Feminist Epistemology Research Articles

Epistemic Oppression and Affective Exclusion

Epistemic oppression is the systematic exclusion of oppressed groups from knowledge-making practices. One of the goals of feminist epistemology is to understand the nature of the barriers preventing oppressed individuals from realising their epistemic agency and contributing to knowledge production. Feminist epistemologists have taken monumental strides in theorising the different forms of exclusions that constitute epistemic oppression (e.g., Fricker 2007; Dotson 2014; Bailey 2014). But more needs to be done by way of understanding what makes an oppressive epistemic landscape resilient and resistant to change. In this paper, I develop a pragmatist account of the affective mechanisms in place that protect the epistemic landscape from critical reflection and produce what I refer to as affective exclusion. I argue that, since the mechanism that protects the epistemic landscape from critical reflection is affective by nature, we cannot reason ourselves out of affective exclusion. Instead, I propose that, although they often prevent us from realising our epistemic agency, our co-occurring emotions and feelings, such as grief, anxiety, and other epistemic feelings, can be catalysts for reflection about the skewed nature of the epistemic landscape. I conclude with a discussion of the role that narrative fiction might play in helping us resist affective exclusion and ending epistemic oppression.

Feminist perspectives on environmental justice and health in Jamaica.

Jamaica is an island nation with a history that is informed by Taino settlement, European colonisation, chattel slavery, disinvestment, and continued extractivism. This perspective paper leverages a historical analysis to explore environmental injustices affecting the health and quality of life of Jamaicans living in Jamaica. This article hopes to contribute to a growing but limited body of scholarly research that contends with environmental and climate justice in the context of the Caribbean. In discussing a lack of critical environmental infrastructure, such as reliable solid waste management, and the impacts of extractive industries, such as bauxite mining, the paper intends to highlight the environmental, public health, and social harms that are produced. Employing an intersectional approach grounded in Black feminist epistemology put forward by Patricia Hill Collins, the authors use their lived experiences as a source of knowledge. The paper analyses how these environmental injustices harm Jamaican communities at large but underscores the compounded challenges faced by Jamaican women who experience marginalisation on the basis of gender, urban/rural residency, and class. The paper concludes by urging researchers, policymakers, regulatory bodies, and other stakeholders to conduct further research and create sustainable and equitable environmental standards that have considerations for environmental injustice in Jamaica.

A nudge in the right direction? Gender-informed support by female business-incubation managers for female STEM-entrepreneurs

ABSTRACT This article critically analyzes the influence of gendered ascriptions and assumptions upon support offered by female business incubation (BI) managers to female STEM entrepreneurs. We draw upon the concept of nudges to illustrate how female managers guide female clients to behave, so as to navigate gendered challenges during the investment-readiness (IR) process. Using an interpretive ontology and social constructionist feminist epistemology, we draw upon in-depth, semi-structured interviews with female BI managers and female STEM entrepreneur clients. The findings illustrate that the gendered BI context encourages gender-aware managers to nudge clients towards behaviours congruent with prevailing masculinized norms, navigating rather than challenging gender-bias, to secure investment.

Speculative Black Feminist Epistemologies of Worldbuilding for XR

Speculative Black Feminist Epistemologies of Worldbuilding for XR

Debris: autoethnography, feminist epistemology, ethics, and sexual violence

ABSTRACT This article examines the impact of methodological choices and collaborative processes in a complex study that delved into the intimate experiences of violence as narrated by conscripts to the Peruvian armed forces. Lurgio Gavilán is a Peruvian anthropologist who strongly identifies with the interviewed veterans because of his own experiences, and Jelke Boesten is European feminist scholar with specific ideas about gender justice. Our collaboration allows us to raise fundamental questions around the limitations, validity, and ethics of knowledge production. The “debris” of this collaboration refers to the ethical questions that we may have previously failed to raise and address. Why did each of us embark on this research? Have our respective epistemological positions shifted due to the research? How has the nature of the collaboration, and our different positions of power therein, enlightened or concerned us? With what are we left, and what do we leave behind?

