Recent philosophical literature on epistemic harms has paid little attention to the difference between deliberate and non-deliberate harms. In this paper, I analyze the “Curare Case,” a case from the ...1940’s in which patient testimony was disregarded by physicians. This case has been described as an instance of epistemic injustice. I problematize this description, arguing instead that the case shows an instance of “epistemic disadvantage.” I propose epistemic disadvantage indicates when harms result from warranted asymmetric relations that justifiably exclude individuals from hermeneutical participation. Epistemic disadvantage categorizes harms that result from justifiable exclusions, are non-deliberate, and result from poor epistemic environments. This analysis brings out a meaningful difference between accidental and deliberate harms in communicative exchanges.
I argue for the merits of studying historical moral revolutions to inform moral and political philosophy. Such a research program is not merely of empirical, historical interest but has normative ...implications. To explain why, I situate the proposal in the tradition of naturalized epistemology. As Alison M. Jaggar and other scholars have argued, a naturalistic approach is characteristic of much feminist philosophy. Accordingly, I argue that the study of moral revolutions would be especially fruitful for feminist moral and political philosophers.
For better or worse, it has become difficult to conduct research in the social sciences without encountering gender, even well beyond fields that specifically focus on it. Since the advent of gender ...studies as a discipline, the concept has gained momentum both as a social fact and structure of social action, and as the analytic category through which these are conceptualised. This special issue of the BMS is embedded in the idea that the analysis of gender itself is indissociable from the history of the concept, and that the increasing spread of this notion throughout society has an impact on the way(s) gender is investigated. In the space of just a few decades the world has evolved from one in which researchers were working to give consistency to a nameless force, to one which is now gender conscious, where gender is mobilised, criticised, claimed, resisted, and debated. In a gender conscious world, the rules of research are changing. The notion of gender consciousness that is proposed here borrows carefully from research in the sociology of law developed under the name legal consciousness studies (LCS). The fact that there are different definitions of gender that compete with each other does not prevent us from considering that there is gender, and we may even consider that the proliferation of definitions participates in the stability of the social phenomenon we are studying, just as, for the theorists of LCS, the multiple representations of the law contribute to its hegemony. One of the central issues here is the problematization of the dialectic between categories of practice and categories of analysis, with a focus on the methodological and epistemological questions of these studies. This ‘return to the field’ will provide answers to these questions, beginning with a personal summary overview of what feminist epistemologies (I) and feminist methodologies (II) have contributed to social sciences, before moving on to contemporary research questions that emerge through the prism of gender consciousness (III).
The notion of moral expertise poses a variety of challenges concerning both the question of existence of such experts and their identification by laypeople. I argue for a view of ethics expertise, ...based on moral understanding instead of on moral knowledge, that is less robust than genuine moral expertise and that does not rely on deference to testimony. I propose identification criteria that focus mainly on the awareness and communication of implicit biases and situated ignorance. According to the account of ethics expertise presented in this paper, the expert's testimony is not an epistemic reason for the layperson's belief, but merely an epistemic influence. The epistemic reasons for the layperson's belief are largely independent from the expert. But there is still some epistemic risk involved in the proposed method of knowledge transfer, and therefore criteria for the identification of a trustworthy expert are necessary. The risk involved in knowledge transfer can be both due to willful manipulation and due to the expert's implicit biases and situated ignorance. While willful manipulation cannot really be avoided, the influence from biases and ignorance can be minimized. I argue that the best way to do this is if the expert is aware of their own biases and ignorance and communicates them. Combined with evidence of the expert's education in moral philosophy and experience with the topic in question, this gives the layperson the best chance to identify someone who can really help them consider all relevant aspects of a situation and come to a better justified decision.
This study, informed by Chicana Feminist frameworks, explores bilingual Latinx students' resistance testimonios pertaining to instruction and assessment. These testimonios transpired through pláticas ...familiar gatherings between adolescent youth and the author, also their former elementary school teacher. This study is contextualized within historical and current ways white supremacy impacts education for bilingual Latinx students. Reviews of the literature show how standardized testing does not always capture a full narrative of bilingual Latinx students' knowledge. While educators cannot dismantle all the limited ways of assessing students at once, this article adds to the scholarship on how teachers can build long-term relationships to mend these sources of harms. The past relationship, between the students and the author, helped establish plática spaces, where they collectively reflected on the ways instructional and assessment practices hurt or dismissed their communities. In the pláticas, students enriched their sociopolitical consciousness by pushing and pulling each other to share their lives. Assembling their collective testimonios reveals alternatives to understanding what bilingual Latinx students know. Remembering with, listening to, and assembling students' testimonios collectively over time offers how educators might build longer lasting and broader relationships, for a broader, more expansive holistic understanding of Latinx students' experiences in school. Educators must collaborate together, as there is a critical opportunity for reclaiming instructiom and assessment practices.
