You are here
Search results
(1 - 6 of 6)
- Title
- Social-ecological systems, values, and the science of "people management"
- Creator
- Piso, Zachary Amedeo
- Date
- 2017
- Collection
- Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Description
-
This dissertation interrogates a shift in environmental science, policy, and management toward conceptualizing the environment as a social-ecological system. Social-ecological systems science reflects an interdisciplinary effort to understand how individuals and communities achieve their environmental goals through the institutions that they maintain. Though the paradigmatic institutions concern economic behavior (e.g. property rights institutions), the field embraces the social sciences...
Show moreThis dissertation interrogates a shift in environmental science, policy, and management toward conceptualizing the environment as a social-ecological system. Social-ecological systems science reflects an interdisciplinary effort to understand how individuals and communities achieve their environmental goals through the institutions that they maintain. Though the paradigmatic institutions concern economic behavior (e.g. property rights institutions), the field embraces the social sciences broadly, with contributions from sociology, anthropology, geography, political science, and so on. That said, social science is fairly narrowly conceived; leaders in the field stress that they are studying social mechanisms in order to predict and manage social behavior. In a popular textbook on the subject, Fikret Berkes and Carl Folke stress that "resource management is people management" and call for a social science of this management.Social-ecological systems scientists have generally neglected the ethics of people management-for the most part they subscribe to a fairly typical fact/value dichotomy according to which scientists describe social-ecological systems while managers and policymakers prescribe actions in light of these descriptions. Following several philosophical traditions (in particular pragmatist philosophy of science), I call attention to the ways that social-ecological systems science is value-laden. I take environmental pragmatism to provide a roadmap for conducting social-ecological systems science ethically. Environmental pragmatists stress that science is always embedded in practical problem-solving activities that presuppose particular goals for, and side constraints to, inquiry. Many traditions in the philosophy of environmental science embrace social science for the specific role of facilitating this deliberation, but these traditions do not seem to anticipate the explanatory ambitions of social sciences. This leaves unaddressed several pertinent questions about how social explanations work (i.e. how functional distinction structure inquiry), which have very practical implications for which social science disciplines should be included in a collaboration and how social and ecological knowledge should be integrated. For example, most social situations are characterized by property rights institutions, cultural traditions, political alliances, and other social institutions within the purview of particular social science disciplines, but researchers are not reflexive about whether to explain environmental change according to one set of practices or another.The dissertation traverses the following terrain: the first chapter more carefully motivates the questions above regarding the need for ethics and the promise, but present inadequacy, of environmental pragmatism to meet this need. Chapter two attends to Dewey's theory of inquiry, in particular the dialogical dimension of inquiry that authorizes warranted assertions. Through reflection on Daniel Bromley's volitional pragmatism and a debate between Richard Rorty and hermeneutic social scientists, chapter three attends to the way that social science structures inquiry in order to intervene in the normative practices of a community. Chapter four analyzes social-ecological explanations in order to locate normative and evaluative assumptions that should be accountable to democratic deliberation. Finally, chapter five redescribes interdisciplinary integration as an ethical project where decisions about the centering and decentering of different sciences is as much ethical as epistemological.
Show less
- Title
- Community epistemic capacities for epistemic self-determination in environmental justice and food sovereignty
- Creator
- Werkheiser, Ian Russell Wolohan
- Date
- 2015
- Collection
- Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Description
-
This dissertation seeks to address an important but underexamined part of communities' survival and flourishing in the face of marginalization and oppression: community epistemic capacities and community epistemic self-determination. I distinguish community epistemic capacities as a subset of community capacities, to mean the abilities of a community to gain, maintain, adapt, and continue the knowledge needed to solve problems and flourish. I have argued previously that community epistemic...
