Standpoint theorists have long been clear that marginalization does not make better understanding a given. They have been less clear, though, that social dominance does not make ignorance a given. Indeed, many standpoint theorists have implicitly committed themselves to what I call the strong epistemic disadvantage thesis. According to this thesis, there are strong, substantive limits on what the socially dominant can know about oppression that they do not personally experience. I argue that this thesis is not just implausible but (...) politically pernicious; it is an excuse for ignorance and silence that stifles our ability to address many injustices. Moreover, I argue that if we are to avoid lending support to the SEDT while working within a standpoint theory framework, we must hold that the socially dominant can achieve marginalized standpoints. So, we must hold that men can achieve feminist standpoints, that white women (and men) can achieve black feminist standpoints, and so on. (shrink)

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder characterised by self-starvation. Accounts of AN typically frame the disorder in individualistic terms: e.g., genetic predisposition, perceptual disturbances of body size and shape, experiential bodily disturbances. Without disputing the role these factors may play in developing AN, we instead draw attention to the way disordered eating practices in AN are actively supported by others. Specifically, we consider how Pro-Anorexia (ProAna) websites—which provide support and solidarity, tips, motivational content, a sense of community, and understanding (...) to individuals with AN—help drive and maintain AN practices. We use C. Thi Nguyen’s work on epistemic “echo chambers”, along with Maria Lugones’ work on “worlds” and “ease”, to explore the dynamics of these processes. Adopting this broader temporal and intersubjective perspective, we argue, not only helps to further illuminate the experiential character of AN but also has important clinical and therapeutic significance. (shrink)

In search of our highest capacities, cognitive scientists aim to explain things like mathematics, language, and planning. But are these really our most sophisticated forms of knowing? In this paper, I point to a different pinnacle of cognition. Our most sophisticated human knowing, I think, lies in how we engage with each other, in our relating. Cognitive science and philosophy of mind have largely ignored the ways of knowing at play here. At the same time, the emphasis on discrete, rational (...) knowing to the detriment of engaged, human knowing pervades societal practices and institutions, often with harmful effects on people and their relations. There are many reasons why we need a new, engaged—or even engaging—epistemology of human knowing. The enactive theory of participatory sense-making takes steps towards this, but it needs deepening. Kym Maclaren’s idea of letting be invites such a deepening. Characterizing knowing as a relationship of letting be provides a nuanced way to deal with the tensions between the knower’s being and the being of the known, as they meet in the process of knowing-and-being-known. This meeting of knower and known is not easy to understand. However, there is a mode of relating in which we know it well, and that is: in loving relationships. I propose to look at human knowing through the lens of loving. We then see that both knowing and loving are existential, dialectic ways in which concrete and particular beings engage with each other. (shrink)

This paper explores a distinctive form of social interaction—interpersonal inquiry—in which two or more people attempt to understand one another by engaging in conversation. Like many modes of inquiry into human beings, interpersonal inquiry partly shapes its own objects. How we conduct it thus affects who we become. I present an ethical ideal of conversation to which, I argue, at least some of our interpersonal inquiry ought to aspire. I then consider how this ideal might influence philosophical conceptions of the (...) self. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that public discourse as we know it is less than ideal from an epistemological point of view. In this paper, we develop an underappreciated aspect of the trouble with public discourse: what we call the Listening Problem. The listening problem is the problem that public discourse has in giving appropriate uptake and reception to ideas and concepts from oppressed groups. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser, we develop an institutional response to the (...) listening problem: the establishment of what we call Receptive Publics, discursive spaces designed to improve listening skills and to give space for counterhegemonic ideas. (shrink)

This article offers the critical concept misfit in an effort to further think through the lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in place and time. The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability by extending a consideration of how the particularities of embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects. The interrelated dynamics of fitting (...) and misfitting constitute a particular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming. The essay makes three arguments: the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body; the concept of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation about universal vulnerability and dependence; the concept of misfitting as a shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship confers agency and value on disabled subjects. (shrink)

