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Managing Ignorance
... Cf. epistemologies of not knowing (see e.g.Tuana 2006;Spelman 2007).23 This is in part expressed in Marion's phenomenology of loving. ...
In search of our highest capacities, cognitive scientists aim to explain things like mathematics, language, and planning (and while explaining them, they often imagine computers at work). But are these really our most sophisticated forms of knowing? In this paper, I point to a different pinnacle of cognition. Our most sophisticated human knowing, I think, lies in how we engage with each other, in our relating. Cognitive science and philosophy of mind have largely ignored the ways of knowing at play here. At the same time, the emphasis on discrete, rational knowing to the detriment of engaged, human knowing pervades societal practices and institutions, often with harmful effects on people and their relations. There are many reasons why we need a new, engaged—or even engaging—epistemology of human knowing. The enactive theory of participatory sense-making takes steps towards this, but it needs deepening. Kym Maclaren’s (2002) idea of letting be invites such a deepening. Characterizing knowing as a relationship of letting be provides a nuanced way to deal with the tensions between the knower’s being and the being of the known, as they meet in the process of knowing-and-being-known. This meeting of knower and known is not easy to understand. However, there is a mode of relating in which we know it well, and that is: in loving relationships. I propose to look at human knowing through the lens of loving. We then see that both knowing and loving are existential, dialectic ways in which concrete and particular beings engage with each other.
... Dominant frameworks of intelligibility do not appear oppressive to those they benefit and denials of complicity appear as normalized practices for the systemically privileged. In his discussion of white ignorance, Baldwin (1985Baldwin ( /1993 The individual and collective walls of meta-ignorance cannot be pierced unless universities are willing to critically examine the dominant frameworks of intelligibility they reproduce and how ignorance is managed (Spelman 2007). Medina (2013) suggests that what is needed is "disruptions, provocations, and in short, resistance from others, so that our interactions with significantly different others can trigger productive self-problematization and beneficial epistemic friction" (p. ...
A common remedial response to a culture of racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of oppression on college campuses has been to institute mandatory implicit bias training for faculty, staff and students. A critical component of such training is the identification of unconscious prejudices in the minds of individuals that impact behavior. In this paper, I critically examine the rush to rely on implicit bias training as a panacea for institutional culture change. Implicit bias training and the notion of implicit bias it is grounded in is examined and the advantages and limitations of this approach is elaborated. An exclusive focus on implicit bias, it is argued, can protect ignorance rather than correct it. Similar to implicit bias, microaggressions is a concept that has played a role in campus diversity interventions. An examination of microaggression education demonstrates how it corrects for some of the pitfalls of relying on the concept of implicit bias to improve campus climate. The ambiguity that is characteristic of microaggressions, however, hints at the need to explore the type of “unknowing” that both implicit bias education and microaggression education attempt to remedy. Building on the recent scholarship around the idea of epistemic injustice, crucial insights can be gleaned about the significance of shifting the focus from lack of knowledge to a willful resistance to know. In the final section, some implications for improving campus climate are drawn out.
... La fundamentación científica de tales discursos es nula o confusa, pero tiene la legitimidad y la fuerza de los poderes que la arropan. La resistencia a tal manifestación de ignorancia, la gestión de la ignorancia, como nos dice Spelman (2007), no sólo ha de desvelar la ignorancia y sus falsedades, sino proveer los conocimientos que han sido negados o suprimidos. Y esto será muy complicado si no se pueden romper los circuitos de producción y mantenimiento de conocimientos, los cuales, y para el caso que nos ocupa, están arduamente tramados con largos siglos de pensamiento patriarcal, con prácticas de opresión y exclusión, como hemos podido comprobar en el ejemplo del Dr. Dana. ...
The aim of this paper is to analyze and expose the most important shortcomings in the investigation of the so called "sexual difference in the brain". Departing from the work of the academic group NeuroGenderings Network this paper will review and analyze critically its proposals to overcome the prejudices that, obviously or not, continue to be maintained in scientific research in relation to sexual differences in the brain. The task of "epistemological guerrilla", as we call it, that this feminist group carries out in order to conform a rigorous scientific knowledge can be seen with the concrete example of the proposal they have recently made to a neuroscientific journal.
... The scholarship of race offers serviceable conceptualizations of the way 'epistemological ignorance' is deployed to maintain the hierarchical racial contract (Spelman, 2007). I find it useful in my classes to demystify 'whiteness' itself by historicizing both white identity (conceptual whiteness) and Black consciousness. ...