Show moreThis dissertation seeks to address an important but underexamined part of communities' survival and flourishing in the face of marginalization and oppression: community epistemic capacities and community epistemic self-determination. I distinguish community epistemic capacities as a subset of community capacities, to mean the abilities of a community to gain, maintain, adapt, and continue the knowledge needed to solve problems and flourish. I have argued previously that community epistemic capacities are necessary for a community to meaningfully participate within the larger society in just, deliberative processes. This dissertation argues in part that community epistemic capacities are also necessary for a community to effectively engage in their own, independent projects (often in cooperation with other communities) which are important to the communities' members, particularly ones which promote the survival and flourishing of the community. I take this other application of community epistemic capacities to be a form of self-determination for communities. I focus in this dissertation on epistemic self-determination as an important sub-set of self-determination. By epistemic self-determination I mean the ability of community members to jointly engage in epistemic projects and determine the epistemic practices of their community, which can include methodologies for knowledge production and evaluative assumptions. To understand community epistemic capacities and self-determination, I contrast them with the Capabilities Approach, including the growing literature on collective capabilities. I also look at the environmental justice and food sovereignty paradigms – two activist discourses which take seriously the importance of both justice within larger institutions, as well as justice claims for communities to be able to build their own alternative projects outside of those institutions. The latter justice claim, which I call self-determination justice, has been insufficiently examined in political philosophy, but as I argue it is vital for community survival and flourishing. The justice conversations in these discourses help explicate the community epistemic capacities and self-determination framework, and these concepts likewise help deepen our understanding of these social justice movements. With this understanding in place, I apply the concepts of community epistemic capacities and community epistemic self-determination to a number of topics to show how they can inform our understanding of policy, activism, and transdisciplinary research. I explore the concept of trust as an epistemic capacity, and look at ways in which external experts can ameliorate a lack of community epistemic capacities through structured decision-making. I also look at how policies in food systems and the environment can be evaluated based on the degree to which they promote epistemic self-determination or undermine it. In the final chapter, I discuss a transdisciplinary project I have been conducting with partners in La Via Campesina and KRRS to look at women's barriers to participation in the food sovereignty movement in India. This work not only provides illustrations of the concepts discussed in this dissertation in its findings, but the study itself stands as a useful model of how incorporating a concern for community epistemic capacities and self-determination can inform external experts' work with communities.
Show less
- Title
- A unified account of motivated ignorance
- Creator
- Woomer, Lauren Michelle
- Date
- 2015
- Collection
- Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Description
-
Motivated ignorance is a state of not-knowing that is cultivated or maintained by a person in order to serve their motives (i.e. their desires, interests, needs, or goals). While there has been a fair amount of work done by some feminist philosophers and critical philosophers of race on cultivated forms of ignorance in general, a detailed account of motivated ignorance in particular has not been given. In my dissertation, I offer just such an account—examining both what it means for a person...
Show moreMotivated ignorance is a state of not-knowing that is cultivated or maintained by a person in order to serve their motives (i.e. their desires, interests, needs, or goals). While there has been a fair amount of work done by some feminist philosophers and critical philosophers of race on cultivated forms of ignorance in general, a detailed account of motivated ignorance in particular has not been given. In my dissertation, I offer just such an account—examining both what it means for a person to not-know in the particular way that characterizes motivated ignorance and how this particular form of not-knowing is produced. I call my account a unified one because it asks both of these questions, while current accounts of ignorance generally only address either one or the other. The accounts of the feminist and critical race theorists mentioned above (who I call epistemologists of ignorance) usually focus on the latter practical question, while those of epistemologists who are neither feminist epistemologists nor epistemologists of ignorance (who I call mainstream epistemologists) only address the former conceptual question.In the first two chapters of my dissertation, I argue that it is not only possible to create a unified account of ignorance that combines the methodologies and insights of mainstream epistemologists and epistemologists of ignorance, but that it is beneficial for an account of motivated ignorance to be a unified one. I develop my two-part definition of motivated ignorance in the remaining chapters. In the third chapter, I argue that the state of not-knowing that characterizes motivated ignorance is best understood as one of agential insensitivity. This kind of insensitivity occurs when an agent's failure either to attend to relevant and available evidence, or to change their beliefs in response to this evidence, results in their beliefs not tracking truth or evidence. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I argue that in cases of motivated ignorance agential insensitivity is produced by an agent's motives exerting influence on their cognitive processes, especially when these motives are affective ones. Furthermore, since our motives are socially shaped, the production of motivated ignorance is a deeply social process even though it takes place largely at the level of individual cognition.
