Interspecies Ethics and the Limits of Epistemic Authority in Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

2022 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-104
Author(s):  
Emily York
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Authority

‘We will take care of you’: Identity categorisation markers in intercultural medical encounters

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 451-473
Author(s):  
Valentina Fantasia ◽  
Cristina Zucchermaglio ◽  
Marilena Fatigante ◽  
Francesca Alby
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Local Hospital ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Social Actions ◽  
Life Saving ◽  
Tumour Board

Ethnomethodology research has systematically investigated discursive practices of categorisation, looking at the various ways by which social actors ascribe both themselves and others to identity categories to accomplish various kinds of social actions. Drawing on a data corpus of oncological visits collected in an Italian hospital, involving both native and non-native patients, the present work analyses how participants in these intercultural medical encounters invoke and make relevant social identity categories by the marking of collective pronouns in their talk. Our results showed that whilst institutional identities (e.g. those of the doctors, the local hospital or the Tumour Board) prevailed, categorial formulations related to cultural or linguistic identities were rarely displayed in interactions with non-native patients. Conversational participants made very little of their linguistical or cultural background and when they did so, their cultural and linguistic identities were deployed for rhetorical and pragmatical aims, such as testing and negotiating common knowledge and epistemic authority. This study shows how even speakers’ minimal lexical choices, such as marked pronouns, impact the negotiation of meanings and activities in life-saving sites such as oncological visits.

Auras of Detection: Power and Knowledge in Drug Prohibition

2021 ◽  
pp. 009145092110354
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Illicit Drug ◽  
Drug Market ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
People Who Use Drugs ◽  
Drug Supply ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Drug Checking

Drug checking is an evidence-based strategy for overdose prevention that continues to operate (where it operates) in a legal “gray zone” due to the legal classification of some drug checking tools as drug paraphernalia—the purview of law enforcement, not public health. This article takes the emergence of fentanyl in the U.S. drug supply as a starting point for examining two closely related questions about drug checking and drug market expertise. First, how is the epistemic authority of law enforcement over the material realities of the drug market produced? Second, in the context of that authority, what are the socio-political implications of technologically advanced drug checking instruments in the hands of people who use drugs? The expertise that people who use drugs maintain about the nature of illicit drug market and how to navigate the illicit drug supply has long been discounted as untrustworthy, irrational, or otherwise invalid. Yet, increased access to drug checking tools has the potential to afford the knowledge produced by people who use drugs a technological validity it has never before enjoyed. In this article, I engage with theories of knowledge production and ontological standpoint from the field of science, technology, and society studies to examine how law enforcement produces and maintains epistemic authority over the illicit drug market and to explore how drug checking technologies enable new forms of knowledge production. I argue that drug checking be viewed as a form of social resistance against law enforcement’s epistemological authority and as a refuge against the harms produced by drug criminalization.

scholarly journals Fieldwork on epistemic authority markers: What we can learn from different types of data

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karolina Grzech
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Epistemic Modality ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
Data Collection And Analysis ◽  
The Right To Know ◽  
Cognitive Study ◽  
The Right

AbstractEpistemicity in language encompasses various kinds of constructions and expressions that have to do with knowledge-related aspects of linguistic meaning (cf. Grzech, Karolina, Eva Schultze-Berndt and Henrik Bergqvist. 2020c. Knowing in interaction: an introduction. Folia Linguistica [this issue]). It includes some well-established categories, such as evidentiality and epistemic modality (Boye, Kasper. 2012. Epistemic meaning: A crosslinguistic and functional-cognitive study. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton), but also categories that have been less well described to-date. In this paper, I focus on one such category: the marking of epistemic authority, i.e. the encoding of “the right to know or claim” (Stivers, Tanya, Lorenza Mondada & Jakob Steensig. 2011b. Knowledge, morality and affiliation in social interaction. In Stivers et al. 2011a). I explore how the marking of epistemic authority can be documented and analysed in the context of linguistic fieldwork. The discussion is based on a case study of Upper Napo Kichwa, a Quechuan language spoken in the Ecuadorian Amazon that exhibits a rich paradigm of epistemic discourse markers, encoding meanings related to epistemic authority and distribution of knowledge between discourse participants. I describe and appraise the methodology for epistemic fieldwork used in the Upper Napo Kichwa documentation and description project. I give a detailed account of the different tools and methods of data collection, showing their strengths and weaknesses. I also discuss the decisions made at the different stages of the project and their implications for data collection and analysis. In discussing these issues, I extrapolate from the case study, proposing practical solutions for fieldwork-based research on epistemic markers.

Epistemic competitions over Jewish Holocaust survivors’ stories in interviews

2021 ◽  
pp. 095792652199214
Author(s):  
Kim Schoofs ◽  
Dorien Van De Mieroop
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
World War ◽  
Master Narratives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Specialist Knowledge ◽  
Expert Status ◽  
The One

In this article, we scrutinise epistemic competitions in interviews about World War II. In particular, we analyse how the interlocutors draw on their epistemic authority concerning WWII to construct their interactional telling rights. On the one hand, the analyses illustrate how the interviewers rely on their historical expert status – as evidenced through their specialist knowledge and ventriloquisation of vicarious WWII narratives – in order to topicalise certain master narratives and thereby attempt to project particular identities upon the interviewees. On the other hand, the interviewees derive their epistemic authority from their first-hand experience as Jewish Holocaust survivors, on which they draw in order to counter these story projections, whilst constructing a more distinct self-positioning to protect their nuanced personal identity work. Overall, these epistemic competitions not only shaped the interviewees’ identity work, but they also made the link between storytelling and the social context more tangible as they brought – typically rather elusive – master narratives to the surface.

scholarly journals Epistemic Authority: Preemption or Proper Basing?

