Whither Epistemic Justice?

Description

The Case for SWAFs Initiatives, or How to Make the Concept of Epistemic Justice Concrete and Actionable?

Science and philosophy simply copied the institutional paths already taken by Western religion and mystified themselves so that one of the maxims of recent Western civilization has been to declare something to be « academic » — meaning that intelligent solutions to problems are in fact illusory because they are devised by people sheltered from the realities of daily life.
Vine Deloria
Managing a population is […] not only a process through which regulatory power produces a set of subjects. It is also the process of their de-subjectivation, one with enormous political and legal consequences
Judith Butler

As an alliance of reform-minded universities, and with the help of a group of experts, ERUA set out to develop its own engagement strategy around a set of core values to guide our relations with civil society. This immediately raised the question: what kind of contract should we have, and with whom? Given the diversity of epistemological, cultural, and economic contexts, a one-size-fits-all solution certainly does not seem to be the appropriate response to what appears to be an ethical issue based on the dual question of access to and production of knowledge. What's more, the title of this workshop does not only refer to a specific geographical location to be reached, but should also be considered in its temporal dimension as we question the way epistemic rights have been historically produced as critical frameworks of thought, which may not reflect the same expectations from one university to another. For example, the notion of innovation understood as unbridled technological progress may seem quite seductive to some, as exemplified by the transhumanist trends championed by prominent scholars around the world, especially with the current hype around AI-driven “empowering” solutions that may seem to lead to an endless and effortless production of knowledge. Can we define this as a form of social innovation? To what extent can such blackboxing processes accommodate epistemic justice, especially as our data-driven information age challenges the very notion of truth? How can we avoid reproducing epistemic injustices while sometimes speaking for others?
There can be no humanity without technology, starting with our command of language and writing as primary techniques. The question is not one of returning to a pastoral ideal, a movement that could be reformulated in Derrida's terms as a kind of autoimmune reaction against the techno-scientific abstraction that tears us away from what would be a living, unharmed spontaneity, the spontaneity of an ideal form of life emancipated from the machine. Rather, what we need to think out is a relationship to the world that is no longer reduced to pure instrumentalization, so much so that we ourselves end up being acted upon by technology that has become autonomous, to the detriment of our ability to act on the world with a view to what has been described as "the good life. According to philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy,

Life has ceased to be a horizon of sense and historicity, a principle of individual or collective action; it has become the endless or unlimited production of the conditions for not ceasing to be. Life is the production of the possibility of not ceasing to be within the unlimited possibility of ceasing to be.

Automation, datafication’s twin, has replaced human capabilities that paradoxically derive from the Western-centric myth of the autonomous human, predominantly white, rational subject. And automation runs the risk of reproducing the infinitely biased, power-driven, and exclusionary mechanisms that we have sought to critique and defuse. Should we subscribe to the twofold argument that recourse to such technologies is better than nothing, or worse, better than human, at the risk of excluding the persons that Judith Butler identifies as "the subject who is not a subject (...) neither alive nor dead, neither fully constituted as a subject nor fully deconstituted in death?”
Beyond Vine Deloria’s provocatively radical take on Western epistemologies, we still need to ask ourselves a series of questions about our academic contribution to the common good, a notion that in turn needs to be challenged, since hypothetical commonalities may originate in hegemonic constructs that serve to justify and perpetuate structures of domination. Redeeming a discipline through the recognition and legitimation of subaltern forms of knowledge can also end up serving a Western-centric knowledge economy. On the other hand, the dismantling of spaces of authority such as the university may contribute to the impossibility of a universal discourse, marking the triumph of epistemic relativism. How can we make sure that we critically engage with society without reproducing or consolidating power-driven mechanisms? How can we ensure the resubjectivation of those who have been rendered invisible, voiceless, and faceless by the dominant norms that govern our social organization? Can we conduct truly collaborative research without falling into the pitfalls of epistemic domination? Is it possible to escape the dominant frameworks of thought and knowledge production while shifting the geographies of reason locally and globally? If so, how? How can we rethink our processes of legitimizing and evaluating what qualifies as scientific inquiry and/or production? Can epistemic justice serve as an operative concept to guide our collaborative efforts and ensure our transformative impact on society as well as on ourselves as politically driven institutions?
 
Contributors
Silvia Pierosara, Associate Professor in Moral Philosophy at University of Macerata, Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici - Lingue, Mediazione, Storia, Lettere, Filosofia
Title of contribution: "Taking Care of Epistemic Injustices in Research Context"?

Biography: She studied the theory of recognition, narrative ethics, and relational autonomy. She is interested in the ethical implications of narratives as paths to personal and social emancipation and in the exploration of the structural features that make narratives violent or tolerant, inclusive, and attentive to suffering. She actually explores the link between narrativity and relational autonomy. She devoted some monographs and several essays to these topics. Her actual researches focus on: the possibility of a «narrative autonomy» that values the concept of self-authorship and scales back that of self-ownership; critical philosophy of history including progress, memory, and nostalgia.

Kristine Samson, Associate Professor, Associate Professor, Ph.D., Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University - Research groups: Environmental Humanities / Visual Culture and Performance Design
Title of contribution: « More-than human commoning. Sensory engagements in regenerative agriculture »

Biography: Kristine Samson’s research interests cover art, design and activism and in particular how activism, art and citizens negotiate urban nature and rural landscapes. She is an arts-based researcher working with artistic methodologies in which she explores and negotiates space and place through sound, performance, film and through walking methodologies. She has co-authored a video and audio papers and has written on audio paper as an affective and multivocal academic format. Currently she is concerned with exploring urban nature and rural landscapes though collaborative, situated and affective methodologies. She currently collaborates with environmental activists, farmers, artists and regards research as a form of activism for environmental and societal change.

Angelo Vaninni, Research program director at the Collège International de Philosophie (Paris, France)
Title of contribution: « Epistemic Translatability as a Structural Response to Hermeneutical Injustice »

Biography: Angelo Vaninni is an assistant professor (ATER) at Paris 8 University and co-head of the international seminar “In Search of Epistemic Justice: A Tentative Cartography.” His research focuses on the philosophy of translation, comparative literature, reception studies, and epistemic injustice.

Moderator
Arnaud Regnauld is Professor of American Literature and Translation Studies, Vice-Rector for Research at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis and re:ERUA’s scientific coordinator.
Biography: after writing extensively on John Hawkes’ later works, he has conducted research on Carter Scholz, Gary Lutz, Diane Williams and Matthew Derby’s short-stories, Percival Everett, Ben Marcus, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Richard Powers’ novels, Jim Rosenberg’s electronic poetry as well as on Mark Amerika, Michael Joyce, Shelley Jackson, Illya Szilak, Grégory Chatonsky and Duncan Speakman’s digital and print works. He is the author of a monograph on Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (pending publication) and the co-editor of several collective works, the most recent ones being The Digital Subject, Dijon: Labex Arts-H2H-Presses du réel, 2017 and Contemporary American Fiction in the Embrace of the Digital Age, Liverpool University Press, 2021. His most recent research focuses on new forms of textuality in the digital era and their translation as well as on the relationship between literature, art and philosophy.

Period	25 Jun 2024
Event type	Workshop
Location	Vilnius, LithuaniaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International