«Knowledge Production in Switzerland’s ‹Postcolonial Moment›: A Critique from a Black Feminist Perspective»

In this second summer episode of Missing Chapters, Jovita dos Santos Pinto speaks about «Knowledge Production in Switzerland’s ‘Postcolonial Moment’: A Critique from a Black Feminist Perspective”.

From a Black feminist perspective, dos Santos Pinto examines how colonial power relations continue to shape knowledge production. She focuses on Swiss universities as sites historically entangled in colonial relations of knowledge and power.

At the heart of her keynote is Switzerland’s «postcolonial moment”: growing public engagement with its colonial entanglements since 2020 and the question of how existing power relations are reproduced within academic institutions. Drawing on examples, she shows how epistemic silencing, extractivism, and dehumanization operate, and explores transformative forms of knowledge and relational practices that emerge within, against, and beyond university structures.

In this episode:

• Colonialism as a material relation of exploitation and dispossession
• The historical entanglement of Swiss universities with colonial projects
• Black feminist perspectives on knowledge, power, and difference
• Continuities of colonial knowledge orders
• Anti-racist and transformative knowledge production