinds of worlds would be made if the western canon began to meaningfully accommodate traditional and indigenous environmental knowledge-ways? Or if the findings and assertions of artists were taken to be as significant as those of art historians?   

As we reckon with the legacies of epistemic injustice across disciplines, cultures, and institutions, this conference invites critical reflection, speculative thinking, and practice-led research on the persistent asymmetries that structure knowledge production. We explore the concept of epistemic equity as both a critical framework and a hopeful method for reimagining what could and should count as knowledge, whose voices are heard, and how alternative forms of knowing can take root within – and transform – our fields.

This conference seeks to elucidate and amplify research that pushes at the edges of disciplinary norms, artistic hierarchies, and institutional authority. The field of Cultural Studies has long been at the forefront of these inquiries, not only diagnosing the colonial, racial, gendered, and disciplinary exclusions embedded in institutions of knowledge, but also modeling new methods for intellectual and artistic production. From feminist theory and Black radical thought to decolonial praxis and indigenous epistemologies, to the experimental, creative and embodied forms of knowing often associated with practice-based research.

Fundamental questions in the understanding of humanity, of culture, and of history are tied up in epistemic asymmetries, many of which are now wide open to correction. Feminist theory for 250 years has grappled not only with achieving gender equality, but with asserting the validity of thought that emanates from worldly experiences of women. Black studies as a field attends meticulously to the recursive nature of slavery in undereducation and carceration, and also to the fundamental interdisciplinarity and radicality of Black thought and aesthetics. Literary studies and art history are productively decentered by sustained problematisations of Western notions of genre, convention, periodisations and the genealogies of aesthetics. Decolonial theory and methods addressing the coloniality of knowledge itself are now operative in almost all fields of cultural studies, from anthropology through archives and collections, from geography to literary studies, from artistic practices to curatorial thinking. This too is ultimately a project attempting the complete recalibration of what we understand to be knowledge, and of knowledge institutions such as universities, museums, art schools, publishers and the press. The concept of 'epistemic equity', and blueprints for achieving its promise of repair, are clearly among the most significant fruits of cultural studies over the past fifty years.

About ESSCS & PASS

The European Summer School for Cultural Studies (ESSCS) is a collaborative consortium of institutions dedicated to the advancement of cultural theory, transdisciplinary methodologies, and inclusive intellectual exchange. The 2026 conference is hosted by PASS – Center for Practice-based Art Studies, a hub for critical and artistic exploration of how knowledge is made, shared, and transformed across disciplinary and institutional borders.