“Who raised you?”: Black women’s indispensable conceptualizations of mothering for theorizing and researching DisCrit

Traditionally, the academic field of special education has resisted critical perspectives. Despite their advanced skills, epistemological approaches, and ways of knowing, special education scholars enacting qualitative inquiry have often described inadequate support from their academic community. In a parallel manner, Black mothering in historical and contemporary spaces, especially in mothering disabled children, has often been dismissed for its valued expertise. This essay is a methodological, theoretical, spiritual, epistemological, and deeply philosophical intervention on the roles of Black mothers in all spaces who grapple with the tensions in the field of special education. The authors build upon Black Feminist epistemology and use Disability Critical Theory as a framework, documenting the journeys of two Black women mother and scholars through duoethnographic storytelling. Realizing that people who are mothering have their own agency and choose what they want to build with the nurturing Black mothers offer, we center multidisciplinary dialogues that lead to deeper understandings of qualitative research methods. Through these exemplars, we highlight how mothering and othermothering, whether through birth, ancestral, or academic kinships, are used to advance ways of knowing about how to best support disabled youth whose futures are pervasively threatened.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Situating the Intersectional Experiences of Black Girls and Women in Computing & Technology

This special issue builds on and expands computing’s engagement with Black feminist epistemologies like Intersectionality and Black Feminist Thought, exploring the intersectional experiences of Black girls and women in computing, technology, and computing education and workforce. The set of articles examines, explores, and uncovers structural and systemic barriers in computing, CS education, and technology; the roles of social supports and social capital in ensuring Black women thrive; quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods approaches that center Black girls and women instead of making them comparative groups to white or other people of color of all genders; and issues around equity and inclusivity in computing, CS education, and technology more broadly. Taken together, this collection serves as a model for centering one community often marginalized in computing, technology, and computing education: Black girls and women.

Animating migration journeys from Colombia to Chile: expressing embodied experience through co-produced film

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the process of co-producing an animated film about the migration journeys of Colombian women resident in Antofagasta, Chile. It first establishes the relationship between feminist epistemologies and arts-based methodologies, which hinges on embodiment. It then turns to a detailed discussion of using film co-production as a research method for accessing and expressing embodied experiences of migration. This discussion highlights how moments of discomfort (Gokariksel, Hawkins, Neubert, and Smith, 2021) experienced by the researcher motivated the search for a more collaborative methodological approach that was better attuned to lived experience. This included striving towards more inclusive practices with respect to recruitment, anonymity, and confidentiality. Moments of discomfort also revealed how care and caring responsibilities are entangled with research, and how they gender possibilities of participation and production for community co-producers and artists, as well as for researchers. Finally, through discomfort, lessons were learned about the politics of representing experiences of migration, violence, and endurance, as well as joy. The paper concludes that, whilst by no means a panacea, collaborative arts-based research methods can offer an innovative toolset for exploring embodied experience and for navigating the relational and representational complexities attendant to research.

Reaction to the Death of the Girlboss: Critical Feminist Epistemology and Implications for HRD

Girlboss is an archetype made popular in the 2010s that defined women’s success in terms of their individual determination and hard work. In their critique “The Death of the Girlboss: Critical Feminist Epistemology and Implications for HRD,” the authors problematize the girlboss archetype’s noting it’s individualistic nature and how it fails to acknowledge and account for the systemic barriers that all women continue to face at work. This reaction paper shares an alternative perspective on the girlboss archetype by expanding the definition of gender and women, discussing the need for collective acknowledgment of women’s successes, a proposing an evolution for girlboss.

