SE01 E04: Tracking Epistemic Violence
Kristin 0:01
Anna
Anna 0:02
Kristin.
Kristin 0:03
How are you?
Anna 0:05
I'm so Well, How are you?
Kristin 0:07
Good. I'm so happy to be back at podcasting with you.
Anna 0:11
Yes, me too. So nice to be back.
Kristin 0:15
Western philosophers have separated the mind and body. And here on thinking bodies. We are pulling on the threads that have always held them together. And to do this, we are crowdsourcing voice clips to discuss works in feminist philosophy that deserve more attention. Our podcast collages with these clips as a feminist DIY experiment.
Anna 0:40
Or a doing-it-together experiment DIT.
Kristin 0:43
That's right. I keep forgetting it's a do it together podcast. Sharing the sounds of feminist philosophy.
Anna 0:51
I’m Anna Mudde. I’m on the Lands of the Nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda peoples, of the Michif/Métis nation, also called “Pile o’ Bones.”
Kristin: And I'm Kristin Rodier recording today and Amiskwaciwâskahikan, homelands of the Plains Cree, the Woodland Cree, The Beaver Cree, The Ojibwe and the Métis. Also called Beaver Hills House.
So, Anna, for this episode, I did something a little different to get our clips. I talked to two contributors and asked them some questions and kind of put together with their permission, of course, put together some sound for us to think with and to think about. Kristie Dotson's amazing work from 2011 “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing”, such an important paper.
Anna 1:46
Such an important paper.
Catherine Clune-Taylor 1:51
My name is Catherine Clune-Taylor.
Jorge Sanchez Perez 1:54
My name is Jorge Sanchez-Perez.
Kristin 2:05
So can we do violence to someone by failing to recognize them as knowers?
Another way to ask this is to think of your own experience. Have you felt silenced? when? What was it like? And when you feel like you're taking a risk against this silencing is some of that silencing coming from yourself? How is this an issue for philosophy? And how good are all of us at recognizing and being sensitive to others as knowers?
Anna 2:46
These are such great questions. I think this is such an important topic, and I'm so glad that I get to talk about it with you in particular. Kristie Dotson's work is universally important in philosophy, and this is a beautiful piece of that work.
Kristin 3:03
Yeah. And I really like that we're getting this in as our third full episode on epistemology, which is, I think, something a little bit out of my comfort zone maybe.
But Kristie Dotson's work and you'll see this from what our contributors submitted is just doing amazing work, thinking about the discipline of philosophy. So doing that meta philosophy of what is philosophy? How can we reform our understanding of what philosophy is? So there's two other really important papers that our contributors reference and that we might draw on even. One is called “How is This Paper Philosophy?”
Anna 3:44
Such a great paper. Yeah, such a great title.
Kristin 3:47
Ya. A lot of us get asked that. And so it's really calling for this justification of are you a real philosopher?
Anna 3:54
Yep.
Kristin 3:56
Do I have to think along with you and your ideas? And so it kind of fits into these ideas of practices, of silencing and dismissal. And in the very discipline that houses all these ideas that we love.
Anna 4:09
Yes, exactly.
Kristin 4:10
Another paper, also from 2011, is “Concrete Flowers Contemplating the Profession of Philosophy.”
She's doing amazing work on epistemic violence and how it affects the discipline, which to me is so cool!
Anna 4:29
When I was thinking about this piece and when I reread it again to do this episode, I was really sort of struck by how much this piece kind of allows us to think about silencing, the silencing of our speech, the silencing of our actions, or silencing the ways that we might put certain ideas both in philosophy and outside of philosophy. I was thinking a lot about masking, and that's certainly something that I experience a lot of.
And I also think a lot in philosophy about being a good audience like what we owe to one another. And what do we owe to the discipline of philosophy if we take seriously the idea that it's important to have a wide variety of people in the discipline, because different people know different things, and I'm often so greedy about wanting to have access to other people's knowledge? And when people are silenced or when they're even kept out of certain spaces entirely, which is a different kind of silencing, we don't we don't get those opportunities. And it makes me really sad.
Kristin 5:40
In that article on “Concrete Flowers Contemplating the Profession”, Dotson brings up this question that gets offered in response to what you were saying about why we should diversify. So, why should philosophers try to diversify? And it's this kind of overly skeptical, hostile kind of question. And we're going to talk about this overly critical, skeptical stance and posture a little bit later. But she really flips that over and sort of says a better question would be why should diverse people ever commit to careers in academic philosophy, especially if they're going to be asked to justify why their ideas ought to be included. You know, I want to just read a little bit from that piece. She goes on to this question, the question of why diverse people should come to academic philosophy. “To this question, I have no universal answer. Responses would vary from person to person. By far, the best question to ask is can professional philosophy provide an environment that can sustain those who do commit to a career in academic philosophy, professionally and personally? My short answer is probably not. As the conditions stand, the diverse practitioner philosophy is like a concrete flower. A concrete flower is essentially a weed that grows between the cracks of poured concrete, as in a sidewalk. Sometimes the crack is so small the flower appears to be growing directly out of the concrete. I have seen several that look to be growing seemingly from nowhere. A couple of things are distinctive about these flowers. They give the impression of being strong survivors after all. And often they and often they alone have managed to grow through concrete. On closer inspection, however, many concrete flowers are fragile and clearly starved for basic nutrients.” So it's just kind of interesting because really looking at that environment of philosophy as a place that rejects diversity is going to be a theme.
