WTMC Summer School “Epistemic inequities”

From Monday 8 to Friday 12 July 2024, the WTMC PHD Summer School ‘Epistemic inequities’ with anchor teacher Sharon Traweek will take place at at Soeterbeeck, Deursen-Dennenburg, the Netherlands.

By way of introduction to ‘new epistemic strategies for STS’, this summer school examines foundational epistemic challenges, which had first surfaced through a feminist provocation during the 1960s and 70s, but which often remain ignored today, sometimes even by feminists. First, the cultural binaries of wo/men were demonstrated as variable across time and space, not natural and biologically determined. Next, the sexual binaries of fe/male were demonstrated as a radically flawed simplification of a much wider array of possibilities. Then the biological science and medicine of sex and gender was shown to be saturated with dyadic assumptions embedded in locally specific cultural practices. Gradually, the binary logics of science and gender were seen as having histories and they became a subject of inquiry, interrogating what had previously been presented as natural distinctions.

In this summer school, we will critically consider such epistemic inequities. Drawing on insights from feminist epistemologies, we call into question a number of assumptions about hierarchies, binaries, objectivities and subjectivities that shape the production and circulation of knowledge. In doing so, we pay attention to four closely interrelated themes. In ‘epistemic edges’, we discuss how research questions, designs, and methods that at first are considered marginal, atypical, and perhaps transformative emerge and are maintained in the margins of different ecologies. In ‘promissory epistemics’, we study how knowledge making practitioners/communities/cohorts/clusters seek resources and recruits to pursue projects that might take decades to achieve their goals, while acknowledging that there is risk that the goals will not be achieved. In ‘epistemic ethics’, we zoom in on knowledge making practitioners who are challenging intersectional inequities in their own communities, and consider how departments, universities, research institutes, and scholarly institutes diligently and energetically chose to not challenge abuse, bullying, and violence, what Japanese call ‘pawa hara’ – power harassment. In ‘epistemic borders’, we want to explore how knowledge and knowledge makers travel: how do the infrastructures they use challenge, revise, undermine, and revise the epistemic practices that many think are universal, or at least ought to be.

This summer school invites participants to reflect upon how we humans engage in robust knowledge making about other humans making robust knowledge. Together we will discuss how the use of binaries, hierarchically ordered, gendered and privileged social classification systems as tools for making and circulating knowledge, reinforces those practices in the ways we make and circulate knowing. If we accept the 50 year-old challenge of feminist epistemology, we must practice a more fluid spectrum of epistemic possibilities, as, of course, found empirically around the world in many phenomena. We also accept the challenge that we are humans studying human phenomena, always entangled in the processes we study. To act as if that were not true, and call that denial ‘objectivity’ is bizarre, yet fiercely defended by many of our colleagues who want to ‘observe’ or ‘listen’ from a distance, but not be close enough to smell, touch or taste. Feminist epistemologists are not the first to have acknowledged that when we interact with the world, it changes, as do we. Of course, thoughtful people have been making robust knowledge without dyads for millennia. Inspired by all that work, this summer school challenges you to consider what we can learn and teach when we use different epistemic practices.

Guest Speakers

Esha Shah, Annemarie Horn, Kyriaki Papageorgieu, Maarten Derksen, Wiebe Bijker