Building better archival futures by recognizing epistemic injustice

The concept of epistemic injustice refers to the injustice that an individual suffers specifically in their capacity as a knower or epistemic agent – that is, as someone who produces, conveys, or uses knowledge. Epistemic injustice is problematic because it undermines individuals’ epistemic agency, or their capacity to produce, convey, or use knowledge. People exercise their epistemic agency every day when they engage in basic epistemic practices: for example, when they contribute to a conversation or when they employ concepts to interpret the social world or make sense of their experience. The literature typically distinguishes between two main types of epistemic injustice. First, when a person is not adequately believed or consulted by their interlocutors due to biases on the interlocutors’ part, the person suffers testimonial injustice. For example, if a woman’s contribution to a meeting is not taken seriously because she is a woman, she faces testimonial injustice because she receives less credibility than she should due to her interlocutors’ biases. Second, when a person or their experience is not adequately understood or represented due to biases in the society’s mainstream pool of interpretive resources (e.g. words, concepts, social representations, shared meanings, or collective understandings), the person suffers hermeneutical injustice. Because a society’s interpretive resources are mainly produced by dominant groups, they tend to neglect or stigmatise the experience of non-dominant groups. For example, prior to the coining of the term, women could not communicate as such their experience of sexual harassment. Their experience was instead inadequately characterised as harmless flirting and therefore remained collectively misunderstood. Women faced hermeneutical injustice because they received less intelligibility than they should have due to their society’s conceptual biases, which obscured and misrepresented the experience of sexual harassment. A person can thus face epistemic injustice in two main ways. With testimonial injustice, the person receives an unduly diminished level of credibility because they are not adequately believed or consulted. With hermeneutical injustice, the person receives an unduly diminished level of intelligibility because they or their experience are not adequately understood or represented. In both cases, the person faces these deficits of credibility or intelligibility because they belong to one or more non-dominant groups – for example, women, LGBTQIA2+, BIPOC folks, people of lower socio-economic status, disabled people, neurodivergent people, or psychiatrised individuals. To face epistemic injustice, then, is to be denied equal status as an epistemic agent because of biases – which may be individual or structural, and conscious or not – of a sexist, cisheteronormative, racist, Eurocentric, classist, ableist, neuronormative, or sanist nature, for example. The phrase ‘epistemic injustice’ was introduced by Miranda Fricker (Fricker 2007), who also introduced the two main categories of epistemic injustice, namely testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. It is important to underline, however, that the concept of epistemic injustice captures some of the epistemic imbalances that had previously been brought into sharp relief and powerfully critiqued – albeit not under the specific label of epistemic injustice – by feminist epistemologists (e.g. Alcoff 1991; Code 1991), including Black feminists and critical race theorists (e.g. Crenshaw 1991; Hill Collins 1990; Mills 1997) as well as standpoint theorists (e.g. Harding 1986; Hartsock 1983). Fricker’s original analysis of testimonial injustice focuses primarily on undue deficits of credibility taking place in an actual epistemic exchange between two or more interlocutors, where the bias at play is directed at the identity of the speaker (Fricker 2007:ch.1). Further developments of the concept by other scholars have shown that testimonial injustice can also be a matter of undue credibility excesses (Davis 2016; Medina 2011, 2013:ch.2) and of undue deficits of criticism (Hazlett 2020); that testimonial injustice can occur independently of an actual epistemic exchange, through silencing (Dotson 2011b; Fricker 2007:ch.6); that testimonial injustice can also be structural (Anderson 2012; Catala 2022); and that testimonial injustice can also stem from biases that concern the content of the speaker’s contribution, regardless of their identity (Davis 2021). Fricker’s original analysis of hermeneutical injustice has likewise been expanded by other scholars, from one that focused mainly on the lack of appropriate terms such as ‘sexual harassment’ (Fricker 2007: ch.7), to ones that focus on the lack of circulation or adoption of new terms coined at the margins such as ‘date rape’ or ‘cisheteropatriarchy’ (Dotson 2012; Mason 2011; Medina 2011, 2013: ch.1; Pohlhaus 2012, or the lack of adequate understanding of existing terms such as ‘racism’ (Catala 2015, 2019). Further developments in the literature on epistemic injustice and oppression have identified the phenomena of epistemic exploitation (Berenstain 2016), epistemic appropriation (Davis 2018), and non-propositional epistemic injustice (Catala 2020, 2025).

The notion of epistemic injustice has in recent years gained recognition within social and political philosophy. Epistemic injustice is the idea that someone can be unfairly discriminated against in our capacity as a knower and that unfair and unjust communicative structures, institutions, and practices have the potential to reproduce and further exacerbate existing socioeconomic inequalities and injustices. Yet, the literature on epistemic injustice has mainly focused on what makes an epistemic injustice epistemic – as opposed to distributive or socioeconomic – and little attention has been paid to what exactly makes it an injustice. This paper fills this lacuna by asking under what conditions epistemic discrimination suffered by a knower becomes an epistemic injustice and identifies five partial conditions that can be used to evaluate claims of epistemic injustice.

