Petr Jehlička: East European households’ resource-use related practices: Learning from the periphery?

Drawing on recent research on East European household practices related to resource use the presentation seeks to counter the scripting of East European scholarship as being on the margins of knowledge production. Instead, the presentation demonstrates that research in the European East can generate important and novel insights. East European urban households’ practices – water consumption, food provisioning and food waste management – are marked by thrift, effective use of resources, resilience and ‘sustainability by outcome rather than intention’. Considering how these practices have been read from the West is instructive for understanding how certain knowledge ‘travels’ and becomes universally accepted knowledge – or theory – or remains a partial knowledge with validity restricted to specific places and circulating within specific subfields. The case of East European household sustainable practices reveals a persistent hierarchy of knowledge-generating contexts even in situations where findings from non-Western settings have a strong potential to extend knowledge of a particular topic. The presentation highlights the obstacles facing efforts to shift Eastern Europe from its position at the bottom of the hierarchy of knowledge-generating spaces. To end up on a more upbeat note, the talk concludes by exploring several strategies for redressing the imbalances within international knowledge circuits.

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