Posthumanism and the Affective Turn: Epistemic Injustice, Emergent Listening and Granny and the Goldfish by Karin Murris presented 19 February 2015

1. 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

2. 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).

3. 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

4. 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…

5. construct a plant showing 6
elements

6. Junk or ‘worthwhile’ knowledge
construction?

7. 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’

8. 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

9. 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”.

10. 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!

11. 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

12. 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.

13. ‘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).

14. Identifying & disrupting “identity-
prejudicial credibility deficit”
Shaun Tan
The Arrival

15. 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)

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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?
……….

21. 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).

22. 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.

23. 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.

24. 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.

25. 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?