The program consists of a workshop in the morning led by Chordaki and Douliakas and a keynote lecture by Chordaki in the afternoon.

The starting point for the event is Evangelia (Lina) Chordaki’s latest book, published by Cambridge University Press, titled Making Sense of Knowledge: Feminist Epistemologies in the Greek Birth Control Movement (1974–1986)

This book launch and lecture introduce Making Sense of Knowledge, a feminist history that examines how knowledge itself becomes a site of political struggle, transformation, and possibility.

The book begins with a major historical moment in February 1983 (Athens), when five hundred women publicly declared that they had had abortions. Their act of speaking out—bold, collective, and unprecedented—was antimilima: talking back. More than a political gesture, antimilima marked a moment in which feminist actors confronted legal and medical authority, but more importantly the epistemological order that had long excluded their experiences from recognition as knowledge. Making Sense of Knowledge follows the

reverberations of such moments, reconstructing a world in which feminist actors intervened in the conditions through which knowledge becomes authoritative, speakable, and real.

At the center of the book lies the concept of affective epistemologies of antimilima, which reinterprets feminist acts of speaking back as epistemological practices. Antimilima names the transformation of lived and embodied experience into forms of knowledge that challenged established expertise and reshaped epistemic authority. Through feminist magazines, pamphlets, activist networks, and archival practices, feminist actors developed forms of experiential expertise that blurred the boundaries between scientific and experiential knowledge, theory and political practice, and institutional and collective ways of knowing.

Crucially, Making Sense of Knowledge moves beyond assigning epistemic value to emotions. It offers a critical interrogation of the binary model of thought that has historically structured reason and emotion as oppositional domains, and scientific knowledge and embodied experience as analytically distinct registers. The book demonstrates how these divisions have structured hierarchies between different forms of knowledge and between different subjects and their capacity to be recognized as knowers. By theorising the emergence of affective epistemologies of antimilima, the book reveals how feminist actors critically renegotiated these divisions, exposing epistemology itself as a terrain shaped by political struggle, embodied experience, and collective intervention.

Situated within the Greek feminist birth control movement of the late twentieth century, this study offers more than a history of reproductive politics. It presents a political history of making knowledge and making sense of knowledge—a history in which feminist actors confronted institutional expertise while simultaneously producing alternative epistemologies grounded in collective experience. Feminist counterpublics, publications, and archives became sites where knowledge preserved and transformed, allowing marginalized forms of expertise to emerge, circulate, and endure.

This lecture introduces Making Sense of Knowledge as an exploration of antimilima as both epistemological and political practice. By tracing how feminist actors transformed embodied experience into knowledge, the book reconstructs knowledge-making as an ongoing process of world-making. Affective epistemologies of antimilima reveal how knowledge does not simply describe the world but participates in its creation—how acts of speaking back become acts of knowing, and how acts of knowing become acts of making worlds.

Workshop: Archives, Social Movements, and the Temporalities of Knowledge

What is an archive, and how does it participate in the making and unmaking of knowledge across time? This workshop approaches archives as epistemic and political formations that hold traces of the past while enabling knowledge to move, reappear, and acquire new meanings across different historical moments. Archives shape how experiences remain available, how intergenerational connections are sustained, and how forms of knowledge continue to circulate beyond the conditions of their original emergence. The discussion brings into conversation state archives, social movement archives, and personal archives created by participants in collective struggles. State archives consolidate institutional memory through classificatory systems that stabilize authority and organize knowledge according to administrative and political priorities. Archives of social movements emerge from collective action and sustain forms of knowledge produced through political struggle, often in ways that resist institutional containment. Personal archives extend these epistemic trajectories across generations, preserving fragile materials, memories, and attachments through practices of care, responsibility, and transmission, and allowing knowledge to endure through relational continuity.

At the same time, the workshop develops a critical perspective on archival practices themselves. As archives increasingly come to be understood as spaces that allow vulnerable histories and marginalized knowledges to persist, they acquire a powerful ethical and political significance. This revaluation, however, also invites closer examination. What becomes archivable, and what remains outside archival space? Which forms of knowledge are preserved, and which exceed the structures that make preservation possible? Archival practices involve processes of selection, stabilization, and transformation that shape how knowledge endures and how it can be encountered in the present.

By bringing these different archival formations into conversation, the workshop opens a broader reflection on archives as sites of knowledge-making and world-making. Archives sustain intergenerational connections and enable temporal continuities that exceed linear narratives, allowing knowledge produced in moments of struggle to remain active across time. In doing so, they participate in ongoing processes through which histories of injustice remain present, informing how knowledge is carried forward and how more just futures can be imagined.

Speaker’s bio

Evangelia (Lina) Chordaki is a historian of science working in Feminist Critical Science and Knowledge Studies and Modern Greek Studies. Her research examines the politics of knowledge production across (techno)science, and medicine, focusing on how authority and credibility are historically constituted through practices of mediation, circulation, and collective sense-making. Integrating feminist and queer theory with affect theory and the history and anthropology of science, she treats knowledge and knowers as fundamentally situated, analyzing how epistemic hierarchies and regimes of legitimacy emerge at the intersection of institutional, community-based, and activist forms of knowing—particularly in contexts of uncertainty, social inequality, and political transition. Grounded in modern and contemporary Greece in a transnational perspective, her work advances a justice-oriented account of science that foregrounds democratization, plural epistemologies, and the co-production of knowledge, power, and care in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is the author of Making Sense of Knowledge: Feminist Epistemologies in the Greek Birth Control Movement (1974–1986) (2025, Cambridge University Press) and editor of Queer(ing) Science, Queer(ing) Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, under contract).

Schedule

13:00-13:30 Welcome by organisers

13:30 – 15:30 Workshop with Chordaki and Douliakas: “Archives, Social Movements, and the Temporalities of Knowledge”

15:30 – 16:30 Break

16:30 – 18:00 Book presentation & talk by Chordaki: Making Sense of Knowledge Feminist Epistemologies in the Greek Birth Control Movement (1974–1986) 18:00 – 19:00 Small reception

Credits

NICA students can obtain 1 ECS. To obtain 1 EC, they are required to read assigned chapters from the speaker’s book, Making Sense of Knowledge, and a number of selected texts on methodology, attending both the talk and the masterclass and submitting questions on the assigned material in advance.