From Epistemic Injustice to Epistemic Awareness. Process-based methodological research on abuse of adult women in the Catholic Church

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Ute Leimgruber
• Subject Area: Roman Catholic Theology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 539293243

The original submission of the project was a research endeavor comprising three interconnected parts; with the current application, a revised version for two sub-projects and a focus on epistemic methodological research is presented. The issue at hand can be summarized in the knowledge, or rather ignorance, of the phenomenon of gender-specific violence in the Catholic Church. So far, there has been little research on the topic of abuse of adult women in the Catholic Church. In addition, file-based research (as for example in the so-called MHG study) is nearly impossible, since abuse of adult women was often not archived under this keyword - or not even recognized as such: neither by the perpetrators nor by the victims nor by those responsible in the church. Previous theological research on the concept of epistemic injustice by the US-American philosopher Miranda Fricker has shown that the persons involved are subject to different dynamics of epistemic injustice, which lead to concealment, cover-up and "forgetting" of the acts - including untraceability, e.g. in historical sources. The common goal of our research project is to develop a distinct method in transdisciplinary cooperation between theology and digital humanities and to establish it in theological research on abuse, which helps to uncover hidden and subversive knowledge about acts of abuse in written sources. We call this method "epistemic awareness" (working title). The technological sub-project aims to develop a web crawler that can be used to find "invisible" material based on the findings of previous theological epistemic research in order to locate globally scattered data, relevant media reports, biographies and scientific articles on violence against women in the Catholic Church and to make these sources accessible for research in a structured way. The theological sub-project identifies (in cooperation with TP1, among others, based on the results of the crawler) knowledge about abuse that is not clearly recognizable as such due to forms of epistemic injustice. It deconstructs the underlying structures and mechanisms, thus providing a deeper understanding of the workings of epistemic injustice in the context of abuse of adult women in the Catholic Church, with the aim of finding further unknown material and integrating the subversive and hidden knowledge they contain into the research itself. What is special about the presented research project is the reciprocal and process-oriented way of working of the two researchers, who are innovatively dealing with a so far hardly researched subject area in terms of methodology, technology and content.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Christian Wolff