Show less
- Title
- Politics of epistemic dependence : an epistemological approach to gender-based asylum
- Creator
- Sertler, Ezgi
- Date
- 2018
- Collection
- Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Description
-
"My dissertation aims to build a bridge between analytic social epistemologies, feminist epistemologies, and refugee studies by bringing them into conversation on gender-based asylum cases, i.e. cases where gender-related persecution is the primary consideration for the determination of refugee status. It does so by using the concept of "epistemic dependence," which refers to our social mechanisms of reliance in the process of knowing, i.e. what we rely on and how we rely on it. In this...
Show more"My dissertation aims to build a bridge between analytic social epistemologies, feminist epistemologies, and refugee studies by bringing them into conversation on gender-based asylum cases, i.e. cases where gender-related persecution is the primary consideration for the determination of refugee status. It does so by using the concept of "epistemic dependence," which refers to our social mechanisms of reliance in the process of knowing, i.e. what we rely on and how we rely on it. In this dissertation, I argue that tracking problematic operations of epistemic dependence can provide an illuminating framework for understanding the epistemological impacts of the social and political structures that govern asylum claims." -- Abstract.
Show less
- Title
- RADICAL CO-LABORATION ACROSS THE MULTIPLE AMERICAN WESTS : IMAGINING PLACE-BASED ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE
- Creator
- Talley, Jared L.
- Date
- 2021
- Collection
- Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Description
-
The grand landscapes of the American West are iconic and critical to the history of environmental conservation, yet they are also highly conflicted. A history of destructive extraction has left many of these landscapes in a state of disrepair, worsened by an increasingly variable climate, continued mis-management, and that these lands are publically owned thereby requiring decision making processes that are accountable to the diverse values that the public holds. This dissertation focuses on...
Show moreThe grand landscapes of the American West are iconic and critical to the history of environmental conservation, yet they are also highly conflicted. A history of destructive extraction has left many of these landscapes in a state of disrepair, worsened by an increasingly variable climate, continued mis-management, and that these lands are publically owned thereby requiring decision making processes that are accountable to the diverse values that the public holds. This dissertation focuses on the last of these, namely that collaborative decision making in the environmental governance of the American West is beneficial yet itself understudied and conflicted. Simply, if the public wishes to collaborate in the governance of Western lands, then special attention needs to be paid to the context, opportunities, and obstacles of Western collaboration in order to better navigate diverging values, knowledges, and worldviews.This argument begins with the premise that the ideal collaborator is often conceived as rational and discursive, able to aptly articulate their positions, wrestle with other’s arguments, and come to consensus over conflict. “Values” and “knowledge” are nested in a web of “beliefs” and “attitudes,” all of which reflect the cognitive dimensions of our worlds. This is not wrong, as it seems a requirement of collaboration to navigate the complexities of our worlds through discussion of values, beliefs, attitudes, knowledges, etc. However, I argue that the focus on the cognitive dimensions of collaboration obscures the materiality of collaborators – their own bodies, the places they exist in, and the ways that these structure their worlds. Building from the works of Mark Johnson and John Dewey, I develop a theory of the embodied imagination and the role of embodied and sociocultural experience in order to explore the ways in which Western landscapes condition our environmental beliefs. These diverging beliefs – or, as I term them, environmental imaginaries – are themselves embodied, occurring as much in our minds as in our bodily performances and experiences. I argue that the places we experience are integral to the beliefs that we hold. The reflexive place-belief process leads to the American West being a multiplicity of American and Indigenous Wests where the same landscape is experienced and perceived so differently as to provide considerable obstacles to collaboration in environmental governance. Through discussions of environmental imaginaries, Western places, the experience of various fencing in the West, and the experience of scientific measurement and grouping – and its concomitant impact on environmental governance – I argue that collaborative scholars and practitioners should take seriously the ways that place, experience, and the imagination impact the potential of collaborative environmental governance. This dissertation ends with a discussion of collaboration itself, arguing that a renewed focus on the embodiment of collaborators is better understood as radical co-laboration, or that organizing Western environmental governance around collaborative principles that take seriously the emplaced body is a radical divergence from the governance philosophies currently employed in the West, namely those that that prefer top-down governance that relies on our cognitive expertise in lieu of our embodied experience. I end with a discussion of structural changes that are required in order to enact co-laboration that recognizes the imaginatively derived, embodied experience of place in hopes that Western landscapes can be better governed, conserved, and protected through public, co-laborative processes.
