Papers:
‘Epistemic Hopelessness and Other Vices of Oppression’ in Hypatia (forthcoming)
‘Should Political Philosophers Attend to Victim Testimony?’ in Journal of Applied Philosophy (2023)
‘Rawlsian Liberalism as a Failure of Critique’ in Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research: New Applications and Explorations, ed. Neal Harris 2021, London: Palgrave MacMillan
‘False Consciousness and The Socially Extended Mind’ in Perspectives . International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy 2016, 6(1): 24-35
Review of The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today by Razmig Keucheyan, in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books 02/03/2016
‘Henri Bergson’s Rejection of Substance Ontologies’ in Filosofisk Supplement 2015, 11(3): 15-22
Follow me on PhilPeople
Book project: Listening to Victims, Thinking About Justice: Feminist Epistemology in Political Philosophy
“Believe women!” The slogan of the #MeToo movement urges us to take allegations of sexual harassment at face value. This is because victims of harassment and discrimination are often disbelieved and silenced when they seek to testify about their experiences, and therefore often do not testify at all. This leaves victims without recourse to justice, and non-victims without knowledge about oppressive social phenomena. This book project examines what political philosophers can learn from attending to the testimonies of victims of injustice, and it develops a methodology informed by feminist social epistemology that facilitates this interaction. It thereby seeks to identify the conditions required for attending to victim testimony without falling prey to common interferences and prejudices, it identifies what is lost to political philosophers in not attending to victim testimony, and it aims to develop a political methodology that takes victim testimony as its basis.
Motivating this research is the growing recognition that victims of injustice may have unique access to knowledge about the injustices they experience, meaning that crucial knowledge about oppressive social structures is lost in not attending to victim testimony.[1] Moreover, one of the ways in which injustices themselves are perpetuated is through many different mechanisms that silence victims by taking them to be less credible, and through denying them the platform and capacity to speak.[2] While these ideas have gained purchase in fields adjacent to analytic political philosophy, such as public policy, social and political epistemology, and feminist philosophy, analytic political philosophers overwhelmingly do not engage with victim insights and perspectives.[3] Indeed, if victim testimony does figure in the context of analytic political philosophy, it is usually merely an illustration of a point arrived at independently of the testimony, rather than the driving force of the argument. It is worth investigating why this is the case; political philosophy is largely concerned with understanding the nature of justice, and it therefore seems odd for victim testimony to simply be dismissed if it provides an epistemically significant source of justified claims about injustice. Either political philosophers do not recognise the epistemic significance of victim testimony, or they do not take victim testimony to be epistemically significant for the specific purposes of political philosophy.
In order to understand why political philosophers do not engage with victim testimony, several questions arise, starting with questions about the epistemic validity of victim testimony: does group membership always come with certain epistemic privileges? If yes, is this epistemic privilege consistently and reliably conferred? What is the relationship between access to justified claims of injustice and determining what a just society consists in? What would a political philosophy look like that systematically draws on victim testimony? In this book, I aim to address these questions with the aim of proposing a methodology of justice that takes victim testimony as its starting point. As a result, this book seeks to reshape the current methodological landscape of political philosophy, both to ensure that victim testimony is not silenced, and in order for victim testimony to have the theoretical impact that it merits.
[1] Cressida Heyes, «Identity Politics», i The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, red. Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2018 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2018), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/identity-politics/.
[2] Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
[3] There are, however, a few honourable exceptions to this generalised trend, such as Jonathan Wolff and Avner De-Shalit (2007), Iris Marion Young (1990), and Elizabeth Anderson (2017), neither of whom fall squarely within the tripartite ideal/ non-ideal/ realist methodological paradigm of contemporary political philosophy, which I will discuss in this book.
Ane Engelstad 