The author reflects on the relevance of her intellectual journey through the Black consciousness movement in the 1960s to her pedagogy teaching from a Black Studies theoretical perspective on liberating knowledge. This pedagogical approach aims to fortify education students’ consciousness regarding a systemic understanding of how racism and domination work. The argument is that this approach is especially needed given the current regime. Using the 1968 poem by Amiri Baraka that asked: ‘Who Will Survive America?’ the author illustrates content and pedagogy that can respond to the presidential campaign slogan understood as ‘making America white again.’
... The essays collected in Sullivan and Tuana's Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (2007) provide a good overview of social epistemology from the perspective of critical race theory. See in particular Alcoff (2007) and Spelman (2007). Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007) has also become an essential reference in critical social epistemology. ...
... Frank Margonis (2007) uses Dewey as an example of how it is possible for philosophers to claim to be in favor of the democratic principle of equality and yet fail to locate their own perspectives and practices in relation to the racist and neocolonialist actions of their group, as well as to those of white citizens and leaders of their nation (189). Elizabeth Spelman's (2007) analysis of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963) clarifies the difficulties in eradicating the racialized attitudes driving mainstream philosophical inquiry that marginalize people of color as knowers. Her insights can be extrapolated to explain the gendered attitude informing Munévar's agenda to discredit Harding. ...
The article explores the problem of epistemological ignorance. Drawing on the literature of feminist epistemology, in particular the epistemologies of ignorance, it theorizes white ignorance and male ignorance and how it is possible to gain consciousness about one's ignorance, as well as how to be responsible for what one does not know. The article explores ignorance as unconscious habits that inform our mental schemas, our social interactions, and our physicality. It identifies and analyzes these habits of ignorance, drawing on our experiences as team teachers (one a philosophy professor, and the other a professor of women's studies and literary studies) who co-taught an interdisciplinary doctoral seminar in feminist epistemology. It describes and illustrates the pedagogical and scholarly processes that led us to view epistemology as a practice of inquiry that combats ignorance by demanding an inclusive partnership across traditional and counterhegemonic approaches to knowledge. The article claims that a transactional pedagogy of friendship makes possible the disruption and rehabituation of epistemic habits of ignorance, moving inquirers in the direction of more inclusive, reliable, and responsible knowledge.
This article draws from the work of scholars in Critical Whiteness Studies to provide a nuanced analysis of ‘white shame’ in anti-racist education. In particular, it is argued that antiracist politics and pedagogy can be enriched by recognizing the affective and political complexities emerging from white shame and shaming. The purpose is to suggest that white shame has different manifestations depending on context and subject/group, and that those manifestations are related to feelings about white privilege, white ignorance, white fragility, and white complicity. The author uses examples of white shame to discuss the pedagogical principles that inform the development of strategies for anti-racist education, emphasizing how educators can capitalize on teachable racial moments in the classroom that: move beyond white students’ tendency to default to shame; and, move beyond white students’ affective investments to racial inequality, while critically equipping white students to explore responsible ways of inhabiting their whiteness.
Western feminism has become one of the most widespread feminist ideologies in our world today and it continues to gain popularity among those in the West who attempt to aid women in foreign nations. This particular feminism is rooted in “saving” non-Western women by attempting to mould their lives so that they may feel “empowered,” much like women in the West. What Western feminism fails to account for, however, is the lack of knowledge towards cultural contexts and the harm caused by Western feminists as they attempt to save these women who they deem oppressed due to their culture. The purpose of this paper is to analyze Western feminism from a variety of perspectives and find the flaws that prevent it from actually having a positive impact on women in the Global South. This essay includes references to prominent philosophic literature as well as present and historical examples of Western feminism that prove that the White Ignorance prevents these types of feminists from actually “rescuing” oppressed women. Through analyzing Western feminism from different lenses of White Ignorance, this paper provides an answer for how feminism can have a genuinely positive impact on non-Western women through the abolition of Structural White ignorance found in Western institutions and corporations.
In this paper, I identify a theoretical and political role for ‘white ignorance’, present three alternative accounts of white ignorance, and assess how well each fulfils this role. On the Willful Ignorance View, white ignorance refers to white individuals’ willful ignorance about racial injustice. On the Cognitivist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance resulting from social practices that distribute faulty cognitive resources. On the Structuralist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance that (1) results as part of a social process that systematically gives rise to racial injustice, and (2) is an active player in the process. I argue that, because of its greater power and flexibility, the Structuralist View better explains the patterns of ignorance that we observe, better illuminates the connection to white racial domination, and is overall better suited to the project of ameliorating racial injustice. As such, the Structuralist View should be preferred.
