Abstract
This essay begins with the story of Vincent Lloyd who recounts a disturbing experience he had while teaching a course to a group of students of color. What does pedagogical uptake under conditions of systemic oppression require of educators? In the first section, I explore philosopher Nancy Potter’s (Nancy Potter. “Giving Uptake”. Social Theory and Practice 26/3 (2000) 479–508; Nancy Potter. The Virtue of Defiance and Psychiatric Engagement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)) work on uptake, whose focus on the mental health field is important because she acknowledges power imbalances. Nevertheless, her understanding of uptake may be insufficient for considering such classroom cases that introduced this essay. The second section shifts the focus of uptake from a psychological approach to a more epistemic understanding of uptake that underscores credibility and intelligibility. Uptake as credibility and intelligibility reveals the everyday patterns of uptake failure that marginalized knowers experience in the socio-epistemic world, described in section three. A recent turn in the scholarship of epistemic injustice towards epistemic agency and resistance is taken up in the subsequent section and applied to the conceptualization of uptake. In the concluding section, I begin to explore how these insights contribute to a notion of pedagogical uptake under conditions of systemic oppression.
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Notes
Vincent Lloyd. “A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-racist Hell”. Compact Magazine (February 10, 2023). https://compactmag.com/article/a-black-professor-trapped-in-anti-racist-hell.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Mitchell Atencio. “Vincent Lloyd on Salvation from Anti-racist Hell”. Sojourners (February 23, 2023). https://sojo.net/articles/vincent-lloyd-salvation-anti-racist-hell.
Ibid.
J. L. Austin. How to Do Things with Words. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).
Kristie Dotson. “A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression”. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 33/1 (2012): 24–47.
Nancy Potter. “Giving Uptake”. Social Theory and Practice 26/3 (2000) 479–508; Nancy Potter. The Virtue of Defiance and Psychiatric Engagement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Nancy Potter. “Giving Uptake”, 481.
Nancy Potter. How Can I Be Trusted?: A Virtue Theory of Trustworthiness (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002): 150.
Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. (Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1983).
Claire Lockard. “The Charitability Gap: Misuses of Interpretive Charity in Academic Philosophy”. Hypatia (forthcoming).
Maria Lugones. Pilgrimages/peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
Claire Lockard. “The Charitability Gap”.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. “Wrongful Requests and Strategic Refusals to Understand”. In Heidi Grasswick, ed., Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011): 223–240.
Ibid., 223.
Nancy Potter. “Giving Uptake”, 483.
Ibid., 507.
Jose Medina. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 27.
Miranda Fricker. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Ibid., 1.
Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird. (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1960).
Pohlhaus, Gaile Jr. “Discerning the Primary Epistemic Harm in Cases of Testimonial Injustice”. Social Epistemology 28/2 (2014): 99–114.
Kristie Dotson, “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing”.
Ibid., 238.
Ibid., 237.
Ibid., 244.
Ibid., 245.
Ibid.
Cassandra Byers Harvin, “Conversations I Can’t Have”, On The Issues 5:2 (April 1996): 15.
Miranda Fricker. Epistemic Injustice, 147.
Miranda Fricker. Epistemic Injustice, 155.
Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of ‘Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance’”. Hypatia 27/4 (2012): 715–735.
Ibid., 725.
Robin Dembroff. “Beyond Binary: Genderqueer as a Critical Gender Kind”. Philosophers’ Imprint 20/9 (2020): 2, 1–23.
Ibid., 2.
Kristie Dotson, “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing”, 251.
Nora Berenstain. “Epistemic Exploitation”. Ergo 3/22 (2016): 569–590.
Ibid., 570.
Ibid., 571.
Ibid., 587.
Sara Ahmed. “An Affinity of Hammers”. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3/1–2 (2016): 22–34.
Ibid., 29.
Ibid.
Ibid., 27.
Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. “Gaslighting and Echoing, or Why Collective Epistemic Resistance is not a ‘Witch Hunt’”. Hypatia 35/4 (2020): 674–686.
Kate Abramson. “Turning Up the Lights on Gaslighting”. Philosophical Perspectives 28/1 (2014): 1–30.
Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 9.
Ibid., 10.
Ibid.
Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. “Gaslighting and Echoing”, 677.
José Medina. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. (Oxford University Press, 2013): 4.
Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. “Epistemic Agency Under Oppression”. Philosophical Papers 49/2 (2020): 233–251.
José Medina. “Group Agential Epistemic Injustice: Epistemic Disempowerment and Critical Defanging of Group Epistemic Agency. Philosophical Issues 32 (2022); 320–334.
Kristie Dotson. “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression”. Social Epistemology 28/2 (2014): 115–138, 115.
Kristie Dotson. “A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression”. Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 33/1 (2012): 24–47, 24.
José Medina. “Group Agential Epistemic Injustice”, 320 (emphasis added).
Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. “Epistemic Agency Under Oppression”. Philosophical Papers 49/2 (2020): 233–251.
Ibid., 241.
Ibid., 245.
Ibid., 248.
Ibid., 243.
Emmalon Davis. “Typecasts, Tokens, and Brands: Credibility Excess as Epistemic Vice”. Hypatia 31/3 (2006): 485–501.
Saba Fatima. “On the Edge of Knowing: Microaggression and Epistemic Uncertainty as a Woman of Color”. In K. Cole and H. Hassel (eds), Surviving Sexism in Academia: Strategies for Feminist Leadership (New York: Routledge, 2007): 147–154.
Nora Berenstain. “Epistemic Exploitation”.
Jeanine Weekes Schroer. “Giving Them Something They Can Feel: On the Strategy of Scientizing the Phenomenology of Race and Racism”. Knowledge Cultures 3/1 (2015): 91–110.
María Lugones. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes.
José Medina. “Group Agential Epistemic Injustice”, 322.
Ibid.
Ibid. 320 (emphasis added).
Ibid. 326.
José Medina. The Epistemology of Protest: Silencing, Epistemic Activism, and the Communicative Life of Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. “Gaslighting and Echoing”.
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Applebaum, B. Pedagogical Uptake: Credibility, Intelligibility, and Agency. Stud Philos Educ 43, 195–210 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-023-09906-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-023-09906-3