Epic Seminar series: all available online

28.10.24

Title: Epistemic injustice, healthcare disparities and the missing pipeline: reflections on the exclusion of  disabled scholars from health research 

People with disabilities often face unfair treatment in both healthcare and society. To improve healthcare and make it more inclusive, research must focus on the unique challenges faced by disabled people. Since they have firsthand experience, disabled individuals are in a strong position to identify problems and suggest improvements in healthcare that others might miss. Academic research informed by patients could play a key role in highlighting these perspectives, and with the right policy support, these insights could help shape better healthcare practices and public life.
 

Despite the clear benefits of including disabled voices in research, we explore the barriers that disabled people in the UK face when trying to conduct health research. In this paper, we draw on previous research and the personal experience of one of the authors - Joanne Hunt, who has spent over three years trying to find a suitable and accessible PhD program while dealing with energy-limiting conditions and being mostly homebound.
 

First, we look at the broader issue of how knowledge from disabled people is often undervalued in health research. Second, we focus on how disabled researchers experience exclusion, using ideas from philosophers Kidd and Carel (2017) on ‘strategies of exclusion.’ Finally, we suggest ways to reduce these barriers and improve access for disabled researchers in academia.

Zoom

Topic: EPIC seminar series: Charlotte Blease and Jo Hunt

Time: Oct 28, 2024 01:00 PM Greenwich Mean Time

Join Zoom Meeting

https://bristol-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/92843104446?pwd=vNgXoRtytQL3UlINBqm4jqvaPzLr7D.1

Meeting ID: 928 4310 4446

Passcode: 559702

30.09.24

Title:   

What is the characteristic wrong of testimonial injustice? 

My aim in this paper is to identify the wrong that is done in all cases of testimonial injustice, if there is one. Miranda Fricker (2007) proposes one account of this distinctive wrong, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. (2014) offers another. I think neither works. Nor does an account based on giving due respect to the testifier’s epistemic competence. Nor does an account based on exposing the testifier to substantial risk of harm. Rachel Fraser (2023) describes a further account, and the proposal I favour is a slight amendment of this.

Epistemic injustice and epistemic responsibility in evidence-informed policymaking during crises

20.05.24

Complex and interrelated crises define today’s policy space and pose particular challenges for deploying science to support evidence-informed policymaking (EIPM). Pandemics, climate change, natural catastrophes or energy crises demand science-based solutions, but also expose our inability to locate, discriminate, understand, and respond to incomplete and contested evidence. The reification of scientific knowledge and expertise as the antidote to uncertainty obscures the challenges of deciding what needs to be asked, and ‘which’ or ‘whose’ science ought to provide the answers when contestation and disagreements emerge. This highlights the inevitability of ignorance in crisis policymaking, created by the exclusion - but also inclusion- of voices, facts and values from the decision-making processes.

In this talk, I will use examples from the past COVID-19 pandemic to show how scientific expertise was selectively and narrowly mobilised to respond to the crisis, thus creating a form of systemic ignorance that shaped public policy. Following the work of Elizabeth Anderson, I argue that explaining why expertise is so narrowly conceived and mobilised requires us to consider science’s structural epistemic injustices. I will finish by sketching an account of epistemic responsibilities that may allow epistemic communities to widen the range of voices contributing to the policy process despite the inherently exclusionary nature of expertise.  Taking epistemic responsibility seriously can help address the root causes of epistemic injustices in EIPM and pave the way for more inclusive and deliberative forms of crisis governance better equipped to deal with uncertainty.

Epistemic Microaggressions and Epistemic Harm in Medicine

29.04.24

Drawing on her recently published book, Microaggressions in Medicine (Oxford 2024), this talk will provide an overview and analysis of epistemic microaggressions in medical contexts. Epistemic microaggressions result in epistemic harm to recipients. Focusing on cases of patients who are members of marginalized groups, the presentation will demonstrate how epistemic microaggressions can lead to a variety of serious short- and long-term harms to patients and therefore ought to be avoided by healthcare professionals. Special attention will be paid to the moral significance of epistemic microaggressions in medical contexts.

Epistemic Injustices and Mental Ill-Health

04.03.24

I will talk us through some types of epistemic injustice, principally: ‘testimonial injustice’, ‘pre-emptive testimonial injustice’, and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ which I defined in earlier work; and ‘testimonial smothering’ as defined by Kristie Dotson. I’ll explain these phenomena largely by way of examples from a memoir of mental ill-health written by the British actor David Harewood, Maybe I Don’t belong Here: A Memoir of Race, Identity, Breakdown and Recovery (2021). His personal story explores how experiences of racism, growing up in Britain in the seventies and as a young man in the eighties, sowed the seeds of personal fracture and psychological disconnect that later expressed themselves in psychosis.

I will also reflect that many psychiatrists and therapists effectively see their own work as including the amelioration of precisely these forms of epistemic injustice: aiming to create a therapeutic relationship in which credibility is not withheld, and shared intelligibility of experience is cultivated, with the result that the service-user may come to express themselves without needing to truncate or restyle what they want to say. This may be an impossible ideal, given that healthcare professionals must equally be diagnostically alert to fantasy, projection, and delusion, among other phenomena of epistemic disturbance, but impossible ideals can nonetheless be useful guiding ideals, playing a helpful informal self-regulatory role in one’s professional practice. If so, then perhaps the explicitly epistemic framing of this particular guiding ideal may make for a useful tool in the therapeutic toolbox?