Show less
- Title
- Epistemologies of Criminalization : Tracking Epistemic Oppression in the Lives of Black Girl Survivors
- Creator
- Spencer, Ayanna De'Vante
- Date
- 2021
- Collection
- Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Description
-
ABSTRACTEPISTEMOLOGIES OF CRIMINALIZATION: TRACKING EPISTEMIC OPPRESSION IN THE LIVES OF BLACK GIRL SURVIVORS ByAyanna De’Vante SpencerWorking with Girls for Gender Equity, the ‘metoo’ movement, and the Firecracker Foundation, I learned from youth Black girl organizers and survivors and adult advocates and allies that the state primarily offers Black girl survivors ankle monitors and parole officers over healing resources and pathways to recovery. I came to suspect that there is a problematic...
Show moreABSTRACTEPISTEMOLOGIES OF CRIMINALIZATION: TRACKING EPISTEMIC OPPRESSION IN THE LIVES OF BLACK GIRL SURVIVORS ByAyanna De’Vante SpencerWorking with Girls for Gender Equity, the ‘metoo’ movement, and the Firecracker Foundation, I learned from youth Black girl organizers and survivors and adult advocates and allies that the state primarily offers Black girl survivors ankle monitors and parole officers over healing resources and pathways to recovery. I came to suspect that there is a problematic intersection between criminalization, how Black girls are expected to respond to violence, and how the state determines what survivors know about their own experience(s) of violence. The problem is not merely whether people in powerful positions believe Black girl survivors, but the convergence of socio-political and epistemic power to deny what survivors know about their own experiences of violence and power to punish survivors for acting on “contested” knowledge. Criminalized Black girl survivors in the US navigate an oppressive landscape of violence that goes beyond state agents not believing Black girl survivors. This is the focus of this dissertation.While criminalized Black girl survivors in the US face social and political disempowerment, they also face epistemological disempowerment through state-sanctioned non-accidental epistemic burdens. A non-accidental epistemic burden is a burden to strengthen one’s epistemic position in relation to some proposition, p, despite having an adequate (or better) epistemic position in relation to some p. As the US criminal injustice system requires survivors overcome state-sanctioned non-accidental epistemic burdens to claim self-defense, criminalized Black girl survivors are epistemically oppressed by a persistent and irregular epistemic burden to prove what they know about their own experiences of sexual violence. I explicate this argument in five chapters. In chapter one, I claim that pragmatic encroachment is a non-neutral knowledge attribution problem whereby attributors are empowered to affirm or deny a subject’s knowledge claim on the basis of the subject’s constructed practical stakes, or constructed pragmatic encroachment (CPE). Constructed practical stakes, here, refers to the potential costs/consequences of acting on knowledge of some p for some subject, ‘S,’ constructed by their practical environment. In chapter two, I critique standard pragmatic encroachment as a methodologically flawed theory in order to illuminate real-world pragmatic encroachment as a disparate epistemological problem for survivors. In chapter three, I explain that a settler colonial obfuscation of Black girl survivorhood exists such that Black girl survivors navigate a criminalizing metaphysical and socio-epistemic quagmire. I claim that punitive attributors leverage a historical construction of Black girl survivors as “fast-tailed swindlers” to override self-defense as “knowing criminal intent.” Next, I explicate an argument for third-person CPE as epistemic oppression in chapter four to bring home the main argument of this dissertation. Criminalized Black girl survivors face epistemic oppression in the US criminal injustice system in the form of state-sanctioned non-accidental epistemic burdens. This chapter extends the insights of chapter three to underscore that survivors are non-neutrally criminalized and burdened to overcome an insatiable criminal injustice system designed to maintain settler power, not healing or justice for survivors of sexual violence. I conclude with considerations for possible objections to the project and implications of the project. Ultimately, I aim to support radical Black feminist futures for survivors free from power struggles for belief, safety, and resources.
Show less