This research contributes to post-structural theorisation of the accounting-power nexus. It explores how social boundaries shape collective identities, and how these identities determine the accounting responses of social groups. This research includes a case study using interview and archival research methods. Hayward's (2000) concept of de-facing power is adopted to demonstrate how the development of historically contingent social boundaries shaped the collective identities of Church and State in the area of education funding and contributed to their lack of accounting records. When a political crisis over the lack of State funding of Catholic education occurred in the early 1960s, neither Church nor State could access the accounting information required to mediate the crisis because they had both selectively chosen to maintain accounting records consistent with their constructed identities even though this meant that their accounting records were not suited to all their needs. This research extends the post-structuralism project in accounting research to the notion of an epistemology of ignorance, which is the intentional choice by a social group to remain ignorant. It explores how boundaries can constrain choices and actions, promoting an epistemology of ignorance that can lead to the maintenance of inadequate accounting records.
This essay establishes a philosophical connection between James Baldwin and the philosopher William James by investigating how the pragmatist protocol against “vicious intellectualism” offers Baldwin a key resource for thinking through how anti-black racism might be dismantled. While Richard Wright had earlier denounced pragmatism for privileging experience over knowledge, and thereby offering the black subject no means for redressing America’s constitutive hierarchies, uncovering the current of Jamesian thought that runs through Baldwin’s essays brings into view his attempt to move beyond epistemology as the primary framework for inaugurating a future unburdened by the problem of the color line. Although Baldwin indicts contemporaneous arrangements of knowledge for producing the most dehumanizing forms of racism, he does not simply attempt to rewrite the enervating meanings to which black subjects are given. Articulating a pragmatist sensibility at various stages of his career, Baldwin repeatedly suggests that the imagining and creation of a better world is predicated upon rethinking the normative value accorded to knowledge in the practice of politics. The provocative challenge that Baldwin issues for his reader is to cease the well-established privileging of knowledge, and to instead stage the struggle for freedom within an aesthetic, rather than epistemological, paradigm.
This article presents an analysis of two experiences of gender violence perpetrated in recent years by male teaching staff against female students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Unlike the silence that victims habitually keep in the face of this kind of behavior, both cases were reported not only within the institution but also in the media. The students publicly denounced these cases because the university failed to duly address the complaints that they initially filed through university channels. Thus, these women used the recourse of making their testimonies public in order to be listened to and to place pressure on the institution to punish their aggressors. Our analysis of these two cases demonstrates the behavior of different institutional actors in the face of these situations, seeking to avoid recognition of a problem that, despite its frequency and the harm it causes to women, has been conveniently ignored within the institution. 1. Study Overview and Method Using a qualitative approach, this article presents the results of research on two cases of gender violence against female students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Spanish acronym: UNAM), the oldest and largest higher education institution in Latin America. The first experience was triggered when a male physics professor proposed to improve a 16 year old female student's grade in exchange for sexual favors. The second case has an antecedent of a sentimental relationship between a female student and one of her male professors who, to revenge her decision to break off the relationship, accused her of plagiarizing her thesis topic. These experiences were selected because they were both made public in the media, which is unusual, and their analysis allows us to observe the institutional reaction to gender violence complaints and to the pressure that arose from the media coverage that these cases received. Since our attempts to interview the young woman harassed by her physics professor were unsuccessful, we took on the task of compiling the information she shared with different media sources (social networks; radio and TV interviews) in order to publicly disseminate her testimony and to demand attention to her complaint. The account of the student accused of plagiarism was obtained from an interview that this young woman gave us thanks to the intervention we requested from a group of students who gave her support to make her case public. The relationship that we have established with this group is based on our shared interest in bringing gender violence practices at the university to light. In the first case, we saved and studied the video—which was widely circulated on YouTube—of the professor's aggression as recorded by a fellow student. We also transcribed the interviews in which the female student gave a detailed description of what happened. Likewise, we inspected the letters and comments published in social media. In the second case, we requested the student's authorization to tape her story and then we transcribed the interview for purpose of analysis.
As concerns about violence, war, terrorism, sexuality, and embodiment have garnered attention in philosophy, the concept of vulnerability has become a shared reference point in these discussions. As a fundamental part of the human condition, vulnerability has significant ethical import: how one responds to vulnerability matters, whom one conceives as vulnerable and which criteria are used to make such demarcations matters, how one deals with one's own vulnerability matters, and how one understands the meaning of vulnerability matters. Yet, the meaning of vulnerability is commonly taken for granted and it is assumed that vulnerability is almost exclusively negative, equated with weakness, dependency, powerlessness, deficiency, and passivity. This reductively negative view leads to problematic implications, imperiling ethical responsiveness to vulnerability, and so prevents the concept from possessing the normative value many theorists wish it to have. When vulnerability is regarded as weakness and, concomitantly, invulnerability is prized, attentiveness to one's own vulnerability and ethical response to vulnerable others remain out of reach goals. Thus, this book critiques the ideal of invulnerability, analyzes the problems that arise from a negative view of vulnerability, and articulates in its stead a non-dualistic concept of vulnerability that can remedy these problems.
