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Feature Article

Loss of Epistemic Self-Determination in the Anthropocene

 

Abstract

One serious harm facing communities in the Anthropocene is epistemic loss. This is increasingly recognized as a harm in international policy discourses around adaptation to climate change. Epistemic loss is typically conceived of as the loss of a corpus of knowledge, or less commonly, as the further loss of epistemic methodologies. In what follows, I argue that epistemic loss also can involve the loss of epistemic self-determination, and that this framework can help to usefully examine adaptation policies.

Notes

1. I would be remiss at this point not to say that as of this writing, it seems that the U.S. Government is moving in a direction of being even less open to these arguments than they have been previously. This could have devastating consequences for the success of any fund to compensate and aid adaptation for poor and affected countries.

2. For a discussion of WIM, see Mathew and Akter (Citation2015).

3. For a longer discussion of this term, see Werkheiser (Citation2016).

4. e.g. the Native American communities discussed in Arquette et al. (Citation2002).

5. For how these differences play out for urban areas, see Stone (Citation2012).

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