Ane Engelstad

I am a postdoctoral fellow in Practical Philosophy at the University of Bergen and an affiliated researcher at the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm. I have previously worked as a Political Theorist at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Leeds, and as the Deputy Director of the Centre for Contemporary Political Theory at the University of Leeds.

In my research, I show that key arguments from feminist epistemology can lead to new insights in political philosophy, and that this impacts some recent debates surrounding how we should approach doing political philosophy more broadly.

At UiB, I am working on a research project which examines what political philosophers can learn from attending to the testimonies of victims of injustice, and develops a methodology informed by feminist social epistemology that facilitates this interaction. Victims of harassment and discrimination are often disbelieved and silenced when they seek to testify about their experiences, and therefore often do not testify at all. This leaves victims without recourse to justice, and non-victims without knowledge about oppressive social phenomena. It therefore seek to identify the conditions required for attending to victim testimony without falling prey to common interferences and prejudices, determine what is lost to political philosophers in not attending to victim testimony, and I aim to develop a political methodology that takes victim testimony as its basis.