Nancy McHugh

We argue that people who are incarcerated and prison health workers are impacted by embodied institutional epistemic injustice. This particular epistemic state results in prison health workers practicing “health harm” instead of health care in prison medical wards. The paper begins by providing background data on incarceration, aging, and health. It then engages the concept of institutional epistemic injustice by framing it as an epistemic component of nonideal theory through the work of Charles Mills and Elizabeth Anderson, and then extending their arguments to understand institutional epistemic injustice as an activity of institutional structures that is imposed on people and embodied. This embodied understanding of institutional epistemic injustice is applied to understanding the health and health care of people who are aging in the U.S. carceral system. It does so by analyzing the effects of this embodied epistemic state on people who are incarcerated and the people who are responsible for caring for their health. We argue that prison health workers take on the harm mentality of the carceral system engaging their patients as prisoners and not as patients. They thus engage in health harm and not health care in their relationship with people who are in their medical care. We end with some key epistemic strategies derived from epistemic injustice and applied to the health and health care of people who are ill, aging, and dying in prison.

in her 2010 paper, "the new politics of community," Dr. Collins's argument on community as conceptually and practically a political construct provides a vital connection to the American philosophical tradition, particularly the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and John Dewey. In my response to her paper, I combine components of her argument with her earlier work in black feminist epistemology. I tie these insights to Du Bois's and Dewey's arguments regarding how communities develop. These are then connected to the work by transnational feminist Chandra Mohanty and political scientist Benedict Anderson on imagined communities. I use these to develop a framework for thinking of some communities as communities of epistemic...

This dissertation problematizes the notion of democracy implicit in arguments for enhancing democracy in science. I argue for a practice I call empiricial reflexivity as a method to enhance democracy in science. ;After a review of the literature, I begin by analyzing the beginnings of the co-development of liberal democracy and science in the seventeenth-century by investigating the relation between John Locke and Robert Boyle. I argue that liberalism and science were used to bolster and secure each other in the developing seventeenth-century social order. This relation led to an entrenched set of ideologies manifesting themselves in twentieth-century science such that they are largely hegemonic practices. ;I move on to argue the conditions of science are such that new voices become obscured and distorted by orthodox mainstream science, and will not provide the divergent and unique approaches desired by those interested in democracy in science. The problem in building a more democratic science is not how to add new voices to science, but how to locate and generate new voices that do not share the same sets of deeply entrenched ideologies, and to rethink scientific practice such that these voices do not become wiped out by orthodox voices. ;I finish by arguing that, given the co-development of science and liberal democracy, scientists and philosophers of science need to think of how the scientific community can build new perspectives in science that can generate and sustain democratic practices in science that are not ideologically encumbered by the liberalism and orthodox science. I argue empirical reflexivity is a means to generate a more democratic science. Empirical reflexivity is an active critical analysis that requires looking for and using alternative approaches. By looking for and using alternative approaches the veracity and legitimacy of our own approaches and ideologies are called into question. Empirical reflexivity also requires analyzing the origins of our own ideologies and scientific approaches. This requires investigating the causes of our own hegemony and recognizing that social causes have had a substantial role in the face of science and our philosophical conception of science

Argues for a transactionally situated approach to science and medicine in order to meet the needs of marginalized groups. The Limits of Knowledge provides an understanding of what pragmatist feminist theories look like in practice, combining insights from the work of American pragmatist John Dewey concerning experimental inquiry and transaction with arguments for situated knowledge rooted in contemporary feminism. Using case studies to demonstrate some of the particular ways that dominant scientific and medical practices fail to meet the health needs of marginalized groups and communities, Nancy Arden McHugh shows how transactionally situated approaches are better able to meet the needs of these communities. Examples include a community action group fighting environmental injustice in Bayview Hunters Point, California, one of the most toxic communities in the US; gender, race, age, and class biases in the study and diagnosis of endometriosis; a critique of Evidence-Based Medicine; the current effects of Agent Orange on Vietnamese women and children; and pediatric treatment of Amish and Mennonite children.

I build upon feminist arguments for situated knowledge and pragmatist arguments for experimental inquiry to articulate and argue for an approach that I refer to as situated communities. This approach seeks to generate effective and ethical scientific research practices by asking that researchers focus on communities in their complex environment as subjects of study instead of relying primarily on clinical trials and laboratory research. Communities should be recognized as situated epistemic agents and as changing, evolving centers of life. Doing so requires that these communities are understood in their materiality through bodies that are aged, gendered, abled/disabled, raced, classed, colonized, bordered, materially advantaged and disadvantaged, engaged in particular daily practices within a complex environment. To illustrate my argument I analyze the effects of Agent Orange on communities in the Aluoi Valley, Vietnam and the accompanying research on Agent Orange. I argue that when studied through the situated communities approach instead of in the isolation of the laboratory, it becomes much more obvious why Agent Orange can cause the congenital anomalies, cancers, and other diseases the Vietnamese claim it does. I focus especially on women in this region because they carry the largest social burden of the effects of Agent Orange due to their role in agriculture, housework, childbearing, breastfeeding, and caring for children and adults affected by Agent Orange.