Feminist Epistemology and Value

Alison Assiter’s 2000 article “Feminist Epistemology and Value” offers a distinctive contribution to feminist epistemological debates by centering the role of values in knowledge production. Published in Feminist Theory, this article develops concepts of “emancipatory values” and “epistemic communities” that chart a middle path between individualist approaches to knowledge and radical relativism. Writing as a professor of feminist theory known for her work on modernist feminism, Assiter argues that the key question for feminist epistemology is not whether values should influence knowledge production—they inevitably do—but rather what kinds of values should guide epistemic communities committed to emancipation.

The Context: Feminist Epistemology at a Crossroads

By 2000, feminist epistemology had developed several influential but competing approaches to questions about knowledge, objectivity, and truth. The field faced tensions between:

Standpoint Theory: Arguing that marginalized social positions provide epistemic advantages for understanding oppression and social structures.

Postmodern Feminism: Questioning grand narratives and universal truth claims, emphasizing the local, particular, and contingent nature of knowledge.

Feminist Empiricism: Attempting to reform traditional scientific methods to eliminate gender bias while maintaining commitment to objectivity.

Social Epistemology: Examining how knowledge is produced collectively through social interactions and institutions rather than by isolated individuals.

Each approach had strengths and weaknesses. Standpoint theory risked essentializing identity categories. Postmodern approaches struggled to ground political claims. Feminist empiricism sometimes replicated problematic assumptions about objectivity. And social epistemology needed to address how power relations shape collective knowledge production.

Assiter’s Core Concepts

Assiter’s intervention focuses on two central concepts that she argues can help feminist epistemology navigate these tensions: emancipatory values and epistemic communities.

Emancipatory Values

Assiter begins with a straightforward but consequential claim: all knowledge production is value-laden. There is no “view from nowhere,” no purely objective stance unconditioned by values and interests. This much had been established by decades of feminist critique of supposedly neutral science and philosophy.

But Assiter goes further. If knowledge production is inevitably shaped by values, the crucial question becomes: which values? Not all values are equal from an emancipatory perspective. Some values promote human flourishing, freedom, and justice; others reinforce oppression, domination, and suffering.

Emancipatory values are those values that, when embedded in knowledge-producing practices, tend to promote liberation rather than oppression. These include:

• Non-oppression: Values that actively oppose the subordination of any group
• Inclusivity: Recognition of diverse perspectives and experiences
• Critical reflexivity: Ongoing examination of how values shape inquiry
• Collective flourishing: Concern for the wellbeing of all community members
• Democratic participation: Involvement of affected parties in knowledge production

Crucially, Assiter argues that feminist values—opposition to women’s subordination, attention to gendered power relations, commitment to women’s liberation—constitute one important set of emancipatory values, though not the only set. Other emancipatory movements (antiracist, anti-colonial, disability justice, etc.) contribute additional values that epistemic communities should incorporate.

Epistemic Communities

The second key concept is that of “epistemic communities”—groups of knowers who share certain values, practices, and commitments that shape their collective knowledge production. This concept shifts focus from individual knowers to the social contexts in which knowledge is created.

Assiter draws on and develops social epistemology’s insight that knowledge is fundamentally collective. We don’t produce knowledge as isolated individuals but through participation in communities that have:

• Shared practices: Methods, standards, and procedures for inquiry
• Common values: Underlying commitments that guide what questions are asked and how
• Interactive processes: Dialogue, debate, and collaborative work
• Institutional structures: Organizations, journals, conferences, networks
• Historical continuity: Ongoing traditions of inquiry that develop over time

The crucial question becomes: what conditions must an epistemic community satisfy to be genuinely emancipatory? What kinds of values, practices, and structures enable rather than hinder the production of knowledge that serves liberation?

