Dr. Ivan Kislenko

Ivan Kislenko holds a double PhD Degree from the Higher School of Economics (Russia) and Ghent University (Belgium). His research interests are global sociology, global production of knowledge, national and indigenous sociologies, sociological canon, decolonial sociology as well as the application of these topics to Russian social science and traditions of knowledge production in the country intertwined with political discourse. He was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Social Theory (Ghent University), a research assistant at the Centre for Fundamental Sociology and a lecturer in sociological theory at the Higher School of Economics. Ivan Kislenko was awarded with the Fulbright Research Fellowship to work at George Mason University (USA) and was a visiting postdoc fellow at University of Graz (Austria), Lund University (Sweden) and Slovak Academy of Sciences (Slovakia). His works were published in such journals as European Societies, Current Sociology, The American Sociologist, Russian Sociological Review, etc.

Research Project

Anti-Westernism of Knowledge Production in Russian Social Science in the State of War: Marginalization of the Epistemic Justice and Prospects for Eastern Epistemology

This project intends to identify the strategies used by Russian scholars to marginalize the narratives ofepistemic justice in social science during Russia's war in Ukraine. It also focuses on the notion of decolonial isolationism that I recently researched in my article in the European Societies journal. This state of affairs emerged in Russia due to anti-Western policies in education and science, inspired by political agenda and appropriation of decolonial narratives by Russian politicans. The project deals with the following research questions: What strategies do Russian scholars use to marginalize the narratives of epistemic justice in social science? What are the possible key tenets of Eastern Epistemology in the state of decolonial isolationism? By analyzing the intellectual history of the debates in Russian academia, this project outlines the relations between anti-colonial arguments, isolationist aspirations of Russian science and marginalization of epistemic justice by Russian scholars. Long term plan is to define further characteristics of decolonial isolationism and the key tenets of Eastern Epistemology. This project uses the Russian example to justify the concepts beyond the local agenda (Decolonial Isolationism and Eastern Epistemology) to advance social theory and studies of knowledge production.