The epistemic effects of close entanglements between research fields and activist movements
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The epistemic effects of close entanglements between research fields and activist movements Rico Hauswald1 Received: 4 May 2018 / Accepted: 30 November 2018 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract There are a number of research fields that exhibit a special connection to some particular activist movement. Typically in these cases, we observe a remarkable degree of personnel overlap between the movements and the scientific communities. I have two primary aims. First, I shall explore the reasons why there are such close entanglements between some research fields and some activist movements. I argue that both scientists and activists have specific epistemic interests that help explain why both practices tend to intersect functionally. Second, I shall evaluate these entanglements from an epistemological point of view. Drawing on a conception of science that has science consisting of two essential tasks—asking significant questions and adequately answering them—, I argue that activists’ contribution to science is ambivalent with regard to the first task because they can help to overcome the unjust distribution of resources, but they can also be the source of new inequalities. Regarding the second task, I similarly suggest that activists can serve a useful purpose in science, since they tend to exhibit certain epistemically valuable properties and can help compensate for what I call collective biases, although in certain situations they tend to reinforce collective biases. Keywords Social epistemology · Activist movements · Scholar-activists · Epistemic diversity · Bias
1 Introduction There are a number of research fields that exhibit a special connection to some particular activist movement in the sense that both have evolved historically more or less in parallel (sometimes sparked by the movement, sometimes by the research field) and have mutually influenced each other in various ways. Typically, these movements are
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Rico Hauswald [email protected] Department of Philosophy, University of Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany
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not merely passive recipients of scientific expertise, for they also attempt, often successfully, to exert influence on these scientific fields. Concrete examples include, for instance, climatology and climate activism (Bromley-Trujillo et al. 2014) or gender studies and feminism (Hirschauer 2012). Further examples are queer theory and queer politics, African-American studies and the African-American civil rights movement, fat studies and the fat acceptance movement, disability studies and the neurodiversity movement, or animal studies and the animal rights movement. Strikingly, in all of these pairings we observe a remarkable degree of personnel overlap between the movements and the scientific communities; in other words, many members of the scientific communities are what can be called scholar-activists. While such entanglements between research fields and activist movements have been endorsed by some (a widely held view is that certain research fields are—and should be—the “acad
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