Many individuals who have mental disorders often report negative experiences of a distinctively epistemic sort, such as not being listened to, not being taken seriously, or not being considered credible because of their psychiatric conditions. In an attempt to articulate and interpret these reports we present Fricker’s concepts of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007, p. 1) and then focus on testimonial injustice and hermeneutic injustice as it applies to individuals with mental disorders. The clinical impact of these concepts on quality of care is discussed. Within the clinical domain, we contrast epistemic injustice with epistemic privilege and authority. We then argue that testimonial and hermeneutic injustices also affect individuals with mental disorders not only when communicating with their caregivers but also in the social context as they attempt to reintegrate into the general society and assume responsibilities as productive citizens. Following the trend of the movement of mental health care to the community, the testimonies of people with mental disorders should not be restricted to issues involving their own personal mental states.

I shall first briefly revisit the broad idea of ‘epistemic injustice’, explaining how it can take either distributive or discriminatory form, in order to put the concepts of ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ in place. In previous work I have explored how the wrong of both kinds of epistemic injustice has both an ethical and an epistemic significance—someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. But my present aim is to show that this wrong can also have a political significance in relation to non-domination, and so to freedom. While it is only the republican conception of political freedom that presents nondomination as constitutive of freedom, I shall argue that non-domination is best understood as a thoroughly generic liberal ideal of freedom to which even negative libertarians are implicitly committed, for non-domination is negative liberty as of right—secured non-interference. Crucially on this conception, non-domination requires that the citizen can contest interferences. Pettit specifies three conditions of contestation, each of which protects against a salient risk of the would-be contester not getting a ‘proper hearing’. But I shall argue that missing from this list is anything to protect against a fourth salient threat: the threat that either kind of epistemic injustice might disable contestation by way of an unjust deflation of either credibility or intelligibility. Thus we see that both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice can render a would-be contester dominated. Epistemic justice is thereby revealed as a constitutive condition of non-domination, and thus of a central liberal political ideal of freedom.

ABSTRACTThis article critiques the broad interpretation of inadequate medical responses to chronic pain reports as instances of testimonial or hermeneutical injustice. While Miranda Fricker's concepts help highlight the neglect of chronic pain sufferers – such as healthcare professionals' failure to take reports seriously (testimonial injustice) or the lack of adequate language to communicate pain experiences (hermeneutical injustice) – we argue that applying these frameworks overlooks important nuances. Specifically, we contend that there is an additional, distinct epistemic failure in how healthcare providers engage with chronic pain complaints: a failure to respond to these reports in adequate ways, beyond merely understanding or believing them. We hypothesize that it has to do with inquisitive inertia (a decision not to investigate further, in the absence of good medical reasons to ground such a decision), and we conceptualize this failure in terms of distributive epistemic injustice, that may persist even in the absence of testimonial or hermeneutical injustices as they are traditionally understood.

Epistemic injustice is, broadly speaking, about ways that members of marginalized groups may be wronged in their capacity as knowers, due to prejudicial stereotypes. Members of marginalized groups are also the main subjects of concern in discussions of implicit bias and stereotype threat. A key concern in discussions of both implicit bias and stereotype threat has been the effects of the phenomena on academic endeavours. It may seem clear, then, what the relationship is between epistemic injustice, implicit bias, and stereotype threat: at first glance, it would appear that implicit bias and stereotype threat are simply varieties of epistemic injustice. This chapter focuses on at Miranda Fricker's two main categories - testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice - exploring how each relates to implicit bias and stereotype threat. It considers the ways that implicit bias and stereotype threat may cause hermeneutical injustice.

Emergent realities such as the COVID‐19 pandemic and corresponding “infodemic,” the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, climate catastrophe, and fake news, misinformation, disinformation, and so on challenge information researchers to reconsider the limitations and potential of the user‐centered paradigm that has guided much library and information studies (LIS) research. In order to engage with these emergent realities, understanding who people are in terms of their social identities, social power, and as epistemic agents—that is, knowers, speakers, listeners, and informants—may provide insight into human information interactions. These are matters of epistemic injustice. Drawing heavily from Miranda Fricker's work Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing, I use the concept of epistemic injustice (testimonial, systematic, and hermeneutical injustice) to consider people as epistemic beings rather than “users” in order to potentially illuminate new understandings of the subfields of information behavior and information literacy. Focusing on people as knowers, speakers, listeners, and informants rather than “users” presents an opportunity for information researchers, practitioners, and LIS educators to work in service of the epistemic interests of people and in alignment with liberatory aims.

