Accounting for the Epistemic Benefits of Diversity: Social Location, Identity, and the Politics of Knowledge

This dissertation investigates and supports arguments intended to justify claims that social diversity in scientific research communities not only promotes justice but is good for knowledge. One such claim that I focus on is that increasing the social location diversity of research communities increases that communitys capacity for critically evaluating knowledge claims. I investigate existing arguments defending this position and point out a common weaknessthey inadequately detail how social diversity in research communities can be epistemically beneficial, and end up implicitly invoking an untenable identity essentialism. I aim to support the epistemic benefits of social diversity claim by providing a solution to this weakness.

In chapters one and two I describe arguments defending the epistemic benefits of social diversity claim, explaining where current accounts run out, and suggesting how they could be enhanced. I argue that appeals to increase social diversity in research communities for the sake of epistemic benefits are also implicitly appeals for the inclusion of researchers who occupy critical standpoints on knowledge production, and claim that the resources of feminist standpoint theory are vital. In chapter three I expand my discussion to consider other aspects of subjectivity in knowledge productive practices, and argue that feminist standpoint theory, as well as discussions of the epistemic value of social diversity, do not yet adequately account for the positive epistemic role that advocacy, care, affect, and emotion can play in knowledge making projects. I explore this claim both theoretically and in an extended analysis of the development of Insite, a safe-injection facility in Vancouver. I use the STS idiom of co-production to analyze the entanglement of the activist coalition to establish Insite and long-term health science research programs in the region. In chapter four I apply my findings to the work of an international collaboration, known as Gendered Innovations, attempting to use various policy initiatives to address the under-representation of women and girls in the sciences. I argue that lack of attention, in key works of this collaboration, to the significance of social location in generating epistemic advantage, limits the transformative epistemic potential of their proposed policy initiatives.