Multilingualism for Epistemological Diversity and Epistemic Inclusion

Epistemic injustices are wrongs done concerning a person’s capacity as a knower. These actions are usually caused by prejudice and involve the distortion and neglect of certain marginalized groups’ opinions and ways of knowing. A type of epistemic injustice is hermeneutical injustice, which occurs when a person cannot effectively communicate or understand their experience, since it is excluded in scholarship, journalism, and discourse within their community. Indigenous Peoples (IPs) are especially vulnerable to hermeneutical injustice because their way of life is unfamiliar or inaccessible to others. This leads to the exclusion of their ideas from public discourse, especially those important for human and societal development. This phenomenon is particularly evident in instances related to IP education. José Medina claims that there are cases of hermeneutical injustice which hinders the ability of people to share and make meaning, or simply, hermeneutical death. Ben Kotzee, on the other hand, identifies the specific educational dimension of epistemic injustice. Using both of these frameworks and citing the results of local studies on indigenous education as illustrative points, we attempt to show instances and scope of hermeneutical injustice in the education of IPs in the Philippines.

While South Africa has been lauded as a multilingual country that accorded official status to 11 languages, the academic notion of multilingualism has always been conceived from a monolingual perspective. Monolingual ideologies, which inadvertently favoured European languages to the detriment of local languages, were passed on to African countries through the occupation, division and colonisation of African territory by European powers in the early 1880s. Surprisingly, however, to date hardly any research has investigated African multilingualism predating the colonial era, or analysed pre-colonial narratives to offer alternative insights into African sociolinguistic and cultural realities. Aiming to shed some light on indigenous ways of knowing and the nature of translingual practices in local South African communities, the author of this article presents a study which collected and analysed storied narratives of six community elders – a glimpse into the pre-colonial period. The results of this study show that there is still a prevalent cultural competence of ubuntu (humanity towards others), which is highly relevant for teaching and learning indigenous knowledge and for identity formation among speakers of Bantu languages. Using a framework of ubuntu translanguaging to account for complex multilingual encounters, the author contends that a preferred literacy methodology for learners should be porous and value interdependence in tandem with ancient plural value systems and indigenous ways of knowing. Recommendations for future research involving narrative accounts of African community elders and practical applications in classroom encounters are considered at the end of the article.

This paper develops the notion of epistemic exclusion as a way of exploring the different types of silence and silencing that happen in English medium Rwandan classrooms. By focusing on classroom observationsof teachers’ pedagogic practices and the ways in which girls interact in the classrooms, we demonstrate how experiences of epistemic exclusion intersect with other mechanisms of marginalisation, in this case related to gendered norms and expected behaviours. Through thematic analysis of dual classroom observation schedules and video transcriptions from 32 Primary Six and Secondary Three lessons in four government schools, we have identified examples where learners’ engagement in the co-construction of language and subject knowledge was limited by classroom practices. Silence, and silencing, of girls was particularly observed in Secondary Three where reluctance to speak in class and respond to teachers’ questions, combined with lack of confidence as evidenced through body language, deprived girls from participating in spontaneous classroom talk. Conclusions discuss how silencing limits girls’ epistemic inclusion.

Cohen's complex instruction provides us with several useful aspects for epistemic inclusion. Making students feel competent in several disciplines increases their resilience when facing failure and equilibrates class status to render every student important in the others' eyes. Cooperative tools are important because of their obligation of role assignment in the aim to not leave the groups to their own devices. In the second part of the chapter, the authors show through examples of real-life situations what happens if we do nothing, when we renounce intervention, pretending that teaching is exclusively related to the relational dimension. The strength of epistemic inclusion can be demonstrated here through its absence. We see that epistemic exclusion is deleterious for learning.

This article explores the evolving contours of epistemic injustice in the digital age, with particular focus on the role of social media in both perpetuating and challenging these injustices. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s foundational concepts of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, the paper examines how algorithmic structures, influencer cultures, and digital hierarchies affect the credibility and interpretability of marginalized voices. It interrogates the mechanisms by which epistemic authority is constructed online and highlights how marginalized groups—such as Dalits, women, and indigenous communities—are often discredited, silenced, or rendered unintelligible in mainstream digital discourse. At the same time, the paper explores the emergence of epistemic counter publics that resist these dominant narratives and reclaim space for alternative ways of knowing. The study concludes by calling for a critical epistemic ethics of the digital public sphere—one that ensures inclusivity, interpretive justice, and equitable knowledge production in our increasingly networked societies.

The decolonization of knowledge is increasingly high on the agenda of applied and sociolinguistics. This article contributes to this agenda by examining how peripheral multilingual scholars confront their linguistic and epistemic exclusion from global knowledge production. Based on the product of such a challenge – a Chinese-centric special issue of Multilingua, a global academic Q1 journal, devoted to crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic and committed to furthering intercultural dialogue in research – we explore the decades-long knowledge production process behind that product and so provide a look into the “black box” of academic networking and publishing. Advocating for collaborative autoethnography as an inherently inclusive method, we focus on enabling academic and personal networks, textual scaffolding, and linguistic and epistemic brokerage. The article closes with three aspects of linguistic and epistemic citizenship that are central to inclusion, namely recognition of the value of peripheral knowledges, recognition of a collaborative ethics of care, and recognition of shared responsibility.

This paper explores the epistemic dimension of neoliberalism in the context of higher education. Much critical commentary depicts neoliberalism negatively in terms of knowledge commodification, marketisation, productivity agendas, accountability regimes, bureaucratisation, economic rationalism and micro-managerialism. The paper offers a conceptual model (Binary Epistemic Model) to theorise the implicit epistemic conflict between some academic identities and the neoliberal paradigm. The model is used to support a paradoxical two-part thesis: (1) that neoliberalism, in its naïve form, is a threat to the necessary epistemological diversity of the academy, and (2) that epistemological diversity has a space, albeit a contested space, for neoliberal identities and ways of knowing. The premise for the model is that it offers a dialectical and evaluativistic way of understanding the influence of neoliberalism in the academy.

English at present is not viewed as a foreign language concerning global needs that should be learned and understood by students with isolation. Therefore, English undergoes shifting from foreign into international language or English as International Language (EIL). This paper describes the importance of EIL teaching to Indonesian students through innovative pedagogy as an effort to speed their English competence in written and spoken. At present theories and research studies dealing with EIL and innovative pedagogies are presented. All confirm that it is time to teach EIL to make the students having their identity although they use English. In EIL, students respect the local identity while learning English. Innovative pedagogy is the instruction strategy to make the students interactive and interested in English. Hence, the teachers’ role in teaching English through innovative pedagogy is required. Teachers should use