Ignorance, Power, and Politics: Perspectives from Feminist and Political Epistemology

About this course

Additional Information

• Learning objectives

  At the end of the course, students will be able to:

  • Understand key concepts in social epistemology, esp. political and feminist conceptions of ignorance (such as "white ignorance”, “epistemic echo chambers” or “science scepticism”) and can apply them to related contemporary issues for example in the media or your own life.
  • Synthesise and combine philosophical traditions, for example analytic, feminist, and continental philosophy, especially in the field of ignorance studies.
  • Analyse diverse, professional-level philosophical research articles, and identify, contextualise, and evaluate their core arguments. You are able to identify the most charitable reading of the article (when appropriate).
  • Clarify their own thinking about challenging philosophical topics by writing (research diary) and discussing in the classroom setting.

• Forms of tuition and hour distribution

  The contact time is split between lectures by the course convenors and in-class discussion. Students will additionally be expected to complete readings from the syllabus before coming to class. The course is awarded with 2 ECTS in total, which means that students are required to spend 56 hours working on the course. 

  These 56 hours are divided up as follows: 

  • We will assign 5 short texts which students are required to read before the course. Students should calculate approximately 1 hour for each text in order to get a thorough grip of the text's arguments and make notes for their research diary. This leads to 10 hours of reading time before the course. 
  • We seek to hold the course in a time span of 5 days, with contact meetings of 6,5 hours each day (including breaks). We will divide this time in 2 hours of lectures by the instructors of the course and 5 hours of guided group discussion and presentations. 
  • Additionally, students should spend 5-10 hours on their research diaries and 5 hours for preparing their presentations.

• Forms of assessment

  • Research diary, presentation and attendance.

  Students will not hand in essays or take a final exam, but will be required to keep a "research diary" in which they discuss what they have learned, the questions that interest them, what they do not understand, what they think about the readings and course content, and connections they make between the readings, real-world issues and events, and their own experiences. 

  We stress that students should try their best to connect issues discussed in the course to their own lives as material to cover in the research diary. This research diary serves as 40% of the students' grades, and is evaluated on the level of its engagement with the course material. 

  At the end of the summer school, students will get the chance to present and discuss the content of their research diaries. 

  In the presentation, students should raise the most interesting questions, connections, and applications that they raised in their research diary, and how they might develop their thoughts in possible future research projects. 

  The presentation of the research diary comprises 30% of the students’ grades. 

  Students are expected to actively participate in in-class discussion. Participation and attendance comprise 30% of the students' grades. Though students are expected to attend all meetings, a minimum of 80% attendance is a requirement to pass the course.

• Syllabus

  Here you can download the preliminary course syllabus.  

  ^{*Please note that it is a preliminary syllabus and that it might be subject to some change before the course starts.}  

• Course coordinators

  Solmu Anttila (MSc, MPhil) is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Their doctoral project examines the foundations of political epistemology. Their doctoral project examines the fundamentals of the emerging field of normative political epistemology. The core of the thesis is a reintroduction of the fundamental concepts of political theory to political epistemology, which serve as resources to construct a systematic political theory of knowledge from an analytic standpoint. These political-epistemic concepts, like epistemic power, epistemic exclusion, and epistemic resources provide a novel, explicitly structural perspective into normative ethical concepts already familiar in political epistemology like epistemic injustice, epistemic resistance, and epistemic responsibility.

  Sonja Riegler (BA BA MA) is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Vienna (supervised by Martin Kusch). Her doctoral project puts forward a novel theory of ignorance in social and political contexts. By drawing on Craigean “function-first” epistemology, and insights from feminist epistemology, she seeks to formulate a “functionalist approach” to ignorance that is able to specify different societal functions, mechanisms, causes and effects of ignorance. During her master's degree, Sonja Riegler was employed as a teaching assistant in philosophy at the University of Vienna. Teaching students of philosophy has been an extremely enjoyable and challenging experience and will function as a solid foundation for further teaching assignments. Moreover, Sonja Riegler is chair of UPsalon, an initiative that aims to create a space for underrepresented philosophers to connect.