How should we theorise across social difference?
Danielle sat down with Rosa Vince to discuss their upcoming workshop, Just Theorising 2026. During the workshop, participants will explore the epistemological and methodological challenges that arise when theorising across social difference. If this sounds interesting to you, or to someone you know, there’s still time to apply to participate. The deadline is 23:59 GMT on Sunday 10 May.
Danielle Bromwich: Hey Rosa! What is the workshop about?
Rosa Vince: Just Theorising is all about how we theorise about groups we don’t belong to and issues primarily affecting those groups. For example, there are white academics theorising about blackness, cis philosophers theorising about transness, non-disabled researchers writing about disability. We’re going to be exploring ethical and epistemic issues with this kind of work; working out how we can avoid problems when doing this kind of theorising and whether there are circumstances in which we shouldn’t be doing it.
DB: What motivated you to organise it?
RV: My friend Nadia Mehdi and I first organised a workshop like this in 2018, because we wanted to work out when and whether theorising across social difference can be done well. We could see some bad work being done in this way, but also were conscious that we inevitably would be discussing groups we don’t belong to in our own work. I was writing my PhD on pornography, and was becoming increasingly uncomfortable doing this as someone who wasn’t a porn worker. Sex workers are very frequently researched by academic outsiders, and this can be really destructive. When outsiders target a group for study, they often make theoretical and epistemic mistakes (simply failing to understand the people they’re talking about, and by bringing in their own biases to their questions and conclusions), and they often make ethical and political mistakes (talking over people, misrepresenting them, and presenting their research in ways that hurt the people they’re talking about). From the philosophical literature on porn and sex work, I noticed quickly that there is zero expectation that philosophers should worry about being outsiders to the group they’re talking about (indeed, having ever seen porn is not treated as a prerequisite for being an expert in it). Meanwhile, in other disciplines, voyeuristic and exploitative empirical research has taken place, but this has prompted lots of work on what’s wrong with those research practices, and how research should best be done. But no-one is checking on the philosophers! We rarely do empirical research, so we get away with just saying stuff, with little interrogation of whether our methods are appropriate. Our methods can generate misunderstandings of others, and cause material harms.
DB: How will Just Theorising work?
RV: I want the workshop to be collaborative and comfortable. This won’t be a classic conference with experts at the front of the room. Instead, it’ll be like a reading group. For each session, we’ll discuss a text (or two) as a group, addressing the theme. For example, for one session we might discuss Charles Mills’ White Ignorance, and for another we might discuss Robin Dembroff’s paper Cisgender Commonsense and Philosophy's Transgender Trouble, or Lime Jello’s blog post Why You shouldn’t study Sex Workers. Participants will have read the papers in advance, but to lighten the reading load and help structure the day, in each session a couple of participants will have prepared half a page of notes on that text (i.e. what they thought the key points were, and some proposed questions for discussion in the session). This means that though there will be quite a few papers to read beforehand, the pressure is off – if there was a paper you only ended up skimming on the train, or something you don’t understand, others in the group can help.
DB: What are you hoping to get out of the workshop?
RV: The main idea is that we’ll all come out of it with a better understanding of the issues, and a better idea of how to do our own work well. I’m not expecting that we’ll solve all of the problems in academia overnight, but we can improve our practice. After the workshop, the other thing I’d like to achieve is to offer some resources to others who are struggling with these issues. So I’d like to gather some resources, particularly our reading list, and share them somewhere online, so that when someone else thinks “hang on, am I doing this right?” they can find these resources, and perhaps organise a reading group of their own to discuss these things with others. If that happens, perhaps we can shift norms and improve practice across the discipline – it’s certainly worth trying!
DB: This sounds fantastic, Rosa! Thanks for sharing.
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