Situated approaches to affectivity overcome an outdated individualistic perspective on emotions by emphasizing the role embodiment and environment play in affective dynamics. Yet, accounts which provide the conceptual toolbox for analyses in the philosophy of emotions do not go far enough. Their focus falls (a) on the present situation, abstracting from the broader historico-cultural context, and (b) on adopting a largely functionalist approach by conceiving of emotions and the environment as resources to be regulated or scaffolds to be used. In (...) this paper, I argue that we need totake situatedness seriously: We need (a) to acknowledge that emotions are not situated in undetermined “contexts” but in concrete socio-culturally specific practices referring to forms of living; and (b) to agree that not only are context and emotionsusedfor the sake of something else but also that the meaning-disclosive dimension of affective intentionality is structured by situatedness as well. To do so, I offer a multidimensional approach to situatedness that integrates the biographical and cultural dimensions of contextualization within the analysis of situated affective dynamics. This approach suggests that humans affectively disclose meaning (together) which is at once product and producer of specific forms of living – and these are always already subjects of (politically relevant) critique. (shrink)

What does it take to see how autistic people participate in social interactions? And what does it take to support and invite more participation? Western medicine and cognitive science tend to think of autism mainly in terms of social and communicative deficits. But research shows that autistic people can interact with a skill and sophistication that are hard to see when starting from a deficit idea. Research also shows that not only autistic people, but also their non-autistic interaction partners can (...) have difficulties interacting with each other. To do justice to these findings, we need a different approach to autistic interactions—one that helps everyone see, invite, and support better participation. I introduce such an approach, based on the enactive theory of participatory sense-making and supported by insights from indigenous epistemologies. This approach helps counteract the homogenising tendencies of the “global mental health” movement, which attempts to erase rather than recognise difference, and often precludes respectful engagements. Based in the lived experiences of people in their socio-cultural-material and interactive contexts, I put forward an engaged—even engaging—epistemology for understanding how we interact across difference. From this perspective, we see participatory sense-making at work across the scientific, diagnostic, therapeutic, and everyday interactions of autistic and non-autistic people, and how everyone can invite and support more of it. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce an enactive account of loving as participatory sense-making inspired by the “I love to you” of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Emancipating from the fusionist concept of romantic love, which understands love as unity, we conceptualise loving as an existential engagement in a dialectic of encounter, in continuous processes of becoming-in-relation. In these processes, desire acquires a certain prominence as the need to know (the other, the relation, oneself) more. We build on Irigaray’s account of (...) love to present a phenomenology of loving interactions and then our enactive account. Finally, we draw some implications for ethics. These concern language, difference, vulnerability, desire, and self-transformation. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories pose a serious threat to our society these days. People often dismiss conspiracy theory believers as at best gullible, or more often unintelligent. However, there are cases in which individuals end up believing conspiracy theories out of no epistemic fault of their own. In this paper, I want to offer a diagnosis of the problem by focusing on the genealogy of the conspiracy theory beliefs. Drawing on a novel interpretation of Nietzsche’s use of genealogies, I argue that the (...) problem of belief in conspiracy theories is best understood as a broadly political one regarding the oppressive, dominating, and exploitative world in which conspiracy theory believers find themselves in. I, then, draw on the work of the feminist philosopher, María Lugones, to offer an approach to addressing the problem of belief in conspiracy theories which recommends radical humility and playfulness. (shrink)

I argue for a deflationary answer to the question, “What is it to be a woman?” Prior attempts by feminist theorists to provide a metaphysical account of what all and only women have in common have all failed for the same reason: there is nothing women have in common beyond being women. Although the social kinds man and woman are primitive, their existence can be explained. I say that human sex difference is the material ground of systems of gender; gender (...) systems serve to enable male control of female reproductive capacities. This explains the fact that most women are female, but it does not entail that all women are female or that all females are women. To clarify my position, I draw an analogy between the kind woman and the kind parent. While it is difficult to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for being a parent, it is clear that the social institution or practice of parenting has its material ground in the biological facts about human reproduction together with facts about infantile dependency. Saying this does not entail that all and only biological progenitors are parents. (shrink)

