Abstract:Epistemic exploitation occurs when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to educate them about the nature of their oppression. I argue that epistemic exploitation is marked by unrecognized, uncompensated, emotionally taxing, coerced epistemic labor. The coercive and exploitative aspects of the phenomenon are exemplified by the unpaid nature of the educational labor and its associated opportunity costs, the double bind that marginalized persons must navigate when faced with the demand to educate, and t… Show more
“…First, I'll briefly discuss the more familiar historical‐material and feminist‐material versions of the situated knowledge thesis. Though these forms of the thesis have fallen largely out of fashion, I'll suggest these readings are useful to illuminate a form of epistemic oppression recently introduced into our theorizing: epistemic exploitation (Berenstain ). Second, I'll develop a social reading of the standpoint thesis that has been gestured at in the literature, but has not been fully developed.…”
Section: Standpoint Epistemology: a Primermentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Lastly, epistemic exploitation occurs “when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to produce an education or explanation about the nature of the oppression they face” (Berenstain , 570). According to Berenstain, epistemic exploitation is oppressive because it is “marked by unrecognized, uncompensated, emotionally taxing, coerced epistemic labor” (570).…”
Section: Applications Of Standpoint Epistemologymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Including emotional and cognitive labor in this category captures the notion that, in performing this sort of labor, the mental energy of women and people of color is diverted away from their own projects, goals, and interests in the service of someone else's. Emotional and cognitive labor, like other forms of epistemic exploitation, “[maintain] structures of oppression by centering the needs and desires of dominant groups” (Berenstain , 570).…”
Section: Applications Of Standpoint Epistemologymentioning
Standpoint epistemology is committed to a cluster of views that pays special attention to the role of social identity in knowledge-acquisition. Of particular interest here is the situated knowledge thesis. This thesis holds that for certain propositions p, whether an epistemic agent is in a position to know that p depends on some nonepistemic facts related to the epistemic agent's social identity. In this article, I examine two possible ways to interpret this thesis. My first goal here is to clarify existing interpretations of this thesis that appear in the literature but that are undeveloped and often mistakenly conflated. In so doing, I aim to make clear the different versions of standpoint epistemology that one might accept and defend. This project is of significance, I argue, because standpoint epistemology provides helpful tools for understanding a phenomenon of recent interest: epistemic oppression. My second goal is to provide an analysis that makes clear how each of the readings I put forth can be used to illuminate forms of epistemic oppression.The landscape of epistemology is changing. Epistemologists are no longer concerned solely with questions regarding what conditions are necessary for knowledge or how knowledge is transmitted; they have instead shifted their attention to concerns regarding our epistemic practices and how those practices might oppress. Epistemic oppression, the unwarranted exclusion or obstruction of certain epistemic agents from the practices of knowledge-production (Dotson 2012, 2014), has been the focus of much work produced by feminist epistemologists in the last decade, and rightly so. If the aim of epistemology is to bring us closer to truth, then any practice that threatens to subvert this aim ought to be thoroughly investigated. 1 In this article, I argue that in order to understand, address, and eliminate epistemic oppression, we must appeal to the conceptual tools made available by standpoint epistemology.Broadly speaking, standpoint epistemology is committed to the thesis that some nonepistemic features related to an agent's social identity make a difference to what an epistemic agent is in a position to know (Hartsock 1983;Haraway 1988;Harding
“…First, I'll briefly discuss the more familiar historical‐material and feminist‐material versions of the situated knowledge thesis. Though these forms of the thesis have fallen largely out of fashion, I'll suggest these readings are useful to illuminate a form of epistemic oppression recently introduced into our theorizing: epistemic exploitation (Berenstain ). Second, I'll develop a social reading of the standpoint thesis that has been gestured at in the literature, but has not been fully developed.…”
Section: Standpoint Epistemology: a Primermentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Lastly, epistemic exploitation occurs “when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to produce an education or explanation about the nature of the oppression they face” (Berenstain , 570). According to Berenstain, epistemic exploitation is oppressive because it is “marked by unrecognized, uncompensated, emotionally taxing, coerced epistemic labor” (570).…”
Section: Applications Of Standpoint Epistemologymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Including emotional and cognitive labor in this category captures the notion that, in performing this sort of labor, the mental energy of women and people of color is diverted away from their own projects, goals, and interests in the service of someone else's. Emotional and cognitive labor, like other forms of epistemic exploitation, “[maintain] structures of oppression by centering the needs and desires of dominant groups” (Berenstain , 570).…”