Anna 7:46
Yeah, I think too, about that example as sometimes we talk about the climate and philosophy.
Kristin 7:52
Hmm.
Anna 7:53
This isn't so much the climate as the terrain that she's drawing our attention to. But of course, those things are not always very distinguishable. It's a really nice way to talk about the kind of challenge that being in professional philosophy is for lots of folks.
Kristin 8:15
I think a lot of times we talk about oppression and, you know, that's one of the basic areas of inquiry in feminist philosophy is what is oppression, what are its operations, what does it affect and why and how, you know, to try to undo it. It's a justice perspective. But if we want to say things about, you know, actually this is patterned, and this is repetitive, and this is systemic, and this is how it's working, we need to be able to make knowledge claims about experiences, right, about structures. And that's why this article is so important, is because it talks about ways that those knowledge claims get undermined.
Anna 8:57
Yeah.Yep
Kristin 8:57
And talks about undermining not just as sort of I could know X, but I don't know X, but is actually a harm.
Anna 9:07
Yeah.
Kristin 9:07
It’s one of the harms of oppression. Right? We rob ourselves of knowledge, but we also harm the knower. Here we're talking about, you know, ignorance not just as a gap, but as a kind of productive ignorance that harms.
Anna 9:22
Yeah, Yeah. And just what I was saying earlier, now that you put it that way. As soon as I said it, I thought, that's not quite right. I am. I am greedy. And also, it is not the job of people who are really harmed to give me that knowledge either. This is another part, perhaps, of being what Dotson will describe as a good audience member, a competent audience member, which will get to talk about.
Kristin 9:49
Yeah. Maybe you were already seeing that coming, calling yourself greedy.
Anna 9:54
Yes.
Kristin 9:54
As Kind of a moral vice.
Anna 9:55
Yes, I think I was. Yes. Yes.
Kristin 9:59
I also think about how intertwined it is, what our theory of knowledge is, and how we allow knowledge to manifest in the world.
Anna 10:14
Maybe I'll just talk a little bit about epistemology. I mean, it's a bit more my comfort zone maybe than it is for you. All I can say is a little bit about that. So philosophers who study knowledge epistemologists have traditionally asked questions like What is knowledge? It's a good philosophical question. How do I know if I know something?
If I just happened to be right about something? Do we say that I know it? And when is a thought knowledge and not just an opinion or a belief? And those. Those questions are thought to be questions about knowledge itself.
Kristin 10:53
Yeah. If you want to light me on fire, tell me that something is just my opinion.
10:54-11:07
Laughter
Kristin 11:08
Let me go on a rant. Yeah. And so there's this idea that knowledge is true, justified belief, right? Usually, we take this isolated atomistic claim and we say it's knowledge it's divorced from the knower and the context. It's always like, Oh gosh, I remember being a student and it was all about, you know, this piece of chalk, right? There's so much epistemology of the piece of chalk.
Anna 11:37
So much epistemology of the chalk.
Kristin 11:38
Now it's whiteboard markers.
Anna 11:41
Right.
Kristin 11:42
As you know, it was sort of like this chalk is white And Lorraine Code, who wrote What Can She Know? (1991). This amazing, groundbreaking book on feminist epistemology, who is also your supervisor?
Anna 11:56
She was. Yeah,
Kristin 11:56
So we've got an amazing intellectual network going on here.
Anna 12:00
Yeah.
Kristin 12:00
Lorraine Code formulated this understanding of epistemology as kind of S knows that P, Right?
Anna 12:08
Yeah,
Kristin 12:08
Epistemology. So S is a knower. P is the proposition and then Code called these claims, like the chalk is white as a “propositional simple.” Right?
Anna 12:19
Yeah.
Kristin 12:19
And S, that knower S, could be anyone.
Anna 12:25
We are interchangeable. Yeah.
Kristin 12:27
Yes. Don't ask about S!
Anna 12:30
Right.
Kristin 12:30
S has no history, no personality, no social context.
Anna 12:35
No features whatsoever, except that they know.
Kristin 12:37
They know something.
Anna 12:38
Yes. They know something.
Kristin 12:40
They are a pure knower.
Anna 12:43
Pure knower, yeah.
Kristin 12:43
Who they are, and don't have any connection to what they know.
Anna 12:46
Right.
Kristin 12:46
Right. And if it does, then that's actually a bad thing.
Anna 12:49
It's a bad thing. That's right because that is taken to compromise knowledge in some way. Yeah.
Kristin 12:54
Yeah.
Anna 12:54
Which is very peculiar, actually. Which is partly what the Lorraine Code is pointing out. And feminist philosophers did start to take that idea seriously and started asking additional kinds of questions like, who is taken to be a credible knower and why are they taken to be credible, not just in terms of like what their mental states are like, but how they are positioned or, you know, what their rules are. They ask questions like, Why are some people generally thought not to be competent or credible knowers? And why are those people very often also members of marginalized groups?