Feminist Philosophical Toys: Playful Companions and Live Theorization

Abstract What are the matters of philosophy? How do they shape how philosophy is practiced, what kinds of knowledge it produces, and who counts as a philosopher? The dominant matters of Western philosophy, or its epistemic companions, are books and journal articles even when dialogic and oral traditions are acknowledged or referenced. In this paper, we argue that alternatives would be necessary if philosophy were to be a more capacious and welcoming discipline. We introduce Feminist Philosophical Toys as one such alternative that challenges what counts as serious philosophy by being seriously playful. The toys foreground the oral and the dialogic while reflecting on and committing to engaging materiality, record-keeping, and record-making. In doing so, the toys challenge the dominant form of philosophy and its mechanics of knowledge-making as they offer an alternative way of doing philosophy that can be transformative for the next generation of feminist scholarship. The dialogic, embodied, and communal interaction with paper, with theory, and with others is meant as a practice of live theorization, opening philosophy to a new groundedness and accessibility, centered in the ethos of feminist epistemology, while at the same time pushing against fetishization of matter.

Philosophical Intuitions about Socially Significant Language

Abstract As we theorize about philosophy of language that bears on social and political issues, it is worth revisiting the methodological question of how we as theorists rely on our philosophical and linguistic intuitions, and what assumptions underlie our justification of such a reliance. Two threads in the philosophical literature are relevant to this question: the discussion of situatedness in feminist epistemology and the debate about philosophical expertise and philosophical intuitions. I argue that philosophers examining social and political philosophy of language should be careful—perhaps more careful than we have been—when we rely on our intuitions to draw conclusions about socially significant language, such as racist, sexist, homophobic, and other derogatory speech. I don’t claim we should give up relying on our intuitions. Instead, I argue that we should be more explicit that our intuitions are limited, and open to the possibility that they might not align with the intuitions of those who have more experience with the kinds of speech we are analyzing. As a result, we might find that the conclusions we draw from our intuitions have to be revised or qualified.

“That is when I understood everything”: Ideological trajectories of pro-choice female doctors in Mexico

ObjectivesThere is little global evidence about how physicians become abortion clinicians or advocates. We describe the ideological trajectories of self-identified pro-choice female Mexican doctors and the factors that made them become pro-choice. Study DesignIn this qualitative study we conducted semi-structured interviews with members of the Mexican Network of Female Pro-choice Physicians (Red de Médicas por el Derecho a Decidir - México). Participants came from 8 diverse states in Mexico. We used a feminist epistemology approach and analyzed data using inductive coding as well as a priori categories (becoming pro-choice, trajectories, and training). ResultsWe included 24 female pro-choice physicians. We identified five intersecting factors that influenced becoming pro-choice: feminism, personal experiences, confrontation with the inequalities and violence that women experience, role models, and routine exposure to abortion care. Participants described three ideological trajectories: being pro-choice before studying medicine, not having a specific opinion, and changing from “pro-life” to “pro-choice”. Participants described an absence of abortion training in medical schools or stigmatizing training, and the use of alternative training sources. ConclusionIn the absence of training on abortion during the medical education, a combination of intersecting personal as well as work-related experience may turn doctors in to pro-choice abortion clinicians and/or advocates. Training on abortion care in medical education and stigma reduction in Mexican society is essential. The findings of this study may be used to develop comprehensive medical curricula as well as strategies directed at doctors in who have never received training on abortion care, such as promoting interactions between doctors and non-medical abortion providers, education on inequalities and violence against women, moving beyond a public health to a human rights and gender perspective, and exposure to routine safe abortion care. ImplicationsMexican female doctors become pro-choice clinicians who provide abortion care and/or advocates in spite of their medical education.

Is Artificial Intelligence Gender-Free? What Does Feminist Epistemology Say About That?