This paper defends a legal and political conception of sexual relations grounded in Kant’s Doctrine of Right. First, I argue that only a lack of consent can make a sexual deed wrong in the legal sense. Second, I demonstrate why all other legal constraints on sexual practices in a just society are legal constraints on seemingly unrelated public institutions. I explain the way in which the just state acts as a civil guardian for domestic relations and as a civil guarantor (...) for private property and contract relations—and thereby enables the existence of legally enforceable claims. Throughout the aim is to demonstrate that Kant’s relational conception of justice entails that legally enforceable claims regarding sexual deeds are fully justifiable only insofar as they are determined and enforced by a public authority that we may refer to as a liberal democratic welfare state. (shrink)

Some people of colour feel shame in response to racist incidents. This phenomenon seems puzzling since, plausibly, they have nothing to feel shame about. This puzzle arises because we assume that targets of racism feel shame about their race. However, I propose that when an individual is racialised as non-White in a racist incident, shame is sometimes prompted, not by a negative self-assessment of her race, but by her inability to choose when her stigmatised race is made salient. I argue (...) that this can make sense of some shame responses to racism. My account also helps to highlight some of the emotional and cognitive costs of racism that have their root in shame as well as a new form of hermeneutical injustice and distinctive communicative harms, contributing to a fuller picture of what is objectionable about racism. (shrink)

I develop two different epistemic roles for emotion and desire. Caring for moral ends and people plays a pivotal though contingent role in ensuring reliable awareness of morally salient details; possession of various emotions and motives is a necessary condition for autonomous understanding of moral concepts themselves. Those who believe such connections compromise the "objective" status of morality tend to assume rather than argue for the bifurcated conception of reason and affect this essay challenges.

Country music has not gotten much attention in philosophy. I introduce two philosophical issues that country music raises. First, country music is simple. Some people might think that its simplicity makes country music worse; I argue that simplicity is aesthetically valuable. The second issue is country music’s ideal of authenticity; fans and performers think that country should be real or genuine in a particular way. But country music scholars have debunked the idea that country authenticity gets at anything real; widespread (...) ideas about country authenticity are rooted in a racist and fabricated picture of country music. In discussing these two issues, I highlight the importance of community in country music. (shrink)

In order to explore how emotions contribute positively or negatively to understanding the meaning of complex socio-culturally specific phenomena, I argue that we must take into account the habitual dimension of emotions – i.e., the emotion repertoire that a feeling person acquires in the course of their affective biography. This brings to light a certain form of alignment in relation to affective intentionality that is key to comprehending why humans understand situations in the way they do and why it so (...) often is especially hard to understand things _differently_. A crucial epistemic problem is that subjects often do not even enter a process of understanding, i.e., they do not even start to consider a specific object, theory, circumstance, other being, etc. in different ways than the familiar one. The epistemic problem at issue thus lies in an unquestioned faith in things being right the way they are taken to be. By acknowledging the habitual dimension of affective intentionality, I analyze reasons for this inability and suggest that being affectively disruptable and cultivating a pluralistic emotion repertoire are crucial abilities to overcome this epistemic problem. (shrink)

Feminists note an association of arguing with aggression and masculinity and question the necessity of this connection. Arguing also seems to some to identify a central method of philosophical reasoning, and gendered assumptions and standards would pose problems for the discipline. Can feminine modes of reasoning provide an alternative or supplement? Can overarching epistemological standards account for the benefits of different approaches to arguing? These are some of the prospects for argumentation inside and outside of philosophy that feminists consider. -/- (...) The further concern is that the academic study of argumentation – in philosophy and other disciplines – has failed to account for the type of reasoning needed for social justice movements. What resources for addressing these concerns can be found in informal logic and interdisciplinary argumentation theory? Since part of the perceived problem derives from assuming that arguing is a contest, are more collaborative epistemological frameworks better? Can regular politeness or civility hedge against undesirable tendencies of argumentation? Can “critical thinking” pedagogy involving argument educations answer the needs of social justice? (shrink)