Kristin 13:31
So these questions are about the knower, the knower who knows something. It's way more complicated than you know. The chalk is white.
Anna 13:42
Right.
Kristin 13:43
They're telling us something about an experience of oppression. And you know that takes time and care and attention to really surface that kind of knowledge. But. But how else are we going to understand how oppression works? So what we end up with there is that that area of knowledge is thinking about epistemic justice. So how do I do justice to someone as a knower?
Anna 14:06
Right? Yeah. And so part of that is instead of thinking about those like propositional simples, we think about at the very least propositional simplesin a greater context. That is the context of knowing. Thinking about epistemic justice is a really rich way to think about the contexts in which we know things or are taken to know things or not know things. And so Dotson's really working in that later area of epistemology. And her question is about what role the audience plays and whether or not someone is taken seriously as a knower. So what is it like to know that your knowledge or testimony isn't being met by an audience who is competent to understand it or competent to understand you as a knower? We can also ask those questions about epistemic violence. That's a term that comes from Gayatri Spivak. Epistemic violence involves harm to someone's, Spivak says. Ability to speak and be heard. And so what is that epistemic violence like? And what are the outcomes of that epistemic violence?
Kristin 15:19
I was talking to Catherine Clune-Taylor, one of our contributors. I'm going to snag an anecdote out of that discussion and just play it for you. I want to hear what you think.
Anna 15:32
Fantastic.
Catherine Clune-Taylor 15:34
It actually makes me think of a totally different example of this guy named this man from the history of medicine named Ignaz Semmelweis. And Semmelweis is well known for having come up with germ theory about ten years early and tried to explain to other people that he thought there were these invisible things on our bodies and suggested, like actually did have data suggested that maybe physicians who wash their hands in between delivering babies or treating patients like maybe less women would die after childbirth of a fever, but it was at a period of time where no one was really willing to hear what he had to say. And ultimately he was sent to an asylum and died in the asylum. Right. And was sent to an asylum and seen as irrational because he was talking about these invisible things in people's hands. Right. Even though ten years later, the community, the medical community, would be more willing and open to hearing that kind of claim.
Anna 16:46
I love Semmelweis. It's a sad story, but also such an interesting story. I love that Catherine's bringing this to this particular conversation because what an excellent example of having a compromised ability to speak and be heard, and that someone who was in a relatively otherwise privileged situation, he was a doctor.
Kristin 17:11
Yeah. And he's being dismissed as essentially “crazy.”
Anna 17:16
Right.
Kristin 17:16
They had to work to suppress what he knew.
Anna 17:23
Yeah. It was active. That always tells us something, doesn't it? Like when we have to work at these sorts of suppressions that often tells us something about what is known, but also who is claiming knowledge.
Kristin 17:41
Hmm. Why don't you start us off with just this excellent definition from the Dotson article about epistemic violence,
Anna 17:53
All right. Dotson says, “Epistemic violence is a failure of an audience to communicate, to fully reciprocate, either intentionally or unintentionally, early in linguistic exchanges owing to pernicious ignorance. Pernicious ignorance is a reliable ignorance or a counterfactual incompetence that in a given context is harmful.”
Kristin 18:15
It's very harmful to not have germ theory.
Anna 18:18
Yes. It is extremely harmful not to have germ theory.
Kristin 18:22
So what I like to break down here is this idea that the violence that's done is connected to harm, and the harm is a result of this failure. So the audience. Right. I mean, epistemic violence is done by the audience of the knower.
Anna 18:45
Right. Which is so important.
Kristin 18:47
This notion of communicative reciprocation.
Anna 18:51
Yes.
Kristin 18:51
So what that means, what I like about that is it puts. To go back to the S knows that P. It's kind of S knows that P in the audience of Y, right?
Anna 19:04
Yeah.
Kristin 19:04
Like, I know we're keeping that formula, but we're basically saying that there's an essential relational social component. And so the way that Dotson frames it is that the audience and the speaker are in this relation where the speaker gives voice to something. And the audience needs to hear it and take it seriously. And in that sort of back and forth, the speaker is very vulnerable. they depend on the audience to meet that vulnerability so that that knowledge can come forth. And it can't come forth really without that.
Anna 19:45
Dotson talks about how that is the case for everyone who speaks. We are all dependent and vulnerable in this way. And this reminds me of a piece that we looked at in our first episode by Sue Campbell. She talks about our relational dependency for the communication of emotion, and Dotson's thinking here about our relational dependency in order for knowledge to be communicated and in a sense, for knowledge to come to be knowledge. That sort of communication about knowledge is what epistemologists often call testimony. And Dotson's pointing out that in order for my testimony to be communicated, I need a certain kind of audience. So I really love this resonance that's like developing between these two accounts.
Kristin 20:37
Mm hmm. And even looking into Dotson's article she is citing Sue Campbell.
Anna 20:44
Right? Yeah.
Kristin 20:45
So cool. Dotson is citing Sue Campbell as one of many people writing specifically on ignorance as the production of unknowing. For Campbell, if we don't have any social uptake of our feelings, we don't, in a way, get to have them. But then we don't get to have authority over them.
