Guest Speaker Dr Yann Allard-Tremblay

Department of Political Science Speaker Series

presents

Yann Allard-Tremblay (McGill University)

A Great Ox Sits in Your Mind: Decolonial Cautions about Epistemic Reparations and the Right to be Known

Wednesday, March 26, 2025

2:00-3:30pm

Hall Building, Room H-1220

Jennifer Lackey has recently argued that victims of gross injustices and epistemic harms not only have a right to know, but also a right to be known, i.e., to share and have their truth heard. This right is associated with a duty to provide epistemic reparations, notably in hearing victims and seeking their testimonies. The epistemic harms with which Lackey is concerned are features of settler colonialism and thus admittedly call for such epistemic reparations. I seek however to raise cautions about the pursuit of epistemic reparations through testimony in settler colonial contexts. I argue that settler colonial epistemic environments constitute morasses of unknowing, where settlers are subjectified in such ways as to render them unable to properly hear, understand, and know victims of gross epistemic harms. I argue that epistemic reparations in settler colonial contexts risk both being unproductive and pernicious. They risk being unproductive precisely because one cannot properly be known without transforming the material and subjective features of settler colonial epistemic environment. They further risk being pernicious by framing the epistemic harms that require reparation as extraordinary and exceptional, instead of as ordinary and built into the very fabric of the settler order. For a right to be known to be properly fulfilled, we must therefore also consider the required, prior decolonial transformation of the structures and subjectivities that make such harms possible.

Yann Allard-Tremblay’s current research is focused on the decolonization and Indigenization of political theory. He is interested in investigating how mainstream concepts and methods in political theory may silence and distort the thoughts and claims of Indigenous peoples. He is also interested in investigating how the political thoughts and claims of Indigenous peoples offer alternative ways to think about, and transform, political conduct and political concepts. Yann Allard Tremblay is a member of the Huron-Wendat First Nation.