Conditions for Emancipatory Epistemic Communities

Assiter outlines several conditions that epistemic communities must meet to qualify as emancipatory:

1. Non-Oppressive Values

The most fundamental condition is that an emancipatory epistemic community must not embody values that oppress women or other marginalized groups. This may seem obvious, but it’s more demanding than it appears. It requires:

Active Opposition to Oppression: Not merely the absence of explicit sexism, racism, or other prejudices, but active work to identify and eliminate more subtle forms of bias and exclusion.

Attention to Intersectionality: Recognition that people experience multiple, intersecting forms of oppression. An epistemic community that addresses gender but ignores race, class, disability, or sexuality cannot be fully emancipatory.

Structural Analysis: Understanding how oppression operates through institutions, practices, and taken-for-granted assumptions, not just individual prejudices.

2. Inclusive Participation

Emancipatory epistemic communities must genuinely include diverse participants, especially those from marginalized groups. This goes beyond token representation to require:

Meaningful Voice: Members must have real opportunities to shape the community’s direction, not just be present.

Recognition of Expertise: Valuing diverse forms of knowledge, including experiential knowledge that marginalized groups possess about their own oppression.

Equitable Structures: Organizing the community in ways that don’t reproduce hierarchies or disadvantage certain members.

3. Critical Reflexivity

Epistemic communities must continuously examine their own practices, values, and assumptions. This includes:

Examining Power Relations: How does power operate within the community itself? Who gets heard? Whose perspectives dominate?

Questioning Assumptions: What taken-for-granted beliefs shape the community’s inquiry? Are these assumptions justified?

Openness to Critique: Willingness to have fundamental assumptions challenged, especially by those who experience oppression.

4. Collective Deliberation

Knowledge in emancipatory communities is produced through collective deliberation rather than individual assertion. This requires:

Genuine Dialogue: Exchange that takes others’ perspectives seriously, not just assertion of pre-formed positions.

Reasoned Argument: Using evidence and logic to support claims, while recognizing multiple forms of reasoning.

Democratic Decision-Making: Processes that give all members appropriate voice in determining the community’s direction.

5. Connection to Emancipatory Politics

Epistemic communities committed to emancipation must maintain connections to broader movements for social justice. They cannot be purely academic enterprises disconnected from political struggle.

Feminist Values as Emancipatory Values

Having established what emancipatory epistemic communities require, Assiter argues that feminist values are one crucial set of emancipatory values that such communities should embrace. These include:

Opposition to Women’s Subordination: Central feminist commitment to ending patriarchal oppression in all its forms.

Attention to Gender Relations: Recognition that gender shapes social life, knowledge production, and power relations in profound ways.

Validation of Women’s Experience: Taking women’s lived experiences seriously as sources of knowledge about social reality.

Commitment to Liberation: Not just understanding oppression but working to eliminate it.

Intersectional Analysis: Recognizing how gender intersects with race, class, sexuality, disability, and other dimensions of social positioning.

Importantly, Assiter doesn’t claim feminist values are the only emancipatory values, or that they’re sufficient by themselves. Rather, she argues that any epistemic community genuinely committed to emancipation must incorporate feminist values alongside other emancipatory commitments.

Modernist Feminism in a Postmodern Age

Assiter’s approach represents what she calls “modernist feminism”—a position that maintains commitment to truth, objectivity, and emancipation while learning from postmodern and poststructuralist critiques. This involves several key moves:

Rejecting Pure Relativism

While Assiter accepts that all knowledge is situated and value-laden, she rejects the slide into pure relativism where all perspectives are equally valid. Some knowledge claims are better than others—not because they’re “neutral” or “objective” in a naive sense, but because they’re produced by communities whose values and practices are more emancipatory.

This allows feminist epistemology to maintain critical purchase. We can say that knowledge produced by sexist, racist epistemic communities is worse—not just different—than knowledge produced by communities committed to challenging these oppressions. The difference isn’t just perspective; it’s ethical and political.

