Lorraine Code
York University
Debates over the issue of climate change touch on a number of epistemic assumptions. Who are the knowers and whose knowledge claims can be taken seriously? In her 2006 book Ecological Thinking, Lorraine Code argues that the practices of advocacy often make knowledge possible within hierarchical social distributions of autonomy and authority, alongside divisions of intellectual labour in western societies. Some in those societies lack the alleged autonomy that social and economic self-sufficiency provides and tend to be denied the epistemic credibility to be recognized as ‘knowers’. In this talk, Dr. Code will examine advocacy practices inside of climate change debates and explores the concept of epistemic responsibility.
Presented by the Health Research Centre for the Study of Violence against Women.
Lorraine Code is Distinguished Research Professor Emerita in Philosophy at York University in Toronto Canada, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She is the author of Epistemic Responsibility (1987), and What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (1991), Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on (Gendered) Locations (1995), and Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location (Oxford University Press 2006). She is currently working on issues of testimony, ignorance, and vulnerability especially as these pertain to climate change scepticism. In 2010 she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at Edinburgh University.
