Epistemic violence and/in the philosophical canon: an intersectional approach

Fellow-Vortrag: Moira Pérez Ph.D.

Mainstream philosophy has long been reluctant to confront its history of exclusion of social groups, languages and regions from its legitimised knowledge circuits. The concept of epistemic violence, alongside a range of tools developed recently by social epistemology, can shed light on the variety and complexity of the practices of epistemic silencing, exclusion and marginalisation that occur in all social interactions, including academic philosophy, and allow us to grasp the specifically epistemic loss they entail. In this presentation, Dr. Perez will take academic philosophy as a case study in order to explore the contributions of an intersectional perspective on epistemic violence. This approach allows for a reading of epistemic violence as a complex phenomenon, in which various epistemic mechanisms and myriad factors of social marginalisation intertwine and reinforce each other. Taken together, the concept of epistemic violence and an intersectional perspective offer a clearer picture of epistemic marginalization as a socially situated phenomenon, and reveal how mere "inclusion" and/or one-dimensional approaches are insufficient for a transformation of the philosophical canon and a broadening of the spectrum of questions, methods and perspectives in our discipline.

Moira Perez is Fellow at FIPH and Assistant Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research, Argentina. Her work focuses on the interplay between identity and violence (including epistemic violence), and brings together contributions of narrativist philosophies of history, queer theory, and decolonial and postcolonial studies, among others.

 

Zoom-Link: https://zoom.us/j/96545373695