Anna 21:08
Yeah.
Kristin 21:08
Right. We aren't able to speak what we know. And this, to me, puts together the two pieces in a way, as I'm not just like, obviously, I want to have my feelings, and I want someone to help me understand them, but I also want someone to take them seriously when I report them.
Anna 21:26
Yeah.
Kristin 21:27
Right. So you can sort of damage a person's agency over time, and so I was thinking about maybe revisiting kind of a key insight from that episode and revisiting what Amy Harbin had to say
Ami Harbin 21:42
Taking other people's feelings seriously and being a good interpreter for them matters deeply, all the way to the level of creating and finding significance in our lives. I love this in part because, for me, philosophy has always been about helping all of us, you know, find and create significance in our lives. That's part of the reason that I care about philosophy at all, because I think it helps us do that. And so this claim from Campbell that actually one big way that we help others do that is by being sympathetic interpreters for their feelings, right? Actually, hearing them and witnessing them rather than dismissing them. I feel like that really shows the importance of doing that, that the power of responding well to other people's expressions of feelings.
Kristin 22:33
The power of responding well to other people's expressions of feelings. We are in a power relation.
Anna 22:42
Yeah. I like the sort of thought about reciprocity here as well. And I was thinking about the fact that right when we're when we're sharing feelings or when we're sharing what we know, there's a sense in which. Right. It might not be immediately apparent what that reciprocity is. Because you're right, you're sharing with me, and I don't know the thing, and I'm the audience, but the reciprocity in part comes by my being able to judge, first of all, whether or not you are a knower, right? So to meet you in a reciprocal way that way, but also to know how to take up what you are saying to me in a way that responds well to you as Ami's putting it, as opposed to dismissing you. And that requires competence. It's a skill, actually, and an important one.
Kristin 23:38
You're talking about. You're talking about S.
Anna 23:41
Yes.
Kristin 23:43
And what S needs to be good at.
Anna 23:43
Yes, that's right
Anna 23:43
S is not very good at these things. We have to learn in the same way. We have to like to learn how to communicate knowledge. We have to, right, seemingly learn how to be an audience and, yeah, to know how to do that skillfully. And Dotson’s work is a really beautiful kind of description of what happens when that's not the case but also gives us some insight into what that might look like.
Kristin 24:10
So I really love how Dotson frames this as the audience has to meet our dependence needs.
Anna 24:16
Yeah. And I mean, I love that because, at a very basic level, it recognizes that human beings are dependent on one another. When we don't meet one another's needs, we are harmed.
Kristin 24:30
And Dotson gives a list here of different kinds of harms.
Anna 24:35
Yes.
Kristin 24:36
I think I mentioned confidence, but also.
Anna 24:39
Yeah, they like intellectual courage, which maybe like that's a way to. To talk about confidence. So Miranda Fricker talks about the ways that not being not being taken as a knower are experiencing epistemic violence often is a harm to one's intellectual courage. The courage to speak again, or the courage to even think about yourself as a knower. Cynthia Townley talks about the harm to someone's epistemic agency. This sense that you are not able to effectively communicate, and then Patricia Hill Collins famously talks about the ways that epistemic violence and silencing constitute harms to entire intellectual traditions, entire groups of people.
Kristin 25:28
And, you know, these harms are context dependent. So, you know, we need to know a lot about our social worlds.
Anna 25:35
Yeah.
Kristin 25:35
So, we have to become curious, listen, analyze, and think critically. We need to understand power relations in history in order to help other people's knowledge come forth.
Anna 25:50
Right,
Kristin 25:50
So, you know, we have a duty to meet that need. I think it's brilliant because we usually have this direct realist understanding of harm, as though if there's harm, I'm going to see it. You know, it may be immediately perceptible and straightforward.
I think we should hear from Jorge Sanchez Perez and get his perspective on the Dotson article. So I'm going to play that clip for you.
Anna 26:18
Perfect, amazing.
Jorge Sanchez Perez 26:19
Hi, my name is Jorge Sanchez Perez. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Alberta. My areas of work are social epistemology, social and political philosophy, legal philosophy, Latin American philosophy. I am originally from Peru, but I've been living in Canada for a while.
My first interactions or awareness of this article came by my general interest in understanding philosophy because Dotson has interesting material in you know, addressing the question What is philosophy? How is this paper philosophy, etc? Right? And then I became an epistemology lecturer because that is under my direction to make it not just about formal Western epistemology. I just do that the first two or three weeks. From there, I move on to feminist epistemology, of which epistemic violence is a core issue because we end up discussing testimonial evidence and testimonial justice and injustice. The idea that there could be a form of violence that are not physical seems to resonate with a lot of students because they seem to have grown up in an environment where things like these are more obvious to them. Social media, for all its problems and challenges, gives people a chance to actually express these views of being neglected, of being discriminated against, of being unheard on purpose.
