We are pleased to announce the upcoming DAN Roundtable, which will mark a significant milestone as our first multilingual session.
Politics of ignorance and complicit “naivetés” in contemporary anthropology
This roundtable will examine how anthropological knowledge is shaped by institutional structures, hierarchies, and material conditions that reproduce unequal power relations. It questions the supposed neutrality of the discipline, highlighting how silences and “innocent” practices often sustain dominant epistemologies. The discussion calls for a more engaged and politically aware anthropology that challenges these dynamics and rethinks where and for whom knowledge is produced.
This roundtable will feature Lía Ferrero (Argentina) and Eduardo Restrepo (Colombia), who will present their contributions in Spanish. At the same time, participants are warmly invited to engage in the discussion in the language they feel most comfortable using. This is not a minor logistical detail, but a deliberate political and epistemic choice.
Languages are not neutral vehicles of communication; they are deeply entangled in the geopolitics of knowledge. The global academic landscape continues to privilege certain languages—particularly English—as universal, often at the expense of other ways of knowing and expressing the world. By opening a multilingual space, we seek to unsettle these hierarchies and recognize that knowledge is always produced from specific linguistic, historical, and territorial locations. Creating conditions where multiple languages can coexist is one way of challenging the asymmetries that structure whose voices are heard, validated, and circulated within the academy.
This roundtable is conceived as a space where different linguistic worlds can encounter each other without being forced into a single dominant framework—an effort to move toward a more plural, situated, and dialogical production of knowledge.
If you would like to attend and receive the event link, please contact one of the two convenors.
We look forward to welcoming you to this conversation.