Vrinda Dalmiya is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. She was a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla and a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University, India. Her research interests lie in care ethics, feminist epistemology, environmental philosophy, and comparative philosophy.    
In this presentation, Vrinda looks at epistemic injustices sustaining politically exploitative frameworks, and claims that staving off the former is necessary for envisioning a just geopolitical order. Why don’t we, for example, seriously explore alternatives to a neoliberalism pushing the planet to destruction? Are there “willful ignorances” propping up ideologically-biased reasoning that perpetuate oppression, and even the very construction of ideal theories of justice? This line of thought in contemporary feminist and philosophers of color, leads me to explore a non-traditional understanding of an ethical exemplar from the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata. Could the figure of a King who fails and is stopped from fulfilling his promise - a paradoxically “non-ideal Ideal” – enable a different kind of ‘being together’ modelled on embracing vulnerability? Roadblocks to global justice are both structural and agential, requiring different kinds of intervention. Articulation of alternative concepts and principles is an important response to the former. However, restructuring subjectivities to possess intellectual virtues that can correct for epistemic injustices are equally important for imagining and upholding a just planetary future.