Ethical and epistemic dilemmas in knowledge production: Addressing their intersection in collaborative, community-based research

Abstract

Collaborative community-based research can bring a range of benefits to universities, communities, and the public more broadly. A distinct virtue of collaborative community-based research is that it makes the ethical–epistemic intersections and challenges in research a focal point of its methodology. This makes collaborative community-based research well positioned to address various forms of ‘epistemic injustice’ (Fricker, 2007) that demean certain people and groups as knowers and exclude them from knowledge production. In this article, we examine the ethical and epistemic advantages and challenges of collaborative community-based research in light of the concept of epistemic injustice. We argue that collaborative community-based research can help provide an institutional response to epistemic injustices often embedded within processes of knowledge production.