I start my contribution with some general questions: Is AI gendered? Is AI sexist or can it be? Does AI include gendered knowledge and suppositions? If so, how? After that, I proceed to develop my theoretical (i.e., qualitatively based) starting points with the main referential authors, Donna Haraway and Alison Adam. The fact that impersonal does not mean observer-independent (as Haraway described it in a slightly different context [1997]) is a good reason to turn to feminist epistemology, especially its concept of situated knowledges. Since knowledge (or the representation of knowledge) lies at the very centre of AI research, this makes it an appropriate vehicle for a gendered critique of AI (Adam, 2000). The concept of situated knowledges entails knowledge that reflects a perspective on a subject which is necessarily partial and limited, not universal (this is Haraway’s famous critique of the “view from nowhere”). Namely, there is no way to be simultaneously in all of the epistemologically privileged positions structured by gender, class, nation, etc. I then proceed to AI research. The knowledge engineers build systems that contain knowledge reflecting their own interests and competencies. While this representation of knowledge is usually regarded as being universal (Adam, 2000), it is hierarchical since it does not grant epistemic authority to all. Most importantly, social exclusivism and biological essentialism are re-inscribed in the ontology of AI (Adam, 2000). I address the question of which effects social and political contaminations and prejudices can bring for the development of AI. I suggest that unless we commit to deconstructing the harmful essentialisms that govern our human lives, we might just be perpetuating the same (i.e., our own and others’) practices of domination and unequal parts of privilege and oppression (Haraway, 1991) in developing AI.

Alternative Epistemologies and Experimental Philosophy. Considerations Starting from the Reading of the Doctoral Thesis Socio-epistemological aspects of contemporary Islamic feminism in Romania and Israel. A contribution to the promotion of experimental p

Reading the doctoral thesis Socio-epistemological aspects of contemporary Islamic feminism in Romania and Israel. A contribution to the promotion of the experimental philosophy supported by Mr. Salem Samih at the Western University of Timișoara, under the guidance of Prof. Florin Lobonț, allowed me to reflect on feminist epistemology and how it can be the basis for recovering factual data from sociological research for philosophizing, reinterpreted in a non-objectivist social constructionist manner.

An index of longing

Feminist epistemology positions knowledge in relationship to, or as contingent on, its knower. From this framework, drawing can be situated as a relational and embodied form of knowing the phenomenal world. Drawing opens a space in which we can explore the margin between perception and representation as an epistemological problem. It asks: ‘How can we locate the relationship between knowers and what is known across time through the canon of drawing?’. Drawing is the enactment of this problem. It bridges the gap between the phenomenal and the constructed world of knowledge and, in doing so, visualizes the relationship between our senses and our sense of self. My research reflects on the visual history of ‘The Corinthian Maid’, a Roman origin story for the first act of drawing, and on its use in my own creative practice as a framework to explore the evolution of western ideas on gender, embodiment, knowledge and creativity. The Corinthian Maid functions as an access point through which to consider new understandings of the relationship between knowledge and the body, with drawing as our guide.

A Feminist Activist Research to mainstream awareness of gender-related violence in universities through photovoice

ABSTRACT Sexual and gender-related violences (SeGReV) is more normalised in the university community than we might expect, even though there have been important changes in HEI politics and policies in this sense. Therefore, sensitisation is essential. In this paper, we present multidisciplinary international research that, implicating around 40 university teachers and 300 students, aimed to approach this necessity through the design and evaluation of an innovative pedagogical protocol. Our text serves two purposes: to reflect on the effectiveness of photovoice to increase the student’s awareness of SeGReV; and to introduce and exemplify the specificity of Feminist Activist Research (FAR), a methodological approach that rises from the intersection of Action Research, Activist Research and Feminist epistemology. We will show how the applied approach of our project, the production of training materials, and other disseminative actions, proved to be a valuable practice for increasing the SeGReV awareness of university students. In this sense, becomes clear that photovoice can be an important ally, as it is an extremely useful technique both on a pedagogical level and as a research instrument. Last but not least, we exemplify the adequacy and peculiarity of FAR as a research approach.

