Melanie is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy working in the area of feminist epistemology. Her dissertation addresses the relationship between knowledge and solidarity by examining how the privileged respond to recognition of their ignorance — especially when that response involves extracting knowledge from the people they want to help. She cautions against the assumption that, since ignorance plays a central role in sustaining systems of oppression, more knowledge will be the solution. This is because she is concerned that cultural and institutional tendencies to treat knowledge like a commodity generate unreliable knowledge about the world and our places in it at the same time as they reinforce oppressive systems. Her current focus is on the assumptions about knowledge at stake in attempts to repair the harm caused by wild rice research and crop development at the University of Minnesota (https://www.cfans.umn.edu/wildrice).