Epistemologies of discomfort: What military-family anti-war activists can teach us about knowledge of violence

Abstract

This paper extends feminist critiques of epistemic authority by examining their particular relevance in contexts of institutionalized violence. By reading feminist criticism of "experts" together with theories of institutionalized violence, I argue that typical expert modes of thinking are incapable of rigorous knowledge of institutionalized violence because such knowledge requires a distinctive kind of thinking-within-discomfort for which conventionally trained experts are ill-suited. I turn to a newly active group of epistemic agents-anti-war relatives of soldiers-to examine the role that undervalued epistemic traits can play in knowledge of war and other forms of structural violence.