Webinar Posthumanism and the

Affective Turn

Epistemic Injustice and emergent listening:

‘Granny and the Goldfish’

Thursday 19 February 2015

Associate Professor Karin Murris

karin.murris@uct.ac.za

Question Mark Taken from “The Visitors Who came to Stay” Annalena McAfee/Anthony Browne

Diffractive methodology – “how

does it work?”

Reading Miranda Fricker and

Karen Barad diffractively

through one another

Waves are not individual ‘things’. Waves can overlap at the

same point in space. When two water waves combine, the

“resultant wave is a sum of the effects of each individual

component wave, that is, it is a combination of the

disturbances created by each wave individually. This way of

combining effects is called superposition (Barad, 2007:76).

Structure chapter

• Problematisation of common definition of what counts as

‘worthwhile’ knowledge

• Fricker’s notion of ‘epistemic injustice’ applied to ‘child’

• An analysis of an example from practice: Granny and the

Goldfish (YouTube)

• Conclusion: in this case children regarded as less than full

epistemic subjects.

• The main obstacles for hearing child’s voice: child as

conceptualised by human rights discourse, developmental

psychology, critical theory, social constructivism,

poststructuralism.

• Epistemic justice involves resisting essentialising and

normalising naturalised discourses about child and requires

emergent listening (relationships human and nonhuman others)

• Conclusion: ‘age’ can’t just be added as category for exclusion

Contesting ‘worthwhile’

knowledge

R.S. Peters (1966): educational practices are “those

in which people try to pass on what is worthwhile as

well as those in which they actually succeed in doing

so”.

Is passing “something on” necessary for calling

something ‘education’ or ‘teaching’? Who decides

something is “worthwhile”?

In schools: adults do.

An example…

construct a plant showing 6

elements

Junk or ‘worthwhile’ knowledge

construction?

Stereotyping and Identity

prejudice

Fricker: “identity prejudice” = “a label for prejudices

against people qua social type” (Fricker, 2007, p.4;

my emphasis)

The exclusivity of race, class and gender (SA’s

‘order’)

Silence about: ‘child’ and ‘age’

Stereotyping and social

imagination

Fricker (2007): identity prejudices “typically enter into a

hearer’s credibility judgement by way of the social imagination,

in the form of a prejudicial stereotype – a distorted image of the

social type in question”

A stereotype is misleading when the prejudice “works against

the speaker”. Two things might follow, she continues, “there is

an epistemic dysfunction in the exchange – the hearer makes

an unduly deflated judgment of the speaker’s credibility,

perhaps missing out on knowledge as a result” and secondly,

the “hearer does something ethically bad” – “the speaker is

wrongfully undermined in her capacity as a knower” (Fricker,

2007: 17).

It is the attributes that make a stereotype positive, negative or

neutral

Fair stereotyping?

Two necessary conditions (Fricker, 2007: 32, 33):

1. the attribute (e.g. immaturity) needs to be a reliable

generalisation

2. secondly, it should not be a “pre-judgement”, that is a

judgement made without proper evidence.

Attributes assigned to historically powerless groups are often

associated with lack of “competence or sincerity or both” & also

apply to child historically: “over-emotionality, illogicality, inferior

intelligence, evolutionary inferiority, incontinence, lack of

‘breeding’, lack of moral fibre, being on the make, etc.” (Fricker,

2007: 32). These prejudices of deficit are often held

“unchecked” in the collective social imagination and operate

“beneath the radar”.

Transformation in schools

possible?

The norm: asking of closed, rhetorical

questions by teachers – a symptom of a

deeper engrained epistemic orientation

that profoundly influences how we speak

and regard what it means to think with

children.

A “listening-as-usual” (Davies, 2013): a listening out for, or

rehearsal of, what teachers already know.

Teachers’ self-identity as epistemic authorities (see earlier

example)

Even, when committed to philosophy with children!

Epistemic Injustice

Epistemic injustice occurs when someone is

wronged specifically in their capacity as a

knower and comprises:

Testimonial injustice: ‘prejudice

causes a hearer to give a deflated level of

credibility to a speaker’s word’

e.g. adults don’t take a child seriously as a

knower

Hermeneutical injustice: when power

relations and structural prejudice undermine

child’s faith in their own ability to make

sense of the world

Denying the capacity for reason

“an uneven discursive terrain”

(Mis)conceptions of child (by ‘Nature’):

‘innocent’, ‘evil’, ‘ignorant’, ‘fragile’,

‘developing’, ‘fragile’ or ‘excluded’

‘Cultural’ responses:

protection, control, discipline, instruction,

development, socialisation, medication,

empowering and guidance

Epistemic injustice is done when the individual is treated as a

typical example of a particular social type, before s/he has been

allowed to show who or what s/he is and interventions are

negotiated democratically.

‘Emergent listening’

Disrupting ‘listening-as-usual’ through reading Fricker and

Barad diffractively through one another

Responsive listening requires adults to think about what a

child is saying - not just to the words used by the child- as

well as being fully aware of the other materialdiscursive

elements of the situation (Barad, 2007)

Carla Rinaldi (2006) = emergent listening which requires a

suspension of “our prejudices” and opens up “new ways of

knowing and new ways of being” (Davies, 2014: 21).

Identifying & disrupting “identity-

prejudicial credibility deficit”

Shaun Tan

The Arrival

Philosophy with children

A boy and his teacher read out aloud a publically available

dialogue that took place between a girl called Charlotte

(aged 6) and her teacher.

With nine year olds in Northumberland, the dialogue is used

as a starting point for a philosophical enquiry

See: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkeEjZVaEqk

Granny and the Goldfish (James Nottingham)

Boy 1: Princess Diana…you only knew her name, but you didn’t really meet her

like, when she died people were sending her flowers and everything, but in a

way she was a stranger, but I cared for her.

