Embodied Institutions and Epistemic Exclusions: Affect in the Academy

This paper explores the intersection between affect, emotion, social imaginaries, and institutions through the lens of epistemic power in the academy. It argues that attending to this intersection is critical for a fuller understanding of how affective and emotional dynamics can assist to entrench, but also disrupt, asymmetries of epistemic privilege that cut across lines of race, sex, and other markers of social difference. As part of this discussion the paper reflects on the possibility of intervening in dominant social imaginaries that become sedimented in the routine operations of the modern university, and which produce affective ecologies that sustain epistemic exclusions within academic institutions

The Sympathetic Imagination: Recognition, Reciprocity, and Difference.

In light of the limitations of top-down measures to adequately address the injustices that are suffered by devalued social identities, this thesis examines the sympathetic imagination as a resource for achieving recognition of racial and sexual difference. Adam Smith’s rich and sophisticated account of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) is central to this project. Smith claims that our capacity to imaginatively adopt others’ standpoints and to be emotionally affected by their experiences is what binds individuals together as moral agents. Smith acknowledges that the extent to which identify with others’ experiences is often influenced by a lack of understanding, bias and prejudice. Hence, if sympathy is to produce moral behaviour, it must be harnessed to an informed and reflective imaginative exercise. Harmonious social communities in Smith’s view are underpinned by reciprocal exercises of imaginative perspective-taking between individuals, wherein each person strives to grasp the other’s point of view, and to critically scrutinise their response to the other’s feelings. Given the general plausibility of Smith’s naturalistic moral theory, this thesis analyses the massive failures of sympathy that mark contemporary societies, with reference to the concept of the social imaginary. I suggest that the dominant social imaginary of a society has the capacity to systematically undercut fellow-feeling with the experiences of identities that are prevented from shaping prevailing values, norms and meanings, owing to their membership within a marginalised and devalued group. It achieves this by structuring implicit and widely held assumptions about different social identities that exclusively reflect the perspectives of privileged groups, and which render certain possibilities inconceivable or implausible. This research discusses the value and limitations of Smith’s appeal to a form of critical self-regulation as a means of repairing the failures of sympathy engendered by dominant imaginings of sexual and racial difference. This discussion draws attention to the important role played by informal, everyday embodied encounters with others, in addition to institutional structures and bottom up initiatives in facilitating sympathetic identification between privileged and devalued identities

Designing for epistemic justice : Epistemic apprenticeship as an institutional commitment

This paper develops the concept of epistemic apprenticeship as a response to failures among privileged social actors to perceive the knowledge bases of unjustly marginalised groups as sources of valuable insight. Inspired by Elizabeth Spelman’s reflections on apprenticeship and intersectional feminism, an epistemic apprenticeship represents an obverse form of apprenticeship; one in which socially privileged knowers become apprentices to those who do not enjoy equivalent power and privilege. This paper critiques and extends Spelman’s account of apprenticeship by focussing on how the institutional sedimentation of dominant social imaginaries works against the volitional and virtuous practice of apprenticeship, and by exploring what a commitment to epistemic apprenticeship demands at the level of institutional practice. As part of this discussion, I scrutinise the conditions under which institutionalised apprenticeships may fall short of their meliorative potential, and may obstruct rather than aid efforts to achieve greater epistemic justice

Sexual Fluency: Embedded Imaginaries and Unjust Sex

In this paper I argue that the pervasive reality of unjust heterosex necessitates greater attention to the concept of “sexual fluency” (Cahill 2014). This paper elaborates on what it means to be a sexually fluent and disfluent subject, and its broader ethical and political significance. As part of this discussion, I explore the relationship between sexual (dis)fluency and embedded imaginaries, and critically reflect on the promise and limitations of particular interventions to disrupt patterns of sexual disfluency among sexual actors

The Many Lives of Institutions: A Framework for Studying Institutional Affect

<p>Editorial introduction to <em>Affect, Power, and Institutions</em> volume (Routledge 2022). </p&gt