Abigail Nieves Delgado, Utrecht University & Jan Baedke, Ruhr-University Bochum
Beyond Race: Rethinking Population Descriptors in Biomedicine
Population descriptors like race, ethnicity, nation, or genetic ancestry are commonly used in biomedicine. However, we argue that population descriptors suffer especially from two problems: They introduce explanations with low proportionality that fail to grasp relevant causal relations; and their usage is motivated by an overly strong focus on global instead of local health issues. Both problems together amount to what we call the ‘missing locality challenge’ of descriptors. Not addressing it leads to epistemic biases and stereotypes against local communities. By drawing on a case study on human microbiome research, we introduce a new framework to meet this challenge. It ranks population descriptors from ‘global’ to ‘local’ contexts of application, which helps selecting appropriate descriptors for different kinds of disease causalities and groups without stereotyping them.
​
Abraham Tobi, University of Montreal
Epistemic Occlusion in Healthcare
In this talk, I introduce the concept of epistemic occlusion, a form of epistemic harm that occurs when certain knowledges, frameworks, or epistemic agents are systematically rendered invisible within dominant epistemic practices, not through active silencing or exclusion, but through processes that pre-emptively block their recognition. Within healthcare, it is a distinct form of epistemic harm where certain forms of knowledge, particularly patient experiential and narrative insights, are systematically rendered invisible within dominant evidence-based frameworks. Unlike testimonial injustice, where credibility is unfairly downgraded, epistemic occlusion operates upstream, preventing recognition altogether through structural mechanisms such as rigid evidence hierarchies. Using the case of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), I demonstrate how patient testimonies in conditions like chronic illness are filtered out before clinical engagement, foreclosing the possibility of uptake and resistance.
​
Ann-Christin Fischer, Ruhr-University Bochum
From Pain to Knowledge: Endometriosis Patients as Epistemic Agents
In this talk, I argue that scientific standards—as well as the personal values of individual scientists—can systematically privilege certain forms of knowledge while marginalizing others, thereby sustaining epistemic injustice and limiting diversity in scientific perspectives. Using endometriosis research as a case study, I show how diagnostic and funding standards function not as neutral indicators of epistemic quality but as institutional mechanisms that produce and stabilize ignorance. In particular, diagnostic norms that privilege visible pathology over patients’ reports of pain contribute to systematic delays, the dismissal of lived experience, and the reinforcement of gendered biases in biomedical practice. Research funding priorities similarly overlook endometriosis, favoring diseases deemed more measurable or life-threatening and often also male-dominated, which reinforces ignorance, discrimination and limits the diversity of scientific knowledge.
Drawing on feminist accounts of ignorance and the literature on epistemic injustice, I argue that this ignorance is not accidental but a predictable outcome of entrenched biomedical standards. Crucially, I foreground endometriosis patients as epistemic agents: through activism, collective knowledge production, and strategic engagement with scientific institutions, patients challenge dominant standards of evidence and relevance. In particular, I focus on social media activism and patient organizations as key sites where this knowledge is produced and mobilized. Many patients have experienced vulnerability and a sense of stripped agency within the healthcare and biomedical research system, and their activism has allowed them to reclaim authority, voice their experiences, and transform marginalization into expertise.
These interventions demonstrate how epistemic change can emerge from outside formal scientific institutions, transforming pain into a source of knowledge, expanding the diversity of recognized experiences, and opening pathways toward more just and reflexive scientific practices with a deeper understanding of patient agency.
César Marín, Santo Tomas University, Chile
Soil Biodiversity: A Lot of Data, Little Theory
While soil is home to about 60% of total global biodiversity, its conservation and biodiversity measurement are absent from the political agendas of many countries. Furthermore, less than 10% of global biodiversity hotspots of important soil taxa, such as mycorrhizal fungi, are under protected areas. There are historical, technological, and epistemological reasons that might explain this: until a few decades ago, many of these taxa were not easily quantifiable, or their ecosystem roles were not understood, or they were simply ignored. Since its inception, soil ecology has been strongly influenced by a general question in community and ecosystem ecology: what is the relationship between (different ways of measuring) biodiversity and ecosystem functioning/services? Perhaps in no other field is it so clear the positive nature of this relationship. However, perhaps no other ecological field justifies its existence as strongly as soil biodiversity does through its ecosystem services, particularly when dealing with different types of audiences: the 'general public', students, and policymakers, among others. As a result, after a couple of decades of analyzing large datasets and implementing policies, soil biodiversity and ecology suffer from a clear lack of theoretical grounding.
