Our emotions tell us that something is happening. When we experience or express an emotion, it is a reaction to a situation that is happening to or around us. This thesis project seeks to address the social and political inequalities that obstruct certain individuals and groups from being able to access and express the unique form of information that emotions provide. Emotional epistemic injustice concerns the ways in which our emotions can be used against us as an epistemic agent along gendered, racial, and ableist lines. Our capacity as a knower is influenced by social rules – and these same social rules dictate which kind of people can feel what, and in which situations. The first two chapters of this project are focused on identifying and analyzing two existing kinds of emotional epistemic injustice – misogynistic emotion reframing and emotional epistemic exploitation. By explicitly acknowledging these phenomena, I provide two new actionable hermeneutical resources, demonstrate the significance of our emotional experiences, and establish the need for a recategorization of emotions as a significant and unique source of information. The third and final chapter focuses on how this recategorization can be done. By specifically identifying socio-epistemically significant emotions, I argue for the recategorization of emotions as an invitation to further investigation of our experiences within the context of existing social and political inequalities. Our emotions, both felt and expressed, have the potential to be powerful tools for real social and political change – and in order for them to have this impact, they must be embraced as their own unique and significant source of information. / Thesis / Master of Philosophy (MA) / The primary goal of this thesis project is to formally acknowledge the role of emotions in how we are able to acquire and contribute to knowledge construction, and successfully communicate said knowledge to others. Our gender, race, sexuality, socio-economic status, and ability all influence how we are allowed to express our emotions, and to what extent they will receive uptake from a given audience. These social feeling rules allow others to “justifiably” dismiss the information our emotions are signaling based on our social position, and results in the expression of emotion being used to undermine our reason-based testimony or communication as well. By identifying two specific ways in which this is already happening via misogynistic emotion reframing and emotional epistemic exploitation, as well as presenting a new way of categorizing our emotions as unique forms of information, I will demonstrate that the information our emotions provide can be a powerful tool for real social and political change.

This thesis argues that the recent erasure of digital pro-anorexia ("pro-ana") narratives by websites such as Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram represents an attempt to silence female self-starvers and reify the authority of medical associations to speak for female bodies. I draw parallels between these attempts and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's theory of epistemic violence, since the experiences of women are effectively discredited, through metaphors that render the thin body dangerous, to shore up professional medical authority. As an attempt to privilege the experiences of the self-starvers, I analyze one Tumblr blog with eating disorder content to listen to the letters users anonymously write to their bodies in contrast to narratives written by "recovered" self-starvers that are officially endorsed by the National Eating Disorder Association. Finally, I argue that the Internet provides us with the opportunity to foster response-able witnessing, for which Kelly Oliver has advocated. I extend Oliver's research to argue that we must foster response-ability for all attempts to bear witness. I suggest that creating response-able spaces where others might witness their different embodied experiences can enable female self-starvers to reclaim subjectivity that medicine has taken from them. In so doing, they might learn to become response-able to their eating disorders, and, eventually, their own bodies.

Our ability to perceive our environment through prejudge mental attitudes is a necessary capacity in order to survive in a social environment. However, how we utilize this capacity, and whether it promotes equality or inequality, is to a large extent dependant on our perception of ourselves in relation to our surroundings. Through critical social theory, this thesis aims to explore and compare attitudes exhibited by the Swedish educational system, towards the socially constructed phenomenon of adolescent students in upper secondary school, speaking their voice. The production of knowledge is problematized regarding the relationship between theoretical regulatory texts of norms, ideals and requirements, versus active implementation in practice. Through metaphysical questioning of reason and norms, discrepancies of intention, lack of consideration for power relations and pernicious ignorance, is problematized and reflected upon, as possible factors reinforcing attitudes of negative stereotyping, identity prejudice and inequality, evoking questions concerning human and children’s rights. Enactment of fear and silencing through reference to status and authority, rather than data actually sustaining a stand through scientific reason and justified knowledge, positions the adolescent student as the subaltern, and perpetuates adultism through imbalance within the dyadic power relation. Through three case studies, chosen due to their compatibility to the frames of a pre- case study initiating attention to the subject at hand, this study exemplifies identity prejudice and institutionalized hegemony through epistemic violence, marginalizing the student to the status of the subaltern. Thereby suffocating both the development of the student, as well as the institutional system´s own purpose and legitimacy, by jeopardizing the confession to scientific reason and justifiable knowledge. It is thus aspects of our ethical and political epistemic conduct this study addresses, by problematizing the cross-boundary interface of research, politics and practice. Findings indicate negative prejudice credibility deficit administered towards students, through social injustice of epistemic violence, fortified by the educational institutions and their regulatory authorities through obscurantism, by neglect of scientific reason and justified knowledge, when constructivist stands implemented as ontological realities, are questioned through critical thinking.