Collective Rather Than Individual

Assiter’s modernism is explicitly collective. Unlike Enlightenment individualism that located knowledge in the isolated rational subject, she insists knowledge is fundamentally social. But unlike some postmodern approaches that fragment knowledge into incommensurable local contexts, she maintains that communities can produce knowledge with broader validity.

The key is that communities, not individuals, are the primary locus of knowledge production. Individuals participate in and are shaped by communities, but they also bring critical perspectives that can challenge and transform community practices.

Values as Central, Not Peripheral

Traditional epistemology treated values as contaminants that must be eliminated from knowledge production. Assiter inverts this: values are central and unavoidable. The question is which values guide inquiry, not whether values do so.

This doesn’t mean “anything goes.” On the contrary, it means we must carefully examine and justify the values that guide our epistemic practices. Emancipatory values are better—not arbitrary preferences, but commitments that can be defended through ethical and political argument.

Engaging with Standpoint Theory

Assiter’s position has interesting relationships with feminist standpoint theory. She shares standpoint theory’s recognition that social position shapes knowledge and that marginalized positions can provide epistemic advantages. However, she develops these insights in distinctive ways:

From Standpoints to Communities

While standpoint theory emphasizes individual or group standpoints based on social position (women’s standpoint, Black women’s standpoint, etc.), Assiter shifts emphasis to epistemic communities defined by shared values and practices rather than shared identity or location.

This has advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, it avoids essentializing identity categories—people with similar social positions may belong to different epistemic communities with different values. On the other, it may underemphasize how material conditions and social positions shape what epistemic communities form and what values they can embrace.

Political Values Rather Than Social Location

For Assiter, what unifies an epistemic community is shared political values and emancipatory commitments, not shared social location. This means people from different backgrounds can potentially participate in the same emancipatory epistemic community if they share values.

This addresses one criticism of standpoint theory: that it fragments knowledge into incompatible perspectives based on identity. Assiter’s approach allows for coalition-building across differences while maintaining that some communities (those with emancipatory values) produce better knowledge than others.

Collective Achievement Rather Than Automatic Privilege

Standpoint theory is sometimes interpreted as claiming that marginalized positions automatically confer epistemic advantages. Assiter emphasizes that achieving emancipatory knowledge requires work—building appropriate communities, cultivating emancipatory values, engaging in critical reflection.

Members of oppressed groups don’t automatically possess superior knowledge just by virtue of their oppression. Rather, communities that include diverse participants, especially those from marginalized groups, and that embody emancipatory values, have better conditions for producing knowledge that serves liberation.

Implications for Feminist Research

Assiter’s framework has significant implications for how feminist research should be conducted:

Building Emancipatory Research Communities

Feminist researchers should consciously work to build epistemic communities with emancipatory values. This means:

• Creating collaborative rather than hierarchical research relationships
• Including diverse participants, especially from communities affected by the research
• Establishing practices of mutual accountability
• Developing shared feminist values and commitments

Making Values Explicit

Rather than pretending to value-neutrality, feminist research should explicitly articulate the emancipatory values guiding it. This includes:

• Being clear about political commitments (e.g., opposing women’s oppression)
• Explaining how these values shape research questions and methods
• Defending why these values are emancipatory rather than oppressive
• Remaining open to critique of stated values

Collective Knowledge Production

Research should be organized as collective endeavor rather than individual achievement. This involves:

• Collaborative research designs that involve multiple perspectives
• Giving credit to community members who contribute knowledge
• Sharing results with participants and affected communities
• Using research to support emancipatory political movements

Critical Reflexivity

Ongoing examination of how values and power operate within research communities:

• Regular reflection on whose voices dominate in research teams
• Questioning assumptions built into research methods
• Examining how findings may reinforce or challenge oppression
• Openness to fundamental critique from marginalized members

Responses and Critiques

Assiter’s approach generated various responses:

The Problem of Agreement

Critics asked: how do we determine which values are truly emancipatory? Different people and communities disagree about what promotes liberation. Assiter’s framework seems to assume more consensus about emancipatory values than actually exists.