Disability studies in war and care: How to do work otherwise? A conversation between anthropology‐and‐disability‐studies scholars in relation to Russia's invasion of Ukraine

AbstractThis piece weaves together the voices of four feminist disability studies scholars and anthropologists whose work has been profoundly shaped by Russia's war of aggression. Composed via a dialogic encounter, it is based on a panel presentation on the topic of disability studies in war and care that took place at the University of Massachusetts Amherst just before the 1‐year mark of the full‐scale invasion. We came together to share insights and consider the best ways to practice horizontal solidarity, our approach inspired by recent work on feminist epistemology and methodology and scholarship on care, and disability studies. The text assumes a dialogic form, presenting our reflections as well as the contexts that shape our knowledge production and sharing the process of scaffolding our “Dis‐Fem” conversation. In dialogue with the decolonizing discussions that animate feminist, anthropological, and Slavic Studies, as well as critical disability scholarship, it centers on the work of Ukrainian scholar‐activists associated with the organization of people with disabilities (OPD) Fight For Right. In foregrounding their work, it traces the creative ways they've mobilized data and the experimental and collaborative data practices they've harnessed. Finally, it asks questions about trans‐local solidarities we can enact and ways we might forge novel, “otherwise” ways to collaborate.

Centering Latinx students in STEM education research through pláticas methodology

Pláticas methodology is introduced in this article to advance the centering of Latinx researchers and Latinx students in STEM research. As an increase in Latinx educational researchers enter academia, engaging an appropriate epistemology and methodology that is culturally relevant and race-centered is key in the ongoing STEM education research which aims to diversify and create equitable outcomes for Students of Color. This article draws from a study with 24 Latinx STEM students and 48 pláticas. An overview of pláticas methodology, Chicana/Latina Feminist Epistemology, along with an examination of the principles of pláticas methodology in STEM education. This article is timely as the Latinx student population and Hispanic-Serving Institutions are growing in higher education. This article places emphasizes reframing methodology to provide a culturally relevant and holistic methodology to engage Latinx Students and advance STEM education research focusing on Latinx students.

Critically Discuss Some of The Ways in Which Feminist Epistemology Offers a Challenge to Certain Traditional Philosophical Approaches to Knowledge. What Might Be the Educational Implications of These Challenges?

This essay mainly depicts how feminist epistemology challenges the traditional epistemology in three aspects, which are feminist standpoint, feminist postmodernism, and feminist empiricism (Anderson,2000). The feminist standpoint represents views of women, and the knowledge of women are epistemically advantageous than those of men in many spheres of life, because women in subordinated or suppressed positions for centuries can acquire some unique viewpoints that men ignore. Therefore, women's ideas are worthy of recognition and respect, and women should be encouraged to share their thoughts and knowledge. The feminist postmodernism emphasizes that the society needs to devote much attention to the voice of women from minority, low-salary group, low social class. This theory reveals that feminist epistemologists not only strive for privileged women’s rights but also fights for the rights of minority, financially disadvantageous women. The feminist empiricism emphasizes that women’s experience as the reliable knowledge contributes to the society (Anderson,2000). However, these three above-mentioned theories challenge certain traditional philosophical approaches to knowledge, and this essay will show how this occurs. Besides, this essay will show some educational implications of these challenges.

For a more reflexive and humanistic scientific education: the contribution of Sandra Harding’s critical view of science

This text aims to present a synthesis of the main ideas of Sandra Harding’s critical feminist epistemology of science, with the aim of integrating these ideas into science education for the development of more reflective, humanistic citizens resistant to any form of discrimination. Some contemporary epistemological views are brought into dialogue, with the goal of inspiring students and teachers in basic education to rethink stereotypical conceptions of science that still persist today. Given the complexity and theoretical scope of Harding’s analysis, we focus on one of her main works and some articles. We hope that the concepts and layers discussed here can stimulate debates about feminist thought and encourage some teachers to discuss aspects of epistemology and the history of science in their science classes, bringing different perspectives to the process of scientific evolution.