I was thinking of how to give a student an example of epistemic violence. And one of these examples in my own life was when I was giving a talk at a conference in the United States that was a comparative analysis between Latin American philosophy and Indigenous philosophy from Latin America. And I started the talk saying, by the way, this talk is going to presuppose that Indigenous people from Latin America can have philosophical thought. I can give many answers to questions about how to justify this. I can even go back to Aquinas. I can give many examples historically informed, but at the end of the day, that would derail the conversation. So if you're not comfortable with that, you can just leave. And I say that in a cheeky manner, but it actually sets the tone because at least two people stood up and left because they weren't willing to engage in a conversation that seemed to challenge certain assumptions about what some humans can or cannot do. And in this sense, they are even unwilling to engage with their own assumption that Indigenous people can have something like philosophy. So it's very interesting how testimony can be disregarded from the beginning because it doesn't track some of the hearer’s assumptions. The paper also engages a little bit with Charles Mills’ view of willful ignorance. Right.
There's a connection there that is very interesting to draw because one of the most ignorant groups that I engage with are academics in the United States, but in which way their ignorance is not about their fields of study, but many times about the history of their own country. I met these academics from the United States, trained at Harvard, Yale, etc. I met them at a conference, and I mentioned the Plan Cóndor, for example, which was the CIA plan to eliminate political leaders in Latin America for decades, and torture techniques and all that well-known across Latin America about how the US has effectively changed and intervened in politics in Latin America for decades, and they were unaware of it. It's as if I had just shattered a worldview, they were like, our country does that? And we're talking about people who are trained at top institutions in the world and who work at top institutions in the world, but they're just unaware of the social complexities and the privileges that they have to the degree where they don't really want to understand the reason why cheap grapes are available during winter. So all those things seem to be connected to this idea of being willfully ignorant about things, about society.
And just to give another example that might track that, one of the most famous political philosophers in the analytic tradition, John Rawls, wrote that the main issue of justice when it comes to circumstances of justice is a scarcity of resources. Race and gender are not that big of a deal because if we fix the scarcity of resources, that is going to be the big issue of liberal democracies in the West. In the same year that he published A Theory of Justice (1971), the FBI declared that the Black Panthers in the United States were the largest threat to the U.S. security. So these detachment of the realities of race, tensions, politics, etc. seems to inform a lot of academia seems to be the backbone of a lot of academic careers.
Okay. Let me give you an example of the reciprocity that Dotson talks about, which seems to be a cornerstone of effective communication. I'm thinking of lectures where I'm teaching about philosophy of race. I have many students there. I would say most of them because the current course I'm teaching is a high level seminar. It seems most of the students there are actually quite interested in the topic, and they seem to be making the effort into engaging with things that they have been engaging in before. For example, in order to understand debates about race, we have to understand a bit of Marxist theory. And to do that, we need to understand a bit of Hegelian theory, which is hard to explain, right? I'm not an expert. I had my training in those fields, but I tried to convey those hard elements to students that haven’t had exposition on those topics, particularly in how they connect with issues of race. Yet the students seem quite willing and eager to engage with them because they know that there's meaningfulness in these, and they see me as a valid interlocutor, as a professor that can give them the proper information to do that right. And in that sense, I think that classrooms where you have engaged students become a good example of reciprocity.
Okay. Let's talk a little bit about smothering in that scenario. The one described by Dotson, the personal element seems to come to the forefront quite easily. It's not necessarily a kind of self-censorship, but it resembles that, and it seems to be a mechanism of survival, right? For example, it comes from Sara Ahmed's idea. For Ahmed, when a person of colour raises a problem, they are the problem. But on the other hand, if people with marginalized identities don't take risks. They don't really get to challenge the status quo. And I had this very interesting conversation with Charles Mills once where I complained about how I was being forced to learn about Kant and Rawls when they clearly had nothing to say about my interest in global justice and colonialism. He basically said,” Well, you have to suck it up, otherwise they won't listen to you.” You have to become an expert in these things, and you have to take the risk to call them out. Otherwise, it just won't happen. And I take that to heart, which was something like advice that I would get from my mother, “suck it up and move on.” But without taking the risk, it's really hard to change how things operate.
Now, of course, this is a high demand, right? Testimonial smothering is a thing because it protects many people, right? But I have grown also because I was raised as a male in a patriarchal society. So I am less averse to risk than other people. So, I ended up in the Easter Island with no money for a week and just being taken care of by the Rapa Nui people. Why? Because I made really poor decisions, but because I was allowed to take risks in that sort of sheltered environment. And that might have trickled down to philosophy where I'm willing to take risks that sometimes other people don't feel comfortable taking.
Anna 36:27
So the last thing that Jorge saying is really interesting. The situation of the knower really does matter. And of course, that's really complex. Right? There would be for all of us, I suspect, places and spaces where we are inclined to take risks and those where we're less inclined to take risks. Classrooms are really interesting places for possibilities of reciprocity and in part because I suspect sometimes those of us who are not taken to be credible, knowers are taken to be credible knowers in part, I suspect, because like I don't know, we're up at the front of the room and we have like doctor in front of our name or whatever it is, but whatever those things are, they do tend to lend at least an initial reciprocity.
