Introduction

Abstract

Epistemic injustice, then, is not only about who speaks but about who is listened to, who is understood, and who is dismissed or ignored. It is about who has the right to know things or to choose not to know them, about whose knowledge has the status of truth and is felt to matter, and about who has access to knowledge, while others are denied access to the things they need to know. As helpful and generative as Foucault’s analysis of power as constitutive of subjects has been, and however much it may still prove useful for theorizing epistemic injustice, it also provoked one of the earliest and most influential elaborations of ‘epistemic violence’, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s critique of Foucault’s work in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’. Epistemically privileged people’s failure to notice epistemic injustice, observes Medina, is a ‘failure of imagination’.