David Ludwig, Wageningen University & Research
When Diversity is Not Enough: The Transgressive Potential of Scientific Pluralism
Widely embraced among university administrators and research funders but also targeted by authoritarian and fascist politics, "diversity" has become a contested concept at the core of science governance and its relations to socio-ecological crises such biodiversity loss, climate change, economic inequality, and environmental injustice. Scientific pluralism increasingly appears as the philosophical complement to administrative diversity management, providing theoretical justifications of administrative efforts to increase diversity in academia. While it is true that scientific pluralism has produced careful scholarship on the epistemic and social benefits of diversity, the aim of this talk is to argue that also provides a central entry point for critical scholarship beyond generic endorsements of diversity. Returning to the classics of feminist standpoint theory—especially the early work of Sandra Harding—demonstrates that scientific pluralists have also carefully thought through conflicts and inequities in diverse research communities. I argue that the relevance of scientific pluralism for contemporary science governance primarily lies in this potential to transgress the status quo of the science system rather than genetic defenses of diversity in science.
Dunja Šešelja, Ruhr-University Bochum
Expert Judgment and Epistemic Diversity
When experts make judgments that inform public policy, what kinds of reasons should they consider in order to provide informed and responsible recommendations? In this talk I will argue that responsible expert judgment requires sensitivity to epistemic diversity in two key forms. First, experts must be sensitive to "higher-order evidence" arising from peer disagreement. Second, they must also be sensitive to "inquisitive reasons" concerning, for example, the pursuitworthiness of various research programs in the field, or the distribution of labor across those research programs. I will illustrate each of these points with examples from the recent pandemic concerning the the COVID-19 aerosol transmission debate. (The talk is based on joint work with Will Fleisher and Daniel C. Friedman)
Phila M. Msimang, Stellenbosch University
Is Diversity Higher? Against the Superficial Inclusion of Racial and Ethnic Groups in Biomedical and Clinical Research
The underrepresentation of marginalised groups in clinical and biomedical studies is now a well-documented problem. The general solution clinicians have taken to solve this problem in their enacting current mandates is to increase the diversity of study participants recruited into clinical and biomedical research. Despite the appeal of this strategy, I argue that the ambiguity of the meaning of “diversity” risks inadvertently perpetuating the underrepresentation of the diversity of the very groups such mandates aim to increase the representation of. This is because diversity exists on numerous dimensions that are not necessarily concordant with each other, thus introducing a co-ordination problem when one measure of diversity is used as a proxy for another. The likelihood of proxy failures introduces epistemic, methodological, and practical risks. I illustrate how these risks can be realised when social identities like race and ethnicity are used as proxies for biological and some aspects of social diversity. I end by proposing a way forward on the use of population descriptors like race and ethnicity where the appropriateness of their use is tested against their fit for the purposes to which they are to be put.
Raphael Uchôa, Museu de Astronomia e Ciências Afins & Universidade de Coimbra, Centro de Estudos Sociais
Entangled Bio-Social Diversity: Rethinking the Amazon Under Extractive Hegemonies
This paper explores one of the most significant yet still non-hegemonic insights in contemporary scientific debates: the recognition that (bio)diversity is historically inseparable from (socio)diversity. Taking the Amazon as a point of departure, it examines how this relational understanding has emerged unevenly across the sciences, gaining particular traction in fields such as historical ecology, archaeology, ethno-biology, and ethnobotany. These areas have increasingly shown that biological diversity cannot be understood apart from diverse social formations, knowledge systems, land-use practices, and cosmological frameworks developed by Indigenous societies. At the same time, this insight remains in tension with dominant scientific and economic imaginaries shaped by epistemic and material monocultures—monocultures of both mind and soil—that continue to structure global approaches to nature. The paper situates these tensions within longer scientific trajectories that have historically framed regions such as the Amazon primarily as spaces of extraction. By taking seriously the deep entanglement of biodiversity and sociodiversity in Amazonian contexts, it argues that recent scientific approaches implicitly challenge hegemonic views of nature as passive, homogeneous, and external to social life. Thinking from the Amazon thus brings into focus the epistemic and political stakes of diversity, revealing how alternative scientific configurations unsettle extractivist paradigms and reframe the Amazon as a relational and knowledge-rich landscape.
