Personal Epistemology on the War in Eastern Ukraine in 2021: Constructing and Deconstructing Knowledge

Abstract

I enact the personal epistemology standpoint to illustrate how my ontology and personal experience transformed my knowledge about the war in Eastern Ukraine. Guiding the reader through my visual and bodily interaction with the war zone, I illustrate my perception construction and deconstruction about the object of knowledge – the war – and the knowledge itself. The researcher is placed at the heart of the research. This article stipulates the value of the world-mind monism stance in knowledge production and legitimises the self as a source of knowledge in international relations research. 

Speaker bio

Evija Djatkoviča is Deputy Head of the Center for Geopolitical Studies Riga and Researcher, as well as PhD student at Rīga Stradiņš University. Her research interests focus on Eastern European countries, particularly Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, as well as hard and soft security in the Baltic Sea region. She has primarily authored policy-oriented publications.

The event is hybrid and accessible via Zoom