There has been a movement aiming to teach agents about their privilege by making the information about their privilege as costless as possible. However, some argue that in risk-sensitive frameworks, such as Lara Buchak’s (2013), it can be rational for privileged agents to shield themselves from learning about their privilege, even if the information is costless and relevant. This threatens the efficacy of these information-access efforts in alleviating the problem of elite-group ignorance. In response, I show that even within the (...) same framework, in this case David Kinney and Liam Kofi Bright’s (2021), the rationality of this information avoidance rests on shaky ground in practice. In this framework, whether an agent should avoid information depends on the precise details of (1) how relevant they expect the information to be, (2) their priors about the value of various options, and (3) their risk attitudes. The model suggests that the rationality of elite-group ignorance is a function of structural factors that are pervasive but nonetheless not insurmountable, thus offering a way out of pessimism about elite group education. (shrink)

Individuals suffering from depression consistently report experiencing a lack of connectedness with others. David Karp (2017, 73), in his memoir and study of depression, has gone so far to describe depression as “an illness of isolation, a disease of disconnectedness”. It has become common, in phenomenological circles, to attribute this social impairment to the depressed individual experiencing their body as corporealized, acting as a barrier between them and the world around them (Fuchs 2005, 2016). In this paper, I offer an (...) alternative view of the experience of social disconnectedness in depression, suggesting that rather than necessarily experiencing their body as object-like, the depressed individual’s bodily is saturated with experiences of lethargy, tiredness, heaviness, sadness, hopelessness and so on, to the exclusion of being able to bodily connect to others. I suggest that depression does not involve a complete social impairment but a specific impairment of affective forms of interpersonal experience. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore some of the temporal structures of racialized experience – what I call racialized time. I draw on the Martiniquan philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, in particular his book ‘Black Skin, White Masks,’ in order to ask how racism can be understood as a social pathology which, when internalized or ‘epidermalized,’ may result in aberrations of affect, embodiment and agency that are temporally lived. In this regard, I analyze the racialized experience of coming ‘too late’ to (...) a world predetermined in advance and the distorted relation to possibility – the limitation of playfulness and imaginative variability – that defines this sense of lateness. I argue that the racialization of the past plays a structuring role in such experience. Racialization is not limited to the present, but also colonizes and reconfigures the past, splitting it into a duality of times: one open and civilizational, the other closed, anachronistic and racialized. To understand this colonial construction of the past, I draw on the work of Latin American thinker Aníbal Quijano. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Testimony from victims of gendered violence is often wrongly disbelieved. This paper explores a way to address this problem by developing a phenomenological approach to testimony. Guided by the concept of ‘disclosedness’, a tripartite analysis of testimony as an affective, embodied, communicative act is developed. Affect indicates how scepticism may arise through the social moods that often attune agents to victims’ testimony. The embodiment of meaning suggests testimony should not be approached as an assertion, but as a process of (...) ‘articulating an understanding’. This account is deepened in the discussion of testimony as a communicative act. It is argued that testimony must be considered as a relational whole, and thus our aim in receiving victims’ testimony should be to honour the relational conditions under which the truth of testimony can be heard. Approaching testimony as the collaborative process of enabling an understanding to be articulated can enhance our conception of gendered violence, whilst also better serving the victims of gendered violence by helping to overcome the lack of trust and excessive scepticism with which victims’ testimony is often met. (shrink)

Can a person privileged in some respect understand what it is like to be disprivileged in that respect? Some say yes; some say no. I argue that both positions are correct, because ‘understand what it is like to be disprivileged’ is ambiguous. Sometimes, it means grasp of the character of particular experiences of disprivileged people. Privileged people can achieve this. Sometimes, it means grasp of the general character shared by experiences of disprivileged people. Privileged people cannot achieve this. However, there (...) is a general kind of understanding that they can achieve: understanding of why individual experiences have their character, in relation to privilege and disprivilege. This understanding is a skill, not knowledge. It is difficult and discomforting for the privileged to acquire and is easily conflated with knowledge of general experiential character. Distinguishing and characterizing these kinds of understanding clarifies whether, and how, the privileged might understand what it is like to be disprivileged. (shrink)

This paper examines Harold Garfinkel's notion of the natural attitude about sex and his claim that it is fundamentally moral in nature. The author looks beneath the natural attitude in order to explain its peculiar resilience and oppressive force. There she reveals a moral order grounded in the dichotomously sexed bodies so constituted through boundaries governing privacy and decency. In particular, naked bodies are sex-differentiated within a system of genital representation through gender presentation—a system that helps constitute the very boundaries (...) between the public and private. (shrink)