Boy 2: What is a stranger?

Girl 1: You haven’t met them, but sort of not communicated with them.

Girl 2: I rather wish a stranger died than my family and friends, because you

don’t really know other people…they might be horrible.

Girl 3: Yes, but you are saying that just because you don’t know them it is

better that strangers die, just because you don’t know them.

Girl 4: If there were such a thing like God, why would he like make horrible

people in the world, like the people in Kosovo? Why does he make people

suffer?

Boy 3: I don’t agree with you Amy, because God might like some bad people on

the earth, because He might think it’s too peaceful, so he might say you have to

have some bother sometime.

Girl 5: It’s impossible to have a perfect world…I mean you have to have bad

people in the world, coz if we did have a perfect world we would go round

saying ‘hiya’ drinking cups of coffee all the time…always being nice to each

other that wouldn’t be right, that wouldn’t be comfortable at all.

First critical incident from practice

1. The dialogue from the internet itself (a real

conversation) used as text

‘“Charlotte”, he claimed, “will have to carry that guilt for the

rest of her life”.’

Without knowing her, so not based on prior acquaintance, he

makes this prejudgement and assigns the attributes fragile,

vulnerable, ignorance and perhaps even innocence to this six

year old. This stereotyping prevents him from listening

responsively and therefore from taking her seriously as

knowledge bearer.

A case of hermeneutical

injustice?

Teacher: ‘What if it’s between Zephyr and grandma?’

Charlotte: ‘Um. Grandma’s very old. She might die anyway.’

Teacher: ‘What if its either grandma dies in 6 months before

she would have, or Zephyr is hit by a car?’

Charlotte: ‘Are you going to tell grandma what I said?’

Teacher: ‘I don’t know. Probably not.’

Charlotte: ‘I think grandma is more important’

Charlotte is clearly not allowed to love non-human animals more

than human animals without running the risk of feeling guilty. Over

time, her responses might increasingly conform to the

expectations of her adult educators (including adopting the

humanist prejudice that human animals are always more loveable

or at least worth saving more than non-human animals.

Second critical incident from

practice

2. The documentary

The documentary invariably prompts adult laughter (what

was your response?). Even when teachers are very familiar

with philosophy with children, they smile, laugh, or claim that

Charlotte cannot possibly be telling the truth and must be

making it up. I have also heard teachers exclaim “How

sweet”, or “Cute” after watching the DvD.

Clearly the prejudice here is that when children grow up, that

is, develop into more mature, rational adults, they will come

to understand that perfect worlds are peaceful (whatever that

might mean) and grandmas should be loved more than cats.

Diffractions…

Some questions that guided me:

The teacher’s intra-actions? What does he do and what are

the differences-in-the-making?

How do my choices (‘agential cuts’) produce meaning?

Those of the documentary makers? (editing etc)

The children’s? Together…?

What is produced diffractively?

……….

Emergent listening

Children’s wonderings were genuinely thought provoking in

the Heideggerian sense: we can only learn to think by

‘giving our mind to what there is to think about’ (Heidegger,

1968: 4).

Necessary condition: adults ‘are’ ‘open-minded’ and have

epistemic modesty, that is, accept that their (and all)

knowledge is limited and that they can learn (also) from

children. They need to be open to what they have not heard

before, and, to resist the urge to translate what they hear

into what is familiar (listening-as-usual).

The materiality that matters

The physical space is another strong language that constitutes

thought although its “code is “not always explicit and

recognisable” (Rinaldi, 2006: 82).

Rinaldi (2006): reading “spatial language is multisensory and

involves both the remote receptors (eye, ear and nose) and the

immediate receptors for the surrounding environment (the skin,

membranes and muscles)”. The children’s questions and

thoughts about e.g. ‘perfect world’ is a materialdiscursive activity

of thinking together.

Knowing is a material practice, that is, “a physical practice of

engagement” (Barad, 2007: 342), a specific engagement with the

world of which the teacher is also a part. Knowledge construction

is always an entangled, open and on-going reconfiguration of the

world.

The knowledge we might miss

In the examples above, hearers’ prejudices can cause

them here to miss out on ‘pieces’ of knowledge offered by

the child, for example, the depth of Charlotte’s love for

Zephyr or the children’s challenge to the idea that a

‘perfect world’ should be desirable.

Epistemic equality

Teachers interpret children’s interpretations of reality. Such

dominant discourses exclude other ways of thinking and of

understanding the world (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005)

Thinking alongside children (Haynes & Murris, 2012):

everyone needs to ‘give’ their mind to what there is to think

about, which is only possible when adults are also ‘open-

minded’, have epistemic modesty and epistemic trust. If what

children say (the content) is not heard (but laughed at) –

epistemic equality is absent. It means being open to the

possibility that when a child speaks she might contribute to

the pool of knowledge, the possibility of which should not be

prejudged.

The conclusion

New diffractive patterns emerging:

Epistemic injustice is done to children when they are wronged

specifically in their capacity as a knower. Knowledge is offered by

the child, but not heard by the adult, because of identity prejudice

(ageism). Fricker’s work concerns race, class and gender, and I

argue that her powerful “conceptual apparatus” (Code, 2008)

should, but cannot simply be extended to include child as a

category for exclusion and discrimination. Barad’s onto-

epistemology intra-acts with Fricker’s notion of epistemic injustice

and ‘interferes’ with the latter’s individualised notion of

subjectivity. Finally, what the inclusion of ‘age’ also necessitates

is an interrogation of what knowledge is in order to ‘allow’ young

(black) child ‘in’. What is worthwhile knowledge and who

decides?