Sergei Shevchenko, Ruhr-University Bochum
Temporal Extensions of Biodiversity Research: The Paradox of the Plankton as a Turning Point
In the mid-twentieth century, the paradox of the plankton articulated a central problem of ecology: the persistent coexistence of high species diversity with rapid and partly unpredictable changes in plankton communities, despite theoretical expectations of competitive exclusion. At that time, long-term limnological monitoring had already produced extensive observational records. These infrastructures supported an infrastructure-driven temporal extension, in which biodiversity was primarily treated as an epistemic effect of accumulated observation. Similar empirical descriptions of plankton instability existed in Soviet limnology, including late-1940s studies of Lake Glubokoe, but a Hutchinson-like theoretical reformulation of the plankton paradox, articulated through alternative temporal logics, did not emerge under conditions that discouraged formal modeling in the life sciences.
G. E. Hutchinson’s intervention introduced a different epistemic use of time. Rather than extending observation alone, he reframed plankton communities as phenomena that unfold in time and whose diversity requires explanation in terms of non-equilibrium dynamics shaped by both environmental fluctuations and biological interactions. This phenomenon-driven temporal extension shifted biodiversity from a quantity to be measured to a process whose conditions of existence had to be explored. It enabled modeling and experimental approaches that treated diversity as dynamically produced, including mesocosm experiments demonstrating internally generated instability in planktonic trophic networks.
Subsequent research introduced further epistemic extensions of temporality. In intervention-oriented studies, such as whole-lake experiments at Lake 227, the focus shifted to how diversity-producing dynamics respond to nutrient enrichment and other external pressures. Taken together, these approaches reveal multiple drivers of temporal extension in plankton research, each associated with a distinct epistemic treatment of biological diversity: accumulation through monitoring, exploratory modeling of dynamic production, and intervention-based assessment of vulnerability.
Sophia Wagemann, Charité Berlin
Hormones, Drug Reactions, and Diversity: Concepts of the Body in West-German Medical Research, 1960s–1980s
What we understand today as diversity was discussed under different terminologies in the second half of the twentieth century. Using the two case studies of hormonal contraception and antiandrogens, the presentation examines how concepts of bodily difference were produced through the interplay of hormonal products, research categories, and clinical practices in the 1960s to 1980s. At the center is the question of how reactions to hormonal medications were meant to provide information about bodily differences and to address them therapeutically. Application-oriented hormone research in the 1970s repeatedly engaged with the presumed hormonal norm of binary sexes. This search for binary hormonal ideal types contributed to the development of hormonal medications intended to “balance” bodies toward these presumed ideal types. For example, side effects of the contraceptive pill functioned as indicators of supposedly different body types in gynecology, ready to be normalized. Further, the emergence of gender-affirming hormone treatments resulted from prenatal research into human sex differentiation. The presentation shows how this research, on the one hand, led to the management of norm-deviating bodies, while on the other hand verbalized new categories of difference and thus opened alternative applications of hormonal products.
Tina Heger, Technical University of Munich
The EcoWeaver Project: Accommodating Ecological Diversity, Diverse Forms of Knowledge and Diverse User Perspectives
In this presentation, I will introduce the EcoWeaver & TReK initiative, and use it as an example for discussing challenges related to diversity. The vision of the collaboration (https://ecoweaver.hi-knowledge.org/) is “to weave together ecological knowledge from diverse sources, using state-of-the-art computational technologies, and create EcoWeaver, an infrastructure that includes an openly accessible knowledge base […] and the tools to create, manage, and access it.” The main application to be developed is TReK, the Toolkit for Restoration Knowledge.
Within this initiative, diversity-related challenges surface in three ways. First, complexity of ecosystems and prevailing context dependence creates the need to develop synthesis methods that account for ecological diversity while still allowing knowledge transfer across ecological settings. Second, the initiative aims at integrating ecological knowledge from diverse sources into one knowledge graph; an aspiration that raises many questions, e.g. concerning data integration and diverging conceptions of what counts as evidence. Finally, an important aim is to account for diverse user perspectives. While the initiative has been interdisciplinary from the start, the aspiration now is to build communities of practice involving e.g. restoration practitioners. The presentation will report on the current state of discussions concerning how to accommodate the outlined diversity-related challenges.