: Feminist epistemologists have found the atomistic view of knowers provided by classical epistemology woefully inadequate. An obvious alternative for feminists is Lynn Hankinson Nelson's suggestion that it is communities that know. However, I argue that Nelson's view is problematic for feminists, and I offer instead a conception of knowers as "individuals-in-communities." This conception is preferable, given the premises and goals of feminist epistemologists, because it emphasizes the relations between knowers and their communities and the relevance of these relations for (...) epistemic assessments. Furthermore, it provides a sense of epistemic agents as active reflective inquirers, capable of transforming and improving knowledge-seeking practices. (shrink)

This paper argues that the language of rights cannot express distinctively ecofeminist insights into the treatment of nonhuman animals and the environment. An alternative is proposed in the form of a politicized ecological ethic of care which can express ecofeminist insights. The paper concludes with consideration of an ecofeminist moral issue: how we choose to understand ourselves morally in relation to what we are willing to count as food. "Contextual moral vegetarianism" represents a response to a politicized ecological ethic of (...) care. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Nader Shoaibi (2024) makes a valuable contribution to the discussion on genealogies and conspiracy theories (CTs) by focusing on a particular kind of genealogy: what he calls 'political genealogies'. Roughly, political genealogies are not so much interested in the epistemic warrant (or rationality) of a given belief or theory. Rather, their function is to illuminate the social and political conditions that give rise to the spread of (unwarranted) CTs. Shoaibi also notes that such genealogies have an (...) important normative dimension: by drawing on the social/political conditions surrounding CTs we are also invited to engage in a ‘constructive strategy’ concerning CT-believers. This strategy, according to Shoaibi, can be cashed out in terms of ‘world-travelling’ which, as per feminist philosopher Maria Lugones, involves radical humility and playfulness. I agree with a lot of what Shoaibi has to say in his paper. I find his notion of CT political genealogies philosophically fruitful since it carves out what I take to be novel conceptual space in the literature. And I welcome the appeal to ‘world-travelling’ when dealing with proponents of unwarranted CTs. In this piece I respond to some of Shoaibi’s worries against epistemic genealogies, and I raise a concern about the possibility of political genealogies being hijacked by malicious actors. I also make some preliminary remarks about what could be called 'genealogical pluralism' about CTs, while also arguing for the primacy of epistemic genealogies. (shrink)

I support much of Maiese and Hanna’s (M&H) account of the ways social institutions “mindshape” people’s cognition (values, meanings, affective framings, and habits of bodily comportment), and of the ways neoliberal individualism can be resisted and progressive social change can be enacted. But the overall approach can be augmented, I argue, if M&H would embrace an enactivist account of socially distributed and collective cognition, and action, in which cognitive systems include but are not limited to individuals. Complementing M&H’s focus on (...) top-down “repressive” forms of power, with also “ideological” forms of power that are distributed throughout social communities and their discursive practices, symbolic resources, and shared meanings would enable M&H to see not just top-down mindshaping by institutions, but also peer-to-peer mindshaping between members of distributed normative social practices. This analysis also entails that diverse institutions are often composed of many differing communities and practices, such that institutions are not wholly destructive and deforming nor wholly constructive and enabling. It also augments their largely top-down account of social change with the kinds of social change enacted through peer-to-peer interactions between members of different communities, whose iterated interactions over time embody competition (differing distributions of repressive and ideological power) between different normative communities with different practices, especially through heterodox communities of resistance, offering liberatory and “enabling” social practices as alternatives to dominant orthodox “deforming” social practices. (shrink)

This paper gives a new and richer account of open-mindedness as a moral virtue. I argue that the main problem with existing accounts is that they derive the moral value of open-mindedness entirely from the epistemic role it plays in moral thought. This view is overly intellectualist. I argue that open-mindedness as a moral virtue promotes our flourishing alongside others in ways that are quite independent of its role in correcting our beliefs. I close my discussion by distinguishing open-mindedness from (...) what some might consider its equivalent: empathy and tolerance. (shrink)

This paper argues that the concept of care is significant not only for ethics, but for epistemology as well. After elucidating caring as a five-step dyadic relation, I go on to show its epistemic significance within the general framework of virtue epistemology as developed by Ernest Sosa, Alvin Goldman, and Linda Zagzebski. The notions of “care-knowing” and “care-based epistemology” emerge from construing caring as a reliabilist and responsibilist virtue.