Section: Applications Of Standpoint Epistemologymentioning
Standpoint epistemology is committed to a cluster of views that pays special attention to the role of social identity in knowledge-acquisition. Of particular interest here is the situated knowledge thesis. This thesis holds that for certain propositions p, whether an epistemic agent is in a position to know that p depends on some nonepistemic facts related to the epistemic agent's social identity. In this article, I examine two possible ways to interpret this thesis. My first goal here is to clarify existing interpretations of this thesis that appear in the literature but that are undeveloped and often mistakenly conflated. In so doing, I aim to make clear the different versions of standpoint epistemology that one might accept and defend. This project is of significance, I argue, because standpoint epistemology provides helpful tools for understanding a phenomenon of recent interest: epistemic oppression. My second goal is to provide an analysis that makes clear how each of the readings I put forth can be used to illuminate forms of epistemic oppression.The landscape of epistemology is changing. Epistemologists are no longer concerned solely with questions regarding what conditions are necessary for knowledge or how knowledge is transmitted; they have instead shifted their attention to concerns regarding our epistemic practices and how those practices might oppress. Epistemic oppression, the unwarranted exclusion or obstruction of certain epistemic agents from the practices of knowledge-production (Dotson 2012, 2014), has been the focus of much work produced by feminist epistemologists in the last decade, and rightly so. If the aim of epistemology is to bring us closer to truth, then any practice that threatens to subvert this aim ought to be thoroughly investigated. 1 In this article, I argue that in order to understand, address, and eliminate epistemic oppression, we must appeal to the conceptual tools made available by standpoint epistemology.Broadly speaking, standpoint epistemology is committed to the thesis that some nonepistemic features related to an agent's social identity make a difference to what an epistemic agent is in a position to know (Hartsock 1983;Haraway 1988;Harding
“…According to Nora Berenstain, “epistemic exploitation” occurs “when privileged persons demand an education or explanation from marginalized persons about the nature of the oppression they face” (Berenstain ). When exercised, epistemic exploitation:maintains structures of oppression by centering the needs and desires of dominant groups and exploiting the emotional and cognitive labor of members of marginalized groups who are required to do the unpaid and often unacknowledged work of providing information, resources, and evidence of oppression to privileged people who demand it.…”
Section: Case Ii: Mikementioning
confidence: 99%
“…When exercised, epistemic exploitation:maintains structures of oppression by centering the needs and desires of dominant groups and exploiting the emotional and cognitive labor of members of marginalized groups who are required to do the unpaid and often unacknowledged work of providing information, resources, and evidence of oppression to privileged people who demand it. (Berenstain )…”
Alison Bailey has recently explored the nature of what she calls privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback or “the variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when they are asked to consider both the lived experience and structural injustices that members of marginalized groups experience daily.” In this article, I want to use Bailey's argument to demonstrate how privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback is facilitated and obscured by the disciplinary tools of traditional Western philosophy. Specifically, through exploring philosophical cultures of justification and case studies, this work will reveal how students engage in privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback by deploying the reason/emotion divide and various philosophical norms and practices it underlies to protect their epistemic home turf. Then, I offer three emotion‐enhancing critical philosophical practices aimed at disrupting the ignorance‐promoting moves of privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback and, instead, engage emotion as epistemically significant.
The information professions need a paradigmatic shift to address the epistemicide happening within our field and the ways we have systematically undermined knowledge systems falling outside of Western traditions. Epistemicide is the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a knowledge system. We argue epistemicide happens when epistemic injustices are persistent and systematic and collectively work as a structured and systemic oppression of particular ways of knowing. We present epistemicide as a conceptual approach for understanding and analyzing ways knowledge systems are silenced or devalued within Information Science. We extend Fricker's framework by: (a) identifying new types of epistemic injustices, and (b) by adding to Fricker's concepts of Primary and Secondary Harm and introducing the concept of a Third Harm happening at an intergenerational level. Addressing epistemicide is critical for information professionals because we task ourselves with handling knowledge from every field. Acknowledgement of and taking steps to interrupt epistemic injustices and these specific harms are supportive of the social justice movements already happening. This paper serves as an interruption of epistemic injustice by presenting actions toward justice in the form of operationalized interventions of epistemicide.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
