Postdoctoral Fellow at Goethe University
Duration of stay: October 2025 to August 2026
In cooperation with Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst
Funded by Claus Wisser Postdoc Program
Sonja Riegler’s research lies at the intersection of social and political philosophy, feminist epistemology, feminist philosophy of science, and Critical Race Studies. She recently completed her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Vienna. Her dissertation, A Functionalist Approach to Ignorance, supervised by Martin Kusch and Linda Martín Alcoff, develops a novel framework for analyzing socially relevant forms of ignorance, with a central case study on the largely overlooked history of “guest worker” migration to Austria. Her current project advances a critical epistemology of bureaucracy, introducing bureaucracy as a crucial yet underexplored topic in political epistemology, with a particular focus on knowledge practices, forms of expertise, and power asymmetries in bureaucratic encounters.
Research project: How Bureaucracy Knows: Toward a Critical Epistemology of Forms, Rules, and Expertise
Despite its centrality to governance, bureaucracy remains a largely neglected topic in political epistemology. While sociology and political science have analyzed bureaucratic organization and practice in detail (e.g., Weber 1907; Blau 2000; Goodsell 2004; Graeber 2015; Zacka 2017), political epistemologists have paid little attention to the forms of expertise that underpin bureaucratic knowledge and to the epistemic authority exercised by bureaucrats and those who interact with them. This project introduces bureaucracy as a crucial yet underexplored topic in political epistemology (PE), aiming to bring core philosophical questions about expertise, authority, and rule-following into conversation with the everyday epistemic and political dynamics of bureaucratic practice. It develops a new conceptual framework for understanding how knowledge, ignorance, and power operate in bureaucratic institutions. Specifically, I investigate bureaucratic expertise as a distinct form of institutional practical knowledge, contrasting it with scientific expertise, and explore how epistemic authority is unevenly distributed between bureaucrats and service users. Drawing on the philosophical literature on rule following (Wittgenstein 1969, Daston 2022, Graeber 2015) and work in the sociology of classification (e.g., Hacking 1984) and standardization (Scott 1998), the project also investigates how bureaucrats’ epistemic and moral agency is shaped by institutional rules, professional norms, and value commitments.
Events
7.11.2025 “A Functionalist Approach to Ignorance”, Talk at Workshop on Novel Approaches in Epistemologies of Ignorance, TU Dresden (organized by Jana Stern)
13.11.2025 “Group Ignorance in Science – An Interactionist Account”, Talk at SW*IP Jahrestagung 2025, Wissenschaft, Philosophie und Öffentlichkeit
18.11.2025 “Bureaucracy and Expertise”, Talk at Forschungskolloqium Rainer Forst
22.1.2026 Talk and Organization of Workshop on Feminist Epistemology, with Frieder Vogelmann and Katharina Hoppe, University of Vienna
March 2026: Referentin bei der Österreichischen Philosophie Olympiade, Bundeswettbewerb
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Publikationen
Riegler, Sonja & Veigl, Sophie: “Meaning Dominance: When Polysemy Creates Hermeneutical Oppression”, submitted to Social Epistemology (R&R) Riegler, Sonja (forthcoming): “Interference By Whom? Advocating for Experience-Based Forms of Expertise in Debates on Epistemic Paternalism”, in: Samarzija, H, McKenna, R (Eds.), The European Face of Political Epistemology, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan Riegler, Sonja (2023): “A Space Yet to Be Filled (By Whom?) – Ignorance as an Institutional and Interpersonal Practice”, in: Heinrich K, Robles F (Eds.), Addressing Amnesia, Performing Trauma, Vienna: Edition Angewandte, 100-108 Riegler, Sonja (2022): “Wissen im Widerspruch, Wissen als Widerspruch – Umriss einer ambivalenten Beziehung“, in: Adrienne N, Gabriel M, Gmainer-Pranzl F (Hrsg.): Das Politische der Wissenschaft, Band 18, Berlin: Peter Lang Verlag, 331-347