ABSTRACT‘Solidarity’ is a key concept in political movements and usually bears on matters of labour, health and social justice. As such, it is essential in the reproduction and transformation of communities that support their members and protect their interests. It is sometimes overlooked that interspecies solidarity already pertains with a number of domesticated animals, and that people are willing to carry substantial emotional, financial and social burdens to benefit them. There has been even more reluctance to acknowledge wild animals as (...) fellow members of our political communities with whom we might stand in solidarity. The purpose of this paper is to propose that solidaristic relations with certain wild animals are not only possible, but also already exist in some contexts. It explores three different understandings of solidarity, and in probing to what extent they can be applied to wild animals, it identifies some important different roles they can play in ‘animal politics’, and shows how they can help us reconceive our communities in less anthropocentric terms. (shrink)

This article elucidates and expands on María Lugones's account of complex communication across liminal sites as the basis for deep coalitions among oppressed groups. The analysis underscores the crucial role that emotions and resistant imaginations play in complex communication and world-traveling across liminal sites. In particular, it focuses on the role of emotional echoing and epistemic activism in complex forms of communication among oppressed subjects. It elucidates Gloria Anzaldúa's storytelling and Doris Salcedo's visual art as exemplary forms of epistemic activism (...) that issue coalitional gestures and critical provocations that can wake people up from their epistemic slumbers and instigate forms of complex communication that can create new possibilities for coalitional politics. (shrink)

Borderlands/La Frontera deals with the psychology of resistance to oppression. The possibility of resistance is revealed by perceiving the self in the process of being oppressed as another face of the self in the process of resisting oppression. The new mestiza consciousness is born from this interplay between oppression and resistance. Resistance is understood as social, collective activity, by adding to Anzaldúa's theory the distinction between the act and the process of resistance.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

The Kohlberg Gilligan Controversy has received intermittent but inconclusive attention for many years, perhaps reflecting the difficulty of bridging the two positions. This article explores the published evidence for Gilligan's claims of gender difference, gender identity difference, and role of caring in people's ethics. It seems that the evidence for pronounced gender differences in ethical attitudes within business is weak, even if gender identity is used instead of physical gender. The main propositions of Care Theory and recent advances in its (...) thinking are discussed. Special focus emerges on the notion of Attachment which seems to be the Care Theory ingredient both most able to survive critical scrutiny and most promising for bridging the divide between the Kohlberg and Gilligan paradigms. The Social Bonding Model and other possible bridge building conceptual structures are introduced. Finally, Max Weber's division between ethics of conviction and ethics of responsibility provides an overarching perspective both of the gap still to be bridged and the need to keep trying to bridge it. (shrink)

This article documents our collaborative ongoing struggle to disrupt the reproduction of the coloniality of knowledge in the teaching of Gender Studies. We document how our decolonial feminist activism is actualised in our pedagogy, which is guided by feminist interpretations of ‘wonder’ (Irigaray, 1999; Ahmed, 2004; hooks, 2010) read alongside decolonial theory, including that of Ramón Grosfoguel, Walter D. Mignolo and María Lugones. Using notions of wonder as pedagogy, we attempt to create spaces in our classrooms where critical self-reflection and (...) critical intellectual and embodied engagement can emerge. Our attempts to create these spaces include multiple aspects or threads that, when woven together, might enable other ways of knowing-being-doing that works towards disrupting feminist complicity with coloniality in the Australian context. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic has fuelled indignation. People have been indignant about the breaking of lockdown rules, about the mistakes and deficiencies of government pandemic policies, about enforced mask-wearing, about vaccination programmes (or lack thereof), about lack of care with regards vulnerable individuals, and more. Indeed, indignation seems to have been particularly prevalent on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, where indignant remarks are often accompanied by variations on the hashtag #WTF?! In this paper, I explore indignation’s distinctive character (...) as a form of moral anger, in particular suggesting that what is characteristic of indignation is not only that it discloses moral injustices but betrays our disbelief at the very occurrence of the offence. Having outlined the character of indignation, I consider how the structure of indignation impacts how we do, respond to, and receive indignation. I explore indignation in action, so to speak, in the context of Covid-19, with a particular emphasis on how indignation occurs ‘on the internet’. (shrink)