Erkenntnis ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 773-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Dormandy
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Authority

‘Who decided this?’: Negotiating epistemic and deontic authority in systemic family therapy training

2022 ◽  
pp. 146144562110374
Author(s):  
Katerina Nanouri ◽  
Eleftheria Tseliou ◽  
Georgios Abakoumkin ◽  
Nikos Bozatzis
Keyword(s):  
Adult Education ◽  
Family Therapy ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
Family Therapy Training ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Therapy Training ◽  
Systemic Family Therapy ◽  
Deontic Authority ◽  
Insight Into

In this article we illustrate how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic authority within systemic family therapy training. Adult education principles and postmodern imperatives have challenged trainers’ and trainees’ asymmetries regarding knowledge (epistemics) and power (deontics), normatively implicated by the institutional training setting. Up-to-date, we lack insight into how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic rights in naturally occurring dialog within training. Drawing from discursive psychology and conversation analysis, we present an analysis of eight transcribed, videotaped training seminars from a systemic family therapy training program, featuring three trainers and eleven trainees. Our analysis highlights the dilemmatic ways in which participants resist and affirm the normatively implicated trainers’ deontic and epistemic authority. Trainers are shown as mitigating directives and trainees as resisting them, with both displaying (not)knowing, while attending to concerns about (a)symmetry. We discuss our findings’ implications for systemic family therapy training.

The Virtues Needed by Experts in Action

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 142-157
Author(s):  
Andrea Lavazza ◽  
Mirko Farina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
Relational Autonomy ◽  
Intellectual Humility ◽  
The Face ◽  
Specialist Knowledge

The current Covid-19 pandemic is illustrative of both the need of more experts and of the difficulties that can arise in the face of their decisions. This happens, we argue, because experts usually interact with society through a strongly naturalistic framework, which often places experts’ epistemic authority (understood as neutrality and objectivity) at the centre, sometimes at the expenses of other pluralistic values (such as axiological ones) that people (often non-experts) cherish. In this paper, we argue that we need to supplement such a strong naturalistic framework used to promote epistemic authority with a number of virtues -both intellectual and ethical- which include i. intellectual humility, ii. courage, iii. wisdom and cares, as well as iv. relational autonomy. To illustrate this claim, we discuss these ideas in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and analyse a set of real-life examples where important decisions have been delegated to experts merely based on their epistemic authority. We use the illustrative failures described in the case studies above-mentioned to call for a revision of current understandings of expertise (merely based on epistemic soundness). Specifically, we argue that in social contexts we increasingly need “experts in action”; that is, people with certified specialist knowledge, who can however translate it into practical suggestions, decisions, and/or public policies that are ethically more balanced and that ultimately lead to fairer, more inclusive, and more representative decisions.

on Pedagogy, Trauma and Difficult Memory: Remembering Namatjira, our Beloved

2003 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 11-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathryn McConaghy
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Indigenous Education ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Curriculum Inquiry ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions

AbstractOne of the projects engaged in within the text Rethinking Indigenous Education (RIE) (McConaghy, 2000) was an analysis of the colonial regimes that are reproduced within Indigenous education, often despite our emancipatory intentions. Through a detailed critique of the various competitions for epistemic authority in the field, the book explores the structural processes by which certain knowledges are legitimated as “truths” and the material and symbolic effects of these.The focus of the book was on the imagined worlds of various traditions of knowing Indigenous education and their claims to authority. It was a “how” rather than a “who” story that dealt with theoretical assumptions, broad-brush policy and curriculum inquiry and that attempted to avoid the identity politics that had gripped Indigenous education for more than a decade. Importantly the book also suggested that rather than being cumulative, critique is a process that needs to be ongoing, done again and again. This paper, Remembering Namatjira, has sought to move beyond the main projects of RIE, many of them structural in nature, to an analysis of more intimate aspects of Indigenous education. It addresses some of the “who” issues, not in terms of representation politics, who can know and speak what, but in terms of the psychic difficulties that we attach to knowledge in Indigenous education. Whereas RIE drew upon postcolonial and feminist insights, this paper considers the contribution of psychoanalysis to thinking through some of the more intractable issues that remain unexamined or underexamined in the field. Among the issues addressed are the fundamental dilemmas around our ambivalences in education; the notion of pedagogical force (and transferences, resistances and obstacles to learning); the work of ethical witnessing; and issues of difficult knowledge, or knowledge and memories that we cannot bear to know. Central to the work of rethinking Indigenous education again, in moving beyond deconstruction, is the process of making meaning out of the ruins of our lovely knowledges (Britzman, 2003), our comfort knowledges, about what should be done in Indigenous education.

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