Lara Apolline Jost
Research Fellow in Medical Ethics, Centre for Exoplanet Science, University of St Andrews, Scotland
About me and my research
I am currently working as a postdoctoral research fellow in Medical Ethics for the Centre for Exoplanet Science on the project 'Forecasting Reproduction in Space'. My philosophical interests are mostly in epistemology, applied ethics, feminist philosophy and philosophy of mind. I am particularly interested in philosophical issues relating to reproductive health and problems around testimony and agency in medical and biological contexts.
For my postdoc, I work on issues of reproduction, ethics and agency in outer space, developing a predictive model using Bayesian Network analysis to predict the challenges faced by astronauts sent on long-duration spaceflights. My research is currently focused on the gender health gap in reproductive health in space and how ethics committees greenlight experiments around reproduction in space given our lack of knowledge about the risks and benefits.
I successfully defended my PhD at the Universities of St Andrews and Stirling in March 2023. You can find my full thesis here. My doctoral thesis was on affective experience as a legitimate source of knowledge. In my dissertation, I aim to show that excluding affective from the sources of justification for knowledge is mistaken. To argue for this position, I propose a positive argument about the reliability of affective experience, and a negative argument as to why excluding it has negative social and political consequences. Moreover, I theorize a new type of epistemic injustice, linked to the unfair downgrading of some sources of knowledge.
More specifically, I'm interested in three applied cases where agents know through their affective experience and suffer injustice:
1. How agents recognize microaggressions through to their emotions.
2. Why dialectical white skepticism is an epistemologically defective stance and putting the burden of the proof on racialised people is incoherent with the rest of our epistemic practices.
3. Why patients with lesser-known illnesses loose credibility when testifying about symptoms that are not intersubjectively shareable.
My primary supervisor was Justin Snedegar. My secondary supervisor was Catarina Dutilh Novaes. I used to be a postgraduate member of both CEPPA and Arché, and one of the co-founders of the Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory seminar. I was also the Postgraduate Research representative of the St Andrews and Stirling Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) chapter from June 2020 to October 2022 and a was a member of the PAFS EDI committee from June 2020 to April 2022.
I use she/her pronouns.
To know what I'm up to and where I'm giving talks next, you can follow me on my professional twitter: @L_A_Jost
I did my PhD at the Universities of St Andrews and Stirling in 2019-2023. Before that, I was at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where I got an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Prehistorical Archeology, and a master in philosophy, with a specialisation in contemporary philosophy.
I am currently working as a postdoctoral research fellow in Medical Ethics for the Centre for Exoplanet Science on the project 'Forecasting Reproduction in Space'. My philosophical interests are mostly in epistemology, applied ethics, feminist philosophy and philosophy of mind. I am particularly interested in philosophical issues relating to reproductive health and problems around testimony and agency in medical and biological contexts.
For my postdoc, I work on issues of reproduction, ethics and agency in outer space, developing a predictive model using Bayesian Network analysis to predict the challenges faced by astronauts sent on long-duration spaceflights. My research is currently focused on the gender health gap in reproductive health in space and how ethics committees greenlight experiments around reproduction in space given our lack of knowledge about the risks and benefits.
I successfully defended my PhD at the Universities of St Andrews and Stirling in March 2023. You can find my full thesis here. My doctoral thesis was on affective experience as a legitimate source of knowledge. In my dissertation, I aim to show that excluding affective from the sources of justification for knowledge is mistaken. To argue for this position, I propose a positive argument about the reliability of affective experience, and a negative argument as to why excluding it has negative social and political consequences. Moreover, I theorize a new type of epistemic injustice, linked to the unfair downgrading of some sources of knowledge.
More specifically, I'm interested in three applied cases where agents know through their affective experience and suffer injustice:
1. How agents recognize microaggressions through to their emotions.
2. Why dialectical white skepticism is an epistemologically defective stance and putting the burden of the proof on racialised people is incoherent with the rest of our epistemic practices.
3. Why patients with lesser-known illnesses loose credibility when testifying about symptoms that are not intersubjectively shareable.
My primary supervisor was Justin Snedegar. My secondary supervisor was Catarina Dutilh Novaes. I used to be a postgraduate member of both CEPPA and Arché, and one of the co-founders of the Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory seminar. I was also the Postgraduate Research representative of the St Andrews and Stirling Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) chapter from June 2020 to October 2022 and a was a member of the PAFS EDI committee from June 2020 to April 2022.
I use she/her pronouns.
To know what I'm up to and where I'm giving talks next, you can follow me on my professional twitter: @L_A_Jost
I did my PhD at the Universities of St Andrews and Stirling in 2019-2023. Before that, I was at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where I got an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Prehistorical Archeology, and a master in philosophy, with a specialisation in contemporary philosophy.
Research Interests
- Medical Ethics
- Epistemology
- Feminist Philosophy
- Applied Ethics
- Emotions