Identity labels like “woman”, “Black,” “mother,” and “evangelical” are pervasive in both political and personal life, and in both formal and informal classification and communication. They are also widely thought to undermine agency by essentializing groups, flattening individual distinctiveness, and enforcing discrimination. While we take these worries to be well-founded, we argue that they result from a particular practice of using labels to rigidly label others. We identify an alternative practice of playful self-labelling, and argue that it can function as (...) a tool for combating oppression by expressing and enhancing individual and collective agency. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to carry out an analysis of the multi-voiced, multi-cultural self discussed by Latina feminists in light of a Heideggerian phenomenological account of persons or "Existential Analytic." In so doing, it points out similarities as well as differences between the Heideggerian description of the self and Latina feminists' phenomenological accounts of self, and critically assesses María Lugones's important notion of "world-traveling." In the end, the essay defends the view of a "multiplicitous" self which takes insights (...) from Lugones's view of the self that "travels 'worlds'" and from other Latina feminists' accounts of self as well as from Martin Heidegger's account of Dasein. (shrink)

I address the problem of how to locate "traitorous" subjects, or those who belong to dominant groups yet resist the usual assumptions and practices of those groups. I argue that Sandra Harding's description of traitors as insiders, who "become marginal" is misleading. Crafting a distinction between "privilege-cognizant" and "privilege-evasive" white scripts, I offer an alternative account of race traitors as privilege-cognizant whites who refuse to animate expected whitely scripts, and who are unfaithful to worldviews whites are expected to hold.

Many voices and stories have been systematically silenced in interpersonal conversations, political deliberations and historical narratives. Recalcitrant and interrelated patterns of epistemic, political, cultural and economic marginalisation exclude individuals as knowers, citizens, agents. Two questions lie at the centre of this article, which focuses on the epistemically – but also politically, culturally and economically – dominant: How can we sabotage the dominant’s investment in their own ignorance of unjust silencing? How can they be seduced to become acute perceivers of others’ (...) experiences of oppression and reckon with their own participation in it? Situated at the intersection between political theory, aesthetics and epistemology, this article contributes a so-far-unexplored suggestion: that certain literary works create epistemic friction between shared, entrenched prejudices on the one hand, and representations of epistemic exclusion or authority, on the other. Their power to illuminate ideational, moral and experiential limitations makes them valuable tools in problematising, rendering visible and dislocating epistemic injustice, as well as other marginalisations it intersects with. To advance this argument, the article relies on insights from aesthetics, unpacking fiction’s multidimensional epistemic potential. Audre Lorde exemplifies literary works’ ability to seductively sabotage bias and provide audiences with prosthetic visions of unfamiliar experiences of marginalisation. (shrink)

Aesthesis, the classical term for sensing and perceiving, is at the heart of innumerable problems that plague global society. The purpose of this article is to open a conversation on aesthesis. We survey the roots and relevance of aesthesis as a direct albeit contested relation and engagement with the world and with Others. From its pre-Socratic origins, aesthesis has been both a pragmatic, somatic concept, prompting a re-evaluation of the distinction between experience and abstraction. We trace its ongoing repression from (...) Plato through ‘western’ theories of formal Aesthetics. Drawing on a relational interpretation of Protagoras’ aesthesis, we argue that modern pragmatists and radical empiricists, as well as more contemporary critics of the ‘colonization’ of aesthesis (Mignolo and Vasquez) by formal Aesthetics recognize and develop the relational and ethical aspects of aesthesis. We consider the role of the body, affect, and of the intangible or virtual qualities of aesthesis. The ethics of obligations (Weil) in the polis (Arendt) shows how aesthesis informs politics despite its repression in favour of moral and legal norms. We argue this is relevant to contemporary crises such as xenophobia and ecocidal climate warming. (shrink)

