Vasiliki (Bessy) Polykarpou

This interview with Françoise Vergès was conducted on June 28, 2025, at the café Au soleil d’Austerlitz in Paris, during the Historical Materialism Paris Conference1. The conversation unfolded amidst a convergence of the recent Greek translation of A Feminist Theory of Violence and urgent political contexts: the ongoing genocide in Palestine and a controversy surrounding censorship2 during the conference's organization. These events shaped the dialogue, which extended beyond the immediate circumstances to engage with broader theoretical and political concerns. Currently engaged in pro-Palestine solidarity, Françoise Vergès is a decolonial feminist intellectual whose work spans political theory, cultural criticism, curatorial practice, and activist engagement. Vergès’s scholarship critically interrogates racial capitalism, patriarchal violence, and the enduring legacies of colonialism, while public interventions across media, institutions, and grassroots collectives contribute to a broader project of emancipatory worldmaking. This interdisciplinary approach bridges academic inquiry and militant activism, the local and the transnational, as well as historical analysis and urgent political realities. Critical perspectives of her/their work on white carceral feminism and racial capitalism (2020; 2021; 2022) have been consistently foregrounded, alongside sustained engagement with the memory and afterlives of slavery and colonialism (1999; 2010; 2015). These contributions continue to shape contemporary debates in feminist theory, decolonial critique, and global solidarity movements. The conversation that follows reflects on present-day social struggles as both sites of inspiration and as grounds for incisive critique of authoritarian formations within the French state, the European Union, and the United States.

Historically, feminist research has emerged as a theoretico-political tradition that challenges notions such as objectivity and truth, articulates critiques around hegemonic sciences and philosophy and suggests emancipatory and radical forms of knowledge production. This chapter observes the critical engagement of intersectional feminism in dialog with queer, trans, crip and decolonial epistemologies through its application in ethnographic research. Drawn on my fieldwork in the city of Athens, this work in progress consists of a reflection on the limitations of knowledge and research production in academic institutions today. Concepts that originate from intersectional feminisms such as positionality, situatedness and embodiment will support the idea of addressing ontological homelessness and unintelligibility which refers to uncategorizable experiences in interdisciplinary research today and suggest other ways to approach unmapped forms of knowledge.