Postcolonial feminists, for instance, might question whether “feminist values” as understood in Western contexts are genuinely emancipatory in non-Western settings, or whether they smuggle in cultural imperialism. Who decides what counts as emancipatory?

The Individual-Community Tension

Some critics worried that Assiter’s emphasis on communities undervalues individual critical thought. Don’t individuals sometimes see truths that their communities resist? Doesn’t transformative knowledge often come from mavericks who challenge community consensus?

Assiter might respond that individuals are always already shaped by communities, even in dissent. And emancipatory communities should welcome internal critique. But the tension between collective solidarity and individual critical distance remains.

The Question of Objectivity

Does Assiter’s framework abandon objectivity entirely in favor of politically committed knowledge? Or does it offer a reconceived objectivity grounded in emancipatory values?

This depends on how we understand objectivity. If objectivity means value-neutrality, Assiter clearly rejects it. But if objectivity means responsiveness to evidence, openness to critique, and willingness to revise beliefs—all within a value-framework—then her approach can claim a form of objectivity, albeit not the traditional kind.

The Scope of Emancipation

Who counts as oppressed? What counts as emancipation? These questions become pressing when different movements have competing claims or priorities. How should epistemic communities navigate conflicts between different emancipatory projects?

For instance, some versions of feminism and some versions of religious freedom might conflict. How do we determine which values are genuinely emancipatory when they clash? Assiter’s framework points toward inclusivity and non-oppression but doesn’t fully resolve these tensions.

Contemporary Relevance

Assiter’s framework remains relevant to current debates:

Feminist Science Studies

Contemporary discussions of feminist approaches to science echo Assiter’s emphasis on values and communities. Debates about how to conduct feminist science—whether to reform existing institutions or build alternative communities—can be framed using Assiter’s concepts.

Online Epistemic Communities

Digital platforms have created new forms of epistemic community. Assiter’s framework can help analyze online feminist spaces: Do they embody emancipatory values? Do they include diverse participants? Do they engage in collective knowledge production? Or do they reproduce hierarchies and oppressions?

Intersectionality and Coalition

Current intersectional feminism emphasizes building coalitions across differences. Assiter’s emphasis on shared values rather than shared identity provides one framework for such coalition-building, though it must be supplemented with attention to power differentials and material conditions.

Debates About Academic Freedom

Current controversies about academic freedom, “cancel culture,” and institutional accountability can be illuminated by Assiter’s framework. When should universities discipline faculty for speech or research? Assiter suggests the key question is whether their values and practices oppress marginalized groups—not whether they’re politically controversial.

Conclusion: Values All the Way Down

Assiter’s “Feminist Epistemology and Value” makes a straightforward but consequential claim: knowledge production is inseparable from values. Rather than trying to eliminate values from inquiry—an impossible task—we should build epistemic communities organized around emancipatory values.

This doesn’t mean abandoning standards of evidence, logical consistency, or critical scrutiny. Rather, it means recognizing that these standards themselves operate within value-frameworks. Emancipatory epistemic communities can maintain intellectual rigor while remaining explicitly committed to liberation.

The challenge, ongoing today, is to build and sustain such communities: spaces where diverse participants engage in collective inquiry guided by values that promote rather than hinder human flourishing. Assiter’s framework doesn’t provide a blueprint, but it offers conceptual resources for this crucial project.

By centering values and communities rather than individual knowers or abstract methods, Assiter’s approach points toward a feminist epistemology that is:

• Realistic about the inevitable role of values in knowledge production
• Ethical in its commitment to emancipatory rather than oppressive values
• Collective in locating knowledge in communities rather than individuals
• Political in maintaining connections to broader movements for justice
• Rigorous in demanding critical examination of values and practices

This remains a valuable vision for feminist scholarship committed to both truth and liberation—recognition that these goals, properly understood, are not in tension but require each other.