Since the 75th anniversary of the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane in 2003, a growing number of journalists and historians writing about the disaster have incorporated Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God as part of the official historical record of the hurricane. These writers often border on depicting Their Eyes as the authentic experience of black migrant workers impacted by the hurricane and subsequent flood. Within the novel itself, however, Hurston theorizes on the potential epistemic violence that occurs when a piece of evidence—a photograph, fallen body, or verbal artifact—is used to judge a person. Without a person's ability to use self-representation to give an "understandin'" (7) to go along with the evidence, snapshots or textual evidence threaten to violently separate people from their prior knowledge of themselves. By offering the historical context of photographs of African Americans in the Post-Reconstruction South, I argue that Janie experiences this epistemic violence as a young girl when seeing a photograph of herself initiates her into the racial hierarchy of the South. A few decades later, while on trial for shooting her husband Tea Cake, Janie again faces epistemic violence when the evidence of Tea Cake's body is used to judge her and her marriage; however, by giving an understandin' to go along with the evidence through self-representation, Janie is able to clarify that which other forms of evidence distort and is able to go free. Modern texts appropriating Their Eyes run the risk of enacting epistemic violence on the victims of the hurricane, the novel, and history itself when they present the novel as the complete or authentic perspective of the migrant workers in the hurricane. By properly situating the novel as a historical text that offers a particular narrative of the hurricane rather than the complete or authentic experience of the victims, modern writers can honor Hurston's literary achievement without robbing the actual victims of the hurricane of their voice.

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English summary The main objective of this thesis is to present some key issues relevant for postcolonial field of study with respect to two basic areas of interest: concepts of identity and place, respectively displacement in contemporary postcolonial discourse and their reflection in fiction, too. The thesis should provide the potential reader with basic theoretical background based on the most fundamental sources and by means of selected literary works it should support (or disclaim, if necessary) conclusions reached by the most notable theories. This dissertation work consists of three major parts. In the introduction, apart from providing the motivational, theoretical and literary objectives of the thesis, I cover some basic difficulties that may occur when dealing with the postcolonial field of study. The central part of the thesis can be divided into two parts, each of them consisting of two further sections. The first one, "Identity in Postcolonial Discourse", is focused on one of the key terms in all of postcolonial theory: identity and other concepts related with it. I cover the basic development of theoretical reflection concerning this concept, drawing primarily from secondary sources dealing with it. The theoretical part on identity is succeeded by a chapter "Reflections of Identity in the...

The study sought to uncover the constitution of migrant women's agency as they rebuild their lives in Australia, and to explore how contact with any publicly funded services might influence the capacity to be self determining subjects. The thesis used a framework of lifeworld theories (Bourdieu, Schutz, Giddens), materialist, trans-national feminist and post colonial writings, and a methodological approach based on critical hermeneutics (Ricoeur), feminist standpoint and decolonising theories. Thirty in depth interviews were carried out with 6 women migrating from each of 5 regions: Vietnam, Lebanon, the Horn of Africa, the former Soviet Union and the Philippines. Australian based immigration literature constituted the third corner of triangulation. The interviews were carried out through an exploration of themes format, eliciting data about the different ontological and epistemological assumptions of the cultures of origin. The findings revealed not only the women's remarkable tenacity and resilience as creative agents, but also the indispensability of Australia's publicly funded infrastructure or welfare state. The women were mostly privileged in terms of class, education and affirming relationships with males. Nevertheless, their self determination depended on contact with universal public policies, programs and with local community services. The welfare state seems to be modernity's means for re-establishing human connectedness that is the crux of the human condition. Connecting with fellow Australians in friendships and neighbourliness was also important in resettlement. Conclusions include a policy discussion in agreement with Australian and international scholars proposing that there is no alternative but for governments to invest in a welfare state for the civil societies and knowledge based economies of the 21st Century.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak gilt als eine der Gründungsfiguren des postkolonialen Feminismus. Ihr Profil als postkoloniale Theoretikerin gewann sie mit der Veröffentlichung ihres Werkes In Other Worlds – Essays in Cultural Politics. In ihren Texten weist Spivak auf Widersprüche innerhalb der Nationen des Globalen Südens hin. Sie fokussiert, u. a. mit Hilfe der analytischen Konzepte Repräsentation (representation) und Subalternität (subaltern), insbesondere auf die problematische Rolle von Geschlechter- und Klassenverhältnissen in postkolonialen Widerstandsbewegungen, auf den Gegensatz zwischen den indischen Eliten und den unteren Bevölkerungsschichten und auf die gewaltsame Unterdrückung von Frauen des Südens.