CANCELLED Understanding Gendered Violence: The Value of Testimonial and Qualitative Evidence

Description

This event has been cancelled due to strike action. We will update this page with more information when it becomes available. Please check our project page for information about future events or email if you have an urgent query.

This two-day workshop will ask whether, and to what extent, testimonial evidence has a specific epistemic role to play in the philosophical and scientific study of gendered violence, broadly understood. The workshop aims to bring together social scientists who use qualitative methods and philosophers interested in testimony in the study of gendered violence.

The sort of topics that will be the focus of the workshop are:

• What epistemic insights do we gain from testimonial evidence, that we might not get from quantitative data, that help us explain gendered violence? For example, how powerful is interview-based qualitative evidence on the causal link between pornography and violence, in comparison with quantitative evidence analysed statistically?
• How should women’s testimony inform our definition of categories such as ‘violence’ or ‘oppression’ or ‘consent’? Should women’s reports of their experiences be accorded a kind of epistemic priority in constructing such definitions?
• Relatedly, on what grounds – if any – can researchers call into doubt, or disregard, the epistemic value of the testimony of women?
• What about the testimony of male perpetrators of violence against women? Is there a specific epistemic value to be gained from such evidence?

This event is hosted by the ERC-funded project ‘Qualitative and Quantitative Social Science: A Unified Logic of Causal Inference?’. QUALITY is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (ERC grant agreement no. 715530)