Woman Alone: Carmita Wood's archival fragments and the emotions of epistemic injustice
27 January 2025, 1.00 PM - 27 January 2025, 2.15 PM
Dr Fred Cooper
EPIC seminar series: Dr Fred Cooper
Date: Monday 27th January 2025
Time: 1pm – 2:15pm
Zoom talk: link at bottom of email
Title: Woman Alone: Carmita Wood's archival fragments and the emotions of epistemic injustice
Abstract: In the summer of 1975, the inaugural issue of the feminist journal Labor Pains carried a brief article, ‘Woman Alone’, written by a victim - and co-articulator - of sexual harassment, Carmita Wood. Harassed by a professor of Nuclear Physics, Boyce McDaniel, at Cornell University, Wood had turned to feminist scholars and activists in Cornell’s Human Studies department to help her make sense of what she had experienced; not (or not exclusively) to herself, but in her ongoing attempts to provide evidence that she had left her post at the university for good reason. The work they did together resulted in the formation of a campaigning organisation, Working Women United (WWU), with Labor Pains as its organ, and the contribution of a new composite term, sexual harassment, to stake out a particular set of behaviours and experiences which had been hitherto difficult to formally name. For many if not most scholars of epistemic injustice (and a smaller number of scholars of sexual harassment and second-wave feminism), Wood’s story is at least partially familiar, forming a central spur of Miranda Fricker’s famous 2007 analysis of hermeneutic injustice. Amid sustained and ongoing discussions over what Wood ‘knew’ about her experience, however, there has been far less attention paid to what she said – and how she felt – at the time. In ‘Woman Alone’, and in a speak-out on sexual harassment attended by hundreds, Wood (and her fellow speakers) made sense of their experiences – and the epistemic problems of understanding and speaking about them – through the interconnecting prisms of aloneness and shame. I take their emphasis on the emotional barriers to epistemic action as a prompt for a consideration of the emotions that attend experiences of epistemic injustice, re-centring them as primary mechanisms rather than secondary harms.
Zoom:
Topic: EPIC seminar: Dr Fred Cooper
Time: Jan 27, 2025 01:00 PM Greenwich Mean Time
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