But I think his point there is maybe deeper than that, because it's still the case that in classrooms, students do have to be good audiences, so maybe classrooms are interesting places, too, because hopefully many of us go into those spaces thinking “I have something I need to learn.” I also want to say, like, many of our colleagues are not met with reciprocity precisely because of how they're racialized, what their gender is like, their ability or disability, all of those things.
Kristin 37:46
Mm hmm. You know, he talks a lot about testimonial smothering. So smothering is this way that one can detect a context is unsafe or risky, and that's kind of to me, the difference in his remarks about the classroom versus the conference presentation. Right. So the conference presentation feels like a feeding frenzy sometimes where power and, you know, smackdowns and all kinds of stuff like that. And I'm really interested in Jorge's technique of basically saying these are my assumptions, and you can leave if you don't want to be a part of it. I think that that's, you know, really just to say I'm aware how the audience needs to meet my vulnerabilities as a speaker here. And if you're not going to do it, just go, you know, don't waste my time, your time.
And Jorge is picking up on another aspect of testimony, testimonial, smothering, which is when you detect that your audience will not understand. And I think he has good reason to think about going into a conference presentation and talking about Indigenous philosophies, given what Dotson calls the monochromatic image of philosophy. And so going up against that, you know, there's going to be microaggressions, that there's going to be a lack of understanding, that there's going to be practices of silencing, you know, epistemic violence. These failures of the audience due to a pernicious ignorance. We have to talk about that pernicious ignorance. It's reliable. It's harmful. It takes place in the context of power relations. And it's one of these act of unknowings. And so it makes sense on Dotson's view here too, I guess, smother your own testimony, to withhold your own testimony,
Anna 39:43
Because not only do you know what you know, you also know that some people don't know. And either they're not going to listen or hear very well or. Yeah, they're going to do things that are harmful to you as a knower.
Kristin 39:57
Yeah. And one of the examples that Dotson uses in the article about testimonial smothering is so interesting, so rich, and so layered. She's drawing on Cassandra Byers Harvin, giving this anecdote of a white woman approaching a black woman in a library, and she's doing some reading. the white woman asks, you know what she's researching? And Harvin says about raising black sons in society. And the white woman responds, “How is that any different from raising white sons?” And well, let's read Dotson's analysis of this.
Anna 40:39
“This is a situation where the audience of potential testimony demonstrated through a racial microaggression testimonial incompetence, racial microaggressions take on different forms. One of the forms is micro and validations. A micro invalidation is characterized by a communications that exclude, negate or nullify the psychological thoughts, feelings, or experiential reality of a person of colour. The unnecessarily skeptical question ‘Oh, how is this different?’ Can operate to effectively negate the experiential reality of many people of colour. The insult, which is carried not only by the question but also by the tone of the question, indicates a testimonial incompetence on the part of the audience with respect to potential testimony on the difficulties of raising black sons in a U.S. context. As Harvin demonstrates in this encounter, the perception of her audience as testimonial and competence with respect to the potential topic of discussion. Led this encounter to be a prime example of ‘a conversation she couldn't have’.”
Kristin 41:46
Oh, I just really love that way of saying, "Demonstrates a testimonial incompetence." The audience? In the audience?
Anna 41:55
And I mean, thinking back to Jorge, his example of being at that conference, I think about the people who stayed, who were also…there would have been some of those people who are still incompetent.
Kristin 42:09
Hmm.
Anna 42:10
There's part of me that says, Well, those people who left were at least right, at least they knew that they were not the right people. But when we stay in those situations, you're alluding to this earlier, right? We have to sort of know things about ourselves, not as we would like them to be, but as they are. not just knowing ourselves but being curious about our capacities. And right listening to someone at a conference can often be an exercise in kind of knowing our limits as a good audience member, one of the things Dotson says, Is that right? Being a good audience member, a competent audience member is knowing when you don't know enough to judge whether someone is a competent knower.
Kristin 42:55
A connection that I see between this example and Dotson's larger body of work is in calling out and putting under a microscope specific aspects of the culture of academic philosophy as being about critique. So, in describing this question as sort of unnecessarily skeptical, right? It starts from an assumption that this person doesn't know what they're saying. It starts from an assumption that this person has to convince me.
Anna 43:33
Right.
Kristin 43:35
Right. I am owed a convincing. And so philosophers, I think, often take this on as a kind of gold standard of philosophy, which is “I'm a blank slate, and it's your job to sort of convince me.” And as you articulated the argument, it's my job to poke holes into it. Right. To me, when it comes to the part of my being that is about being in community and relational and all that stuff, it's just so and to the article, to that form of philosophy as critique
Anna 44:10
Yes.
Kristin 44:10
And how are we ever going to build knowledge that that tells us how oppression works and how our social worlds work if we take this fundamentally relationally hostile approach,
Anna 44:23
As you're saying that I'm thinking about the ways that question-asking can be part of precisely that relational approach. That sounds really interesting. I don't know much about that. What are you discovering? Like, tell me all the things right?
Kristin 44:39
There's this sort of liberal mirage that we are these self-sufficient, independent knowers.
Anna 44:48
Right?