Resumo A entrevista aborda a trajetória de Evelyn Fox Keller, professora emérita de história e filosofia das ciências do Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Keller reflete sobre seu percurso e ...sobre os desafios que precisou enfrentar para expandir as fronteiras dos estudos de ciências com seu trabalho pioneiro relacionando linguagem, gênero e ciências, que tem sido muito influente em mudar a visão da história das ciências.
Abstract This interview covers the trajectory of Evelyn Fox Keller, emeritus professor of history and philosophy of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Keller reflects on her career and the challenges she had to overcome to push back the frontiers of science with her pioneering work on language, gender, and science, which has been very influential in changing views in the history of science.
In his last writings, Wittgenstein repeatedly addresses the question of how our concepts relate to general facts of nature or human nature and how they are embedded in our lives. In doing so, he uses ...the term “pattern of life”, characterizing the complicated relationship between concepts and our lives and how our concepts “are connected with what interests us, with what matters to us” (LWPP II, 46). But who is this “us”, and whose interests manifest in the concepts we use to designate patterns of life? What if certain concepts—or their absence—are exclusionary, discriminatory, or otherwise unjust to those who are not “us”? In this paper, I want to discuss Wittgenstein’s notion of “pattern of life” in its interweaving with facts, human life, and concepts, as well as its political implications. To this end, I will first outline the relationship between facts and concept formation as Wittgenstein drew it in his last writings. Based on this, I will argue that he uses the concept of pattern of life to capture the complicated relationship between concepts and human nature or “social facts”. Going beyond Wittgenstein and drawing on recent feminist epistemology, I will raise the question of the political implications of our patterns of life and concomitant social “conceptual injustices”. Finally, I will show how imagining facts otherwise and other conceptual worlds can help us to reveal the prejudices and injustices of our concepts and can lead to conceptual change and new patterns of life that may ultimately even change “things”, i.e., our thinking, judging and acting in the world.
In this paper, we utilize a blended conceptual framework based on spirituality, endarkened feminist epistemology, and feminist co-mentoring that draws upon dialogue from a Freirean perspective to ...inform our inquiry. In our analysis, we sought to respond to the question: How does spirituality inform the work we do as Black women faculty? We engaged in spirituality focused, co-mentoring dialogues and embraced a collaborative autoethnography research design that involved individual writing, dialogue, reflection, and sharing and meaning making. Through these processes we came to articulate our individual definitions of spirituality and made sense of how spirituality informs our way of being and knowing in the academy. We experienced spirituality as a means to heal self and others, and as a source of resistance and courage.
This study explored the relationships between historically white institutions (HWIs) and their local Black communities. Using participatory action research (PAR) methodology, grounded in a critical ...race theoretical framework, undergirded by endarkened feminist epistemology, our research question was: How do Black communities surrounding University of Georgia make meaning of their local HWI? Rooted in PAR methodology, this study included two Black undergraduate coresearchers from Athens, Georgia. Together, we used an intergenerational approach for data collection, centering the voices of Black undergraduate students, community leaders, and families from the Athens-Clarke County community. Findings are presented as theatrical performance based on performative counterstory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)
This article draws on the creative methods deployed in the course of a research project aimed at mapping community-based mental health service provision and other specific services migrant, refugee ...and asylum seeking women regularly access in London. Although the study made use of a mixed method research design, only the art-based approach deployed as part of the focus groups is discussed. The article contributes to developing embodied research methods in that it explores the bodily engagement of research participants in making a collage and unpacks the implications of this approach for collecting qualitative data involving experiential activity. The body plays a central role in generating qualitative data through the making of the collage and collage-making represents an embodied experience suggesting that how we feel, how we perceive, how we relate to our own bodies and the place they have in the order of things – is contextual, gendered, relational, historically and culturally situated.
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