situated-knowledges

Section 01 — Testimonial Injustice

The discounted witness

Vignette. A patient repeatedly tells her doctor her pain is severe and unusual. The doctor records her as "anxious" and prescribes a low-dose sedative. Months later, an imaging scan reveals a condition that would have been obvious had her reports been treated as data. The doctor was competent and well-trained.

Traditional analysis — was the doctor's belief justified given the evidence available?Feminist analysis — how did social position shape what counted as credible testimony?

Section 02 — The View From Nowhere Audit

Whose somewhere was this?

Early pain research. Twentieth-century pain research was conducted predominantly on young white male subjects, then generalized as 'human' pain response. Findings shaped dosing guidelines for everyone.

What social position was hidden inside the "universal" claim?What were the downstream consequences of the god trick?

Section 03 — The Hermeneutical Gap

Experience without a name

Before "sexual harassment" entered shared vocabulary in the 1970s, women had the experience — but the conceptual resource to articulate it, to themselves and others, did not exist in dominant discourse. The harm was real and linguistically invisible. What experiences today might be in that pre-articulate state? And what does this mean for AI systems trained on existing corpora — corpora that necessarily reflect the conceptual gaps of their era?

Describe an experience that feels real but lacks a shared nameWhat concept is missing? What would naming it make possible?What does this imply for AI knowledge claims drawn from existing corpora?