Kristin 44:49
But this actually says, "No, no. You are embedded in relations of power, social worlds, and histories, and that affects how you're able to meet the dependent needs of a speaker in a particular interaction. That doesn't just take introspection."
Anna 45:09
Yes.
Kristin 45:10
So let's talk a little bit about testimonial quieting because quieting is a little different than testimonial smothering. It's a practice of silencing that is, again, owing to a pernicious ignorance. It's reliable, it causes harm, but it's not so much about an individual withholding testimony. It's more about these sort of larger systems that just kind of judge things from the outset as not not knowledge. And so they're not perfectly distinguishable. I think there's a dimension to both and in a lot of circumstances. But the testimonial quieting, she's really drawing on Patricia HIll Collins's work on controlling images, stereotypes and controlling images and how those work to specifically those stereotypes of black women work to silence and control them. The testimonial quieting fails to identify the speaker as a knower. You know, I think this might be a good place to listen to Catherine Clune-Taylor talk about Dotson's article.
Catherine Clune-Taylor 46:19
My name is Catherine Clune-Taylor. I am an assistant professor in the program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. I love teaching this piece. Dotson is really taking time and rigorous care here to give us a framework for making sense of phenomena that folks had acknowledged was around for a long time. Right? There was already this understanding that members of marginalized communities experienced a kind of testimonial asymmetry. Right. And to me, it was actually a lot of experiences that I had in graduate school.
As a philosopher, you know, I think that for many of us marginalized folks who are in philosophy, graduate programs, because traditionally philosophy is fairly narrow in terms of how it defines itself. Many of us end up being what Dotson actually talks about in other work of hers as diverse practitioners, right? That we're not necessarily folks who are often turning to the traditional literature or turning to folks generally recognized within the canon because we just find that that work isn't necessarily helpful for us. I often found that it was in those contexts that I had to engage in a kind of testimonial smothering, right? Like there were issues that I wouldn't raise in particular classes, in part because even though we were all there as philosophers and in theory, we were all supposed to be open to each other's arguments and others experiences, I could tell that they were not necessarily people who were willing and capable of hearing what I needed to say, whether it was, you know, talking about experiences of injustice, for example, that are very traditional moral philosophers were not really dealing with or whether it was speaking to the kind of epistemic asymmetries within philosophy itself. I knew that to kind of bring those kinds of claims in the room was to make myself vulnerable. I often engaged in that kind of silencing in those spaces. I would keep those arguments to have with people who I did feel like were able to hear me in that way, but it often was not in the classroom. It was finding my own community outside of it.
I think with regards to teaching this paper, I find that often it is her discussion of testimonial smothering and it's a real revelation in terms of thinking about this as an epistemic harm. Often they might think about this as like being strategic, right? So like, I, you know, I know that, like, my dad is sexist, so I'm not going to, like, make a feminist argument about abortion, even though I do really want to, like, engage him in this discussion to try to, like, swing his the way he's going to vote. I find the revelation, and sometimes the thing that can be difficult for me to deal with is to recognize that as a form of epistemic injustice and realize that actually that is a kind of harm, right? In that same way that like having the feminist revelations can make being in the world harder.
I'll give you a very concrete example of this. I'm working on a piece right now, an article where I want to talk about the way in which I think that, in the context of intersex medicine, there's been a conceptual collapse between evidence based medicine on the one hand and ethical medicine on the other. So an assumption has kind of come to concretize that as long as you have good evidence, like as long as you have high quality, reliable evidence with regards to your clinical outcomes, then you have ethical medicine. So we grant that for a diabetic, the ethical aim of care is to regulate and manage their blood sugar so that they don't have very large changes. And so we, we grant that like the aim of diabetic management is decreasing diabetic mortality and morbidity. Right. And then what becomes like ethical practice is what does the evidence indicate is the best treatment option? But there's an ethical consensus that comes first. Like, what do we think is moral in this case? There has been a real silencing of anyone who wants to talk about the ethics of intersex care or intersex surgery, in particular, but who isn't bringing data. And so you'll see in the debates that go back and forth in the clinical journal articles where people will say, " well, what you have is just anecdotal. You want to talk about like morality and that, you know, some people who are unhappy with having had surgery, but that's just anecdote. We need data. We need evidence. And so what that has led to is that it means that many individual intersex people who want to talk about their experiences are being silenced because they are not bringing scientific data. They're just seen as like not the right kind of knowers to be part of this discussion.
And actually, I will say intersex folks are silenced in a variety of different ways in the context of intersex medicine, whether it's being positioned as activists, right, or as radicals or as, you know, a vocal minority of people who had bad outcomes. But there's also this other thing that's going on where it's like we're just going to silence anyone who isn't bringing data to the table, which can also then include ethicists, right, or parents. I think that often in very traditional epistemology, we think of the speaker as almost like being able to bring in knowledge into existence by fiat, like just by saying it, like they have this kind of pure agency where I'm like, no, my agency in this regard is very much dependent upon others.
