Maryam Aghdami

Progressive movements are often driven by the noble goal of fostering inclusivity, equality, ‎and justice. They allegedly aim to dismantle harmful prejudices and create spaces where ‎historically marginalised voices can be heard. Yet within this noble pursuit there frequently ‎lies a troubling contradiction: sometimes, the very mechanisms designed to protect ‎underprivileged individuals end up silencing them instead. In this essay I explore an ‎unsettling paradox: how progressive agents, in their shared efforts to create inclusive ‎discourse, can sometimes impose epistemic harm on the very individuals they intend to ‎support.‎

Standpoint epistemology holds that a standpoint is not given by social identity but achieved ‎through material and political struggle. This raises a difficulty: privileged subjects, who ‎have not undergone that struggle, appear unable to access marginalised standpoints at all. I ‎argue that this conclusion is too strong. Privileged subjects cannot acquire the standpoint of ‎the oppressed, but they need not remain trapped in their privileged ignorance, a condition I ‎call not-getting-the-point. Through what I call epistemic struggle, the sustained ‎transformation of one’s habits of attention through serious engagement with marginalised ‎testimony and the history of oppression, they may instead reach the half-way-point, an ‎intermediate position between privileged ignorance and marginalised standpoint. Drawing ‎on Robert Paul Wolff’s account of racial understanding, and on progressive misreadings of ‎Iranian women’s resistance to compulsory hijab, I argue that epistemic struggle lets ‎privileged subjects resist ignorance without appropriating the authority of those who ‎struggle.‎

In this thesis, I explore a paradox at the centre of contemporary progressive politics: how inclusionary practices, although well-intentioned, can result in the very epistemic harm they are meant to fight against. Based on personal experience in progressive institutions and scholarship in feminist social epistemology and the epistemology of ignorance, I establish that some varieties of anti-oppressive intervention act as tools of epistemic oppression, instead of epistemic justice. Such interventions are performed by agents, usually from privileged positions, who intend to protect marginalised groups. However, they ultimately end up regulating, correcting, or silencing marginalised expression. I introduce the concept of privileged ignorance as a way to show how epistemic harm can be done without any of the characteristic prejudice or bad faith that accompanies wilful ignorance. Progressive agents, confident of their ethical performance, often overlook the extent to which their own social position dictates what they can hear or acknowledge. This ultimately leads to the exclusion of marginalised knowers, not through disbelief or outright hostility, but via standards for acceptable speech that favour certain vocabularies and even forms of resistance. I take my critique a step further than diagnosis by questioning what truly inclusive epistemic relations might entail. With support from care ethics, virtue epistemology, and feminist discussions of attention and responsibility, I suggest the concept of spaces of epistemic care. These are epistemic environments informed by relational attentiveness and responsiveness to vulnerability rather than performance. I suggest that resisting privileged ignorance is both a political and an epistemic project that requires those who inhabit progressive spaces to listen differently and to remain open to being unsettled by those with whom they claim solidarity.