Epistemic Injustice, Philosophy and Performance: a dialogue across disciplines
A Research Seminar with speakers, Professor Miranda Fricker, Julius Silver Professor of Philosophy at NYU, and Co-Director of the New York Institute of Philosophy and Dr Amanda Stuart Fisher, Reader in Contemporary Theatre and Performance and Principal Investigator, Credible Witnesses: Young People, Life Performance, and Testimonial Injustice, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
This research seminar explores a dialogue between philosophy and socially engaged performance that has developed through the development of an ongoing research project Credible Witnesses: Young People, Life Performance, and Testimonial Injustice. A two-year AHRC-funded research project, now in its second year, and developed in partnership with Little Fish Theatre and Oldham Theatre Workshop, Credible Witnesses has been exploring how socially engaged performance can be used to better understand young people’s lived experience of testimonial injustice. It has been steered by an international advisory group comprising of researchers and practitioners in philosophy, criminology, psychology, social work and performance.
The research presentation will examine the interconnections between philosophical thinking and theatre and performance around the problematic of epistemic injustice.
Professor Miranda Fricker, who is one of the Credible Witnesses advisory group members and who conceptualized ‘testimonial injustice’ as a basic kind of ‘epistemic injustice’ (Fricker 2007), will talk about her research, and the differences between writing philosophy in an academic context and writing a ‘philosophical play’.
Dr Amanda Stuart Fisher who is the PI for Credible Witnesses will draw on concepts of epistemic injustice and theorization developed by feminist phenomenologists to examine her conception of what she is calling “women’s life performance”. Drawing on an analysis of My Uncle is Not Pablo Escobar (2024), co-written by Valentina Andrade, Elizabeth Alvarado, Lucy Wray and Tommy Ross-Williams, she will examine how women theatre makers are using forms of life performance to generate potent forms of resistance as redress to the lived experience of epistemic injustice.
Biogs:
Professor Miranda Fricker
Miranda Fricker is Julius Silver Professor of Philosophy at NYU, and Co-Director of the New York Institute of Philosophy. She is the author of Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007), and most of her recent research is in moral philosophy. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sheffield.
Dr Amanda Stuart Fisher
Dr Amanda Stuart Fisher is a Reader in Contemporary Theatre and Performance at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her research addresses testimonial, verbatim and autobiographical theatre and the relationship between performance and care. Her monograph Performing the Testimonial: Rethinking verbatim dramaturgies and co-edited collection Performing Care: New Perspectives on socially engaged performance, were published by MUP in 2020.