Anna 53:03
Fantastic. Catherine is talking about having conversations about those things that might be relevant but that she didn't think she could raise in classrooms outside of classrooms. Maybe sometimes being a good audience is to also be able to read silences, not because you know what the content is, but because I might be sitting in a room with Catherine and our other classmates and think, I bet Catherine has something to say right now. And she's not not saying it. If we develop that kind of capacity for thinking about or noticing when people might be quieting themselves, that might be another skill of an audience member.
Kristin 53:43
Yeah, I think articulating those skills and being deliberate in cultivating them. It is an important part of epistemic justice. You know, I asked both of these both of our contributors in my discussions with them, I asked both of them, you know, what would it take for some of this to go right. We sort of talked about these tools and skills and also just sort of, “learn your history.” I think, and understanding how stereotypes work, how ideologies get perpetuated. Catherine's example is very layered. I think we should dig into it.
Anna 54:21
Yes.
Kristin 54:21
She's talking about how intersex people and parents are dismissed as “radicals.”
Anna 54:27
Yes.
Kristin 54:28
And that strikes me as one of these instances of a stereotype. What's a radical?
Anna 54:35
Yeah.
Kristin 54:35
Right? What's a radical or an activist? You know, or just the other one was, you know, someone who just had a bad outcome. Well, you're just a complainer, right? Which makes me think about Kathryn Norlock. Like, “I'm interested in complaining.”
Anna 54:51
Right?
Kristin 54:51
Yes,
Anna 54:52
Yes.
Kristin 54:52
Complaining is very rich because who is the complainer? What are they complaining about, and is their complaint something that needs to be taken seriously?
Anna 55:03
Yes. How are those complaints met? Some are met with a great deal of ease, care, and attentiveness to fixing the problem, and others are not.
Kristin 55:15
Interesting thing about the example that she gives is that you know, if we collapse what's evidence-based into what's ethical and then say that anybody who's bringing a bad outcome to them and basically saying, “you know, I had this experience, I think you should learn from my experience and do differently.” And they're just basically saying, well, you're not the kind of information you're bringing to me is not relevant. And so it's basically saying you're not the right kind of knower, but it's using this really sophisticated form of reasoning. Right? It's getting at those meta-commitments about what counts as knowledge.
Anna 55:59
Yes.
Kristin 56:00
Oh, only scientific data, not anecdote. Well, what is scientific data about medical outcomes other than interviewing a lot of people a lot of times and collecting? But what's significant?
Anna 56:09
Yes.
Kristin 56:10
Right
Anna 56:15
Yeah, I was just going to say I always love instances where someone is, in this sort of case, telling you something about the thing that you are studying, but the idea that that is not evidence is such a peculiar idea. It is a thing in the world, and presumably, that is what we are studying! How is this possible [that that isn’t some kind of evidence]? And, of course, just as you say, that has to do with very complex reasoning about what will count as not just evidence but relevant evidence. And, in fact, what will count as evidence at all?
Kristin 56:48
Yeah, and I've thought a lot about Catherine's work. And read a lot of her work. It's so interesting to me that when you try to bring in an ethical framework around how medicine can be harmful or how some practices, you know, can be harmful when we say we need data and not just your reporting of your experience. Basically,what you're saying is “I want to harm a statistically significant number of people in the same way.” And somehow that is going to convince me, you know. So that really shows the ethical assumptions that she's unearthing at the outset that basically say what's ethical is whatever's evidence based. It's like, no, no, no. You know, that has a lot of assumptions baked into it about the kinds of harms that are perpetuated, And here, you know, one of those harms, an important harm, is not identifying those speakers as knowing. Not allowing them to enter a conversation that they have important things to say about.
Anna 57:57
And then laying out by well, by fiat, as Catherine says, laying out which kinds of harms will be relevant, which kinds of data we will write, which is equivalent in this case to which kinds of data we will take seriously. So there's the harm to the people who are claiming knowledge and not being recognized as knowers. But there's also the harm that was done to those people by not having the people in the medical profession, not having listened to people in the past. These decisions about what counts as evidence and thus who can speak and. Spivak says access really are so inextricable from living well with one another and doing justice to one another and being basically decent, in fact, to one another. That, yeah, Catherine's example here is just so fantastic and hard. It's a hard example.
Kristin 59:10
I'm so happy that we were able to talk about epistemic violence and bring in Jorge Sanchez Perez and Catherine Clune-Taylor. We've got some resources on the website pointing you to some of their works so you can become more familiar with them.
Anna 59:27
It's amazing. Amazing work. Please. Yes.
Kristin 59:29
To find some of Dotson's other works. And this one, as well. I made a silly concept map again to try to visually explain.
Anna 59:41
It's never silly.
Kristin 59:43
To try to explain some of epistemic violence
Anna 59:47
And on that note, if you'd like to contribute or give us ideas for our next episodes, please go to our website thinkingbodiespod.com. We are open to ideas as usual, and because this is a DIT experiment, we're very happy for feedback and participation. We're very happy to do it together
Kristin 1:00:06
Thank you to everyone who contributed to the episode and to the Amplify Podcast Network for your mentorship.
Anna 1:00:14
People can also, I think, find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. So check us out.
Kristin 1:00:21
Yes, and maybe even social media.
Anna 1:00:23
Maybe even social media.
Kristin 1:00:29
Let's think about it.