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Scholars usually distinguish between testimonial and hermeneutical epistemic injustice in healthcare. The former arises from negative stereotyping and stigmatization, while the latter occurs when the hermeneutical resources of the dominant community are inadequate for articulating the experience of one's illness. However, the heuristics provided by these two types of epistemic predicaments tend to overlook salient forms of epistemic injustice. In this paper, we prove this argument on the example of the temporality of patients with drug dependence. We identify three temporal dimensions of epistemic injustice affecting drug-dependent patients: the temporal features of their cognitive processes, their individual temporal experience, and the mismatch of social temporality. Notably, the last aspect, which highlights the disparity between the availability of care and its accessibility, does not fit neatly into the categories of testimonial or hermeneutical injustice. (We should note that the International Network of People Who Use Drugs (INPUD) and The Asian Network of People who use Drugs (ANPUD) consider the term "drug addiction" to be associated with disempowerment and negative stereotyping. Instead, they suggest the expression "drug dependence" (INPUD 2020). However, the concept of "drug addiction" is still being used in the current public health, philosophy, and sociology debates that concern the specific field of addiction studies. Replacing the notion of drug addiction with "drug dependence" would not eliminate existing epistemic injustices or allow us to avoid creating new ones, such as those related to ignoring pain claims (O'Brien 2011). Still, for the sake of clarity we will use the notion "drug dependence" when speaking of people while retaining the term "drug addiction" for labelling healthcare practices and the topic for philosophy of healthcare.).

A Cautionary Tale:On Limiting Epistemic Oppression Kristie Dotson (bio) I cannot recall the words of my first poembut I remember a promiseI made my pennever to leave itlyingin somebody else's blood. Audre Lorde, "To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and the Black Poet Who Happens to Be a Woman"1 Introduction In this paper, first and foremost, I aim to issue a caution. Specifically, I caution that when addressing and identifying forms of epistemic oppression one needs to endeavor not to perpetuate epistemic oppression. Epistemic oppression, here, refers to epistemic exclusions afforded positions and communities that produce deficiencies in social knowledge. An epistemic exclusion, in this analysis, is an infringement on the epistemic agency of knowers that reduces her or his ability to participate in a given epistemic community.2 Epistemic agency will concern the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources within a given epistemic community in order to participate in knowledge production and, if required, the revision of those same resources.3 A compromise to epistemic agency, when unwarranted, damages not only individual knowers but also the state of social knowledge and shared epistemic resources. Unfortunately, avoiding unwarranted epistemic exclusions is an exceedingly difficult task. It may well be impossible. For example, we simply do not have the capacity to track all the implications of our positions on any given [End Page 24] issue, which would, arguably, be necessary to avoid epistemic oppression entirely. This realization relegates efforts to be conscious of and minimize epistemic oppression to a kind of naïveté characteristic of utopian dreamers who advocate pie-in-the-sky goals achievable only in theory. Like many forms of pessimism, pessimism about epistemic fairness assumes an all-or-nothing stance. Either we can eliminate epistemic oppression entirely, or we can do nothing about epistemic oppression at all. This position is an obvious over-simplification of the many options available. One can advocate for better, more responsible epistemic conduct capable of reducing epistemic oppression, without also harboring unrealistic expectations for superior epistemic conduct and abilities necessary for eliminating epistemic oppression entirely. In this vein here I issue a caution and a proposal for minimizing epistemic oppression. To issue this caution, I take Miranda Fricker's book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing as a paradigmatic case of the challenges that arise when attempting to avoid epistemic oppression, even while drawing attention to epistemic forms of oppression.4 By bringing attention to specifically epistemic forms of injustice, Fricker's work offers a strong and valuable contribution to a tradition of feminist thought that aims to highlight the observation that "when it comes to knowledge, women get hurt."5 However, her framing of epistemic bad luck as an antithesis to epistemic injustice conceptually forecloses the possibility of other forms of epistemic injustice and hence can be used to demonstrate the pervasiveness of epistemic oppression. Fricker, I claim, inadvertently perpetrates epistemic oppression by utilizing a closed conceptual structure to identify epistemic injustice. This limitation of Fricker's view illustrates the difficulty of avoiding epistemic oppression and demonstrates an avenue for reducing it in one's own analyses. This paper will proceed in two parts. First, I introduce Fricker's two forms of epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice, and a third form of epistemic injustice, contributory injustice. I will also briefly gesture to the pervasive nature of epistemic oppression. Second, I use Fricker's concept of epistemic bad luck as a contemporary example of how easy it is to perpetrate epistemic oppression, even while working to address epistemic oppression. Specifically, I show how Fricker's account deploys a closed conceptual structure that prematurely forecloses the possibility of alternative forms of epistemic injustice, like contributory injustice, and thereby perpetuates epistemic oppression. Ultimately, the strengths and limitations of Fricker's efforts to outline epistemic injustice highlight a need to move toward open conceptual structures that signify without absolute foreclosure so as to reduce the continued propagation of epistemic oppression. [End Page 25] Three Forms of Epistemic Injustice In this section I introduce three forms of epistemic injustice. They are: (1) testimonial injustice, (2) hermeneutical injustice, and (3) contributory injustice. For...