The paper contends that transcendental phenomenology is a form of radical immanent critique able to explicate the necessary structures of meaning-constitution as well as evaluate our present situation through the historically traditionalized layers of concrete, lived experience. In order to make this case, the paper examines the critical dimension of phenomenology through the lens of one of its core conditions for possibility: the imagination. Building on—yet also departing from—Husserl’s own analyses, the paper contends that the imagination is both self- and (...) lifeworld-constituting. The imagination is anchored in our everyday senses of self and world as well as able to distance itself from being naively moored in normalized and deeply sedimented commitments. It is precisely this ‘anchored distance,’ rather than a sweeping doxic and ontic neutrality and negative freedom, that reveals the critical dimension of the imagination. (shrink)

A lack of diversity remains a significant problem in many STEM communities. According to the epistemic approach to addressing these diversity problems, it is in a community’s interest to improve diversity because doing so can enhance the rigor and creativity of its work. However, we draw on empirical and theoretical evidence illustrating that this approach can trade on the epistemic exploitation of diverse community members. Our concept of epistemic exploitation holds when there is a relationship between two parties in which (...) one party accrues epistemic benefits from another party’s knowledge and epistemic location and, in doing so, harms the second party or sets back their interests. We demonstrate that the ironic outcome of this nominal application of the epistemic approach is that it undermines the epistemic benefits which it promises. Indeed, we show that epistemic exploitation undermines the relationships and interactions among community members that produce rigor and creativity. Our central argument is that for communities to reap the benefits of an epistemic approach to diversity, to implement a genuine epistemic approach, they need to develop cultures that ameliorate the harms faced by, and protect the interests of, their diverse community members. (shrink)

In this article I am concerned with how relatively privileged people who wish to act in anti-oppressive ways respond to their own ignorance in ways that fall short of what is necessary for building coalitions against oppression. I consider María Lugones's sense of “world”-travel and José Medina's notion of epistemic friction-seeking as strategies for combating privileged ignorance, and assess how well they fare when put into practice by those suffering from privileged ignorance. Drawing on the resources of tourism studies, I (...) critique the political and material context that can turn these attempts to “world”-travel or seek epistemic friction into a morally and epistemically problematic epistemic tourism. Centrally, I argue that trying to learn what it's like to experience oppression is not an effective method of counteracting privileged ignorance, since the epistemic vices and cognitive distortions that created the ignorance in the first place continue to influence knowledge-creation even after they are acknowledged. Rather than attempting to understand “what it's like” to experience oppression, privileged progressives should undertake to learn about the provenance and purpose of their ignorance and the structures of oppression that facilitate and are facilitated by that ignorance. (shrink)

This essay asks after the lateness that affectively structures Fanon's phenomenology of racialized temporality in Black Skin,White Masks. I broach this through the concepts of possibility, “affective ankylosis”, and by taking seriously the dismembered past that haunts Fanon's text. The colonization of the past involves a bifurcation of time and of memory. To the “burning past,” wherein colonized experience is stuck and to which we remain sensitive, is contrasted the colonial construction of white, western time as progressive and futural—a construction (...) that relies on the very indifference, ankylosis, and closure of this time to the multiple, lived temporalities of colonized others. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay elaborates how an imbalanced reciprocity between inhabitants of places of relative safety and places of greater precarity results from pursuing security on the basis of a reactive fear of vulnerability. It analyzes a range of features that shape the complex forms that vulnerability takes with a particular focus on how the constitution of places as rhetorically and corporeally secure or not renders different groups of people secure and/or subject to heightened exposure to harm. This analysis suggests that vulnerability (...) is better conceived as a process than a quality, mediating between conceptions of vulnerability as a universal condition and as a highly specific empirical condition. Finally, by departing from the negative, reactive view of vulnerability that animates the supposition of the boundedness of selves and places, an alternative conception of security that neither equates it with invulnerability nor opposes it to vulnerability can be developed. (shrink)