Based on the use of the notion of gender performativity as a theoreticalmethodological tool, five cases of violence against women in the context of the National Autonomous University of Mexico were analyzed. References to the concepts “right not to know” and “cultivated ignorance” were used to try to expose organizational mechanisms that pose obstacles to reporting these kinds of cases and silence. These two phenomena-hampering and silence-have been imposed as unwritten norms to evade recognition of gender violence as a systemic problem that significantly effects the experience of female university students. © 2015 Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. All rights reserved.
In this paper, I make explicit some implicit commitments to realism and conceptualism in recent work in social epistemology exemplified by Miranda Fricker and Charles Mills. I offer a survey of recent writings at the intersection of social epistemology, feminism, and critical race theory, showing that commitments to realism and conceptualism are at once implied yet undertheorized in the existing literature. I go on to offer an explicit defense of these commitments by drawing from the epistemological framework of John McDowell, demonstrating the relevance of the metaphor of the “space of reasons” for theorizing and criticizing instances of epistemic injustice. I then point out how McDowell’s own view requires expansion and revision in light of Mills' concept of “epistemologies of ignorance.” I conclude that, when their strengths are used to make up for each others' weaknesses, Mills and McDowell’s positions mutually reinforce one another, producing a powerful model for theorizing instances of systematic ignorance and false belief.
This article addresses the impact of systematic ignorance and epistemic uncertainty upon white Western women's participation in anti-racist and transnational feminisms. I argue that a "methodology of the privileged" is necessary for effective coalition-building across racial and geopolitical inequities. Examining both self-reflexivity and racial sedition as existing methods, I conclude that epistemic uncertainty should be considered an additional strategy rather than a dilemma for the privileged.
A reductive theory of collective intentionality would imply that the ‘official’ intentions of an oppressive political authority cannot be constructed from the intentions of individuals when they follow the authority's rules. This makes it difficult to explain the unraveling of official group plans through time in a seemingly consistent fashion, and the corresponding source of coercion. A non-reductive theory, on the other hand, cannot capture whether the actions of individuals in an oppressive society are free or coerced, so long as a manifest institutional structure and rules are in place. I put forward a hybrid account of group intentionality that is capable of articulating why oppressive political power is illegitimate, which comes down to the official and individual intentions in joint group actions diverging in such a way that individuals are not governed on the basis of dependent reasons.
Working with the recollections of everyday experiences of apartheid collected by the Apartheid Archives project, and drawing on the emerging theorization of ignorance in the critical philosophy of race, this article explores how an ‘ignorance contract’ – the tacit agreement to entertain ignorance – lies at the heart of a society structured in racial hierarchy. Unlike the conventional theorization of ignorance that regards ignorance as a matter of faulty individual cognition, or a collective absence of yet-to-be-acquired knowledge, ignorance is understood as a social achievement with strategic value. The apartheid narratives illustrate that for ignorance to function as social regulation, subjectivities must be formed that are appropriate performers of ignorance, disciplined in cognition, affect and ethics. Both white and black South Africans produced epistemologies of ignorance, although the terms of the contract were set by white society as the group with the dominant power.
:Drawing upon recent literature on what has been called "epistemologies of ignorance" in relation to race, this paper examines an audit of a research project on equality and diversity in a UK university. It argues the audit functioned as a technology of ignorance. This paper suggests that the audit drew upon the cultural associations between white male academic masculinity with notions of quantification, detachment, and disembodied aggression. In this way, ignorance is seen as a form of labor. In particular, this paper suggests that current forms of neoliberal audit in UK universities could be understood in terms of Haraway's notion of scientific gentlemanly modest witnessing. But rather than the scientific gentlemanly masculinity, neoliberal audit legitimates a hyper-rational audit masculinity which casts women and racialized minorities as subjective, interested, and emotional and in so doing performs epistemic violence which maintains whiteness.
This paper aims to understand the relationship between ignorance and vulnerability by drawing on recent work on the epistemology of ignorance. After elaborating how we might understand the importance of human vulnerability, I develop the claim that ignorance of vulnerability is produced through the pursuit of an ideal of invulnerability that involves both ethical and epistemological closure. The ignorance of vulnerability that is a prerequisite for such invulnerability is, I contend, a pervasive form of ignorance that underlies and grounds other oppressive forms of ignorance. Thus, undoing such forms of ignorance requires working toward a particular form of vulnerability: epistemic vulnerability.
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