JSI Seminar: Epistemic privilege and duties of mutual assistance

In-person event

Victims of oppression are sometimes said to have epistemic privilege in virtue of their marginalised social position into the operation and impact of oppressive social structures. Epistemic privilege sometimes is cited as a basis for deference in social relations between victims and non-victims—for example, the use of ‘lived experience’ to resolve or terminate disagreements about social and political oppression. I am interested in whether epistemic privilege can be a basis for duties of mutual assistance between victims, where assistance is understood as mitigating the harms of oppression on other victims without necessarily targeting oppression itself. I outline the ways in which victims of oppression can be said to have epistemic privilege, the limits of this privilege, and what duties of assistance this privilege might ground.

About the speaker:

Ashwini Vasanthakumar

Ashwini Vasanthakumar is a political and legal theorist with research interests in political obligation and authority, migration, and the ethics of resistance.

She is currently an Associate Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in Legal & Political Philosophy at Queen’s Law School in Canada. She holds an AB from Harvard, an MA from Toronto, a JD from Yale Law School, and a DPhil from Oxford, where she studied as a Canadian Rhodes Scholar.

Previously, she has worked at King’s College London, the University of York, University College, Oxford, and Jindal Global Law School. She has also been a Researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies (Stockholm) and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School (Berlin).

Thursday 27 July 2023, 6-7.30pm AEST

Venue: Level 4, Common Room, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1.5

This event is proudly presented by the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence at The University of Sydney Law School.