Genocide remembrance is a complex epistemological/ethical achievement, whereby survivors and descendants give meaning to the past in the quest for both personal-historical and social-historical truth. This paper offers an argument of epistemic injustice specifically as it occurs in relation to practices of (individual and collective) genocide remembrance. In particular, I argue that under conditions of genocide denialism, understood as collective genocide misremembrance and memory distortion, genocide survivors and descendants are confronted with hermeneutical oppression. Drawing on Sue Campbell’s relational, reconstructive account of remembering, I argue that genocide denialism involves disrespectful challenges to memory, which systematically misrecognize rememberers. Adopting the case of Turkey’s denialism of the Armenian genocide, I discuss two interrelated mechanisms through which this can happen: i) through the systematic portrayal of survivors and descendants as vicious rememberers, and ii) through distortions of the very concept of ‘genocide’. Based on this, I show how hermeneutical and testimonial injustice are crucially interrelated when it comes to ‘contested’ memories of historical injustice and the biographical testimony it gives rise to.

In this article, we consider a recent philosophical attempt to narrate transgender experiences in response to what Miranda Fricker has termed ‘epistemic injustice’, against the background of highly polarized debates concerning trans identities in both academic philosophy and popular culture. We bring out some of the difficulties and challenges involved in doing epistemic justice to trans testimonies via an analysis and critique of Daniele Moyal-Sharrock and Constantine Sandis’ philosophical paper ‘Bedrock Gender’. We consider how the paper raises distinct issues related to testimonial and hermeneutical injustice in its emphasis on trans testimonies of gender certainty. In response, we consider what is at stake in understanding and using the testimony of gendered experiences for furthering a philosophical account of gender. In scrutinizing the epistemology of trans in the paper, we argue that combatting epistemic injustices related to gender requires self-reflexivity and an understanding of the complexity of gendered realities as well as the moral-existential aspects of testimonies of gender. We suggest that rather than speaking of gender in terms of ‘bedrock’ and ‘certainty’, thinking philosophically about gender must involve a critical investigation and ongoing conversation of how gender identification can both confirm and contest our sense of who we are.

Connecting epistemic injustice and justified belief in health-related conspiracies

Hermeneutical injustice is the injustice of being frustrated in an attempt to render a significant social experience intelligible where hermeneutical marginalization is a significant causal factor in that failure. Someone counts as hermeneutically marginalized insofar as they belong to a social group that under-contributes to the common pool of concepts and social meanings. Trans people report experiences that are surely ones of testimonial injustice. Pre-emptive testimonial injustice is effectively an advance credibility deficit sufficient to ensure that one's word is not even solicited. The testimonial injustices of various kinds suffered by trans people offer a particularly stark illustration of the connection between testimonial injustice and hermeneutical marginalization. Hermeneutical marginalization is the key condition for hermeneutical injustice, which will occur with any failed or frustrated attempt at intelligibility that is significantly due to the marginalization. Remedying hermeneutical injustice often begins by developing an operative concept that is used by a particular community to fill the hermeneutical lacuna.

Between 1958 and 1961, as Ruanda-Urundi approached independence, the Belgian State deported 283 Métis children to Belgium where they were placed in orphanages or with foster families. Most of these illegitimate children of Black women and white colonial men would never see their birth mothers again, believing the ‘official’ narrative that their mothers had abandoned them. This article focuses on the mothers’ stories uncovered in visits to Belgium’s ‘Africa Archives’ in Brussels. Previously inaccessible for over 40 years, the files consulted debunk the notion that the mothers wilfully gave up their children. Instead, they expose the racial discrimination and prejudices to which the mothers were subjected by Belgian colonial officials determined to segregate the children from their African families and subsequently remove them to Belgium indefinitely. Using Miranda Fricker’s concepts of ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ as a theoretical framework, we examine the marginalization, coercion, and manipulation of the mothers in terms of epistemic violence facilitated by the colonial racial hierarchy. Additionally we suggest that, despite recent improvements pertaining to accessing Belgium’s colonial archives, the continued difficulties in accessing the files for the mothers and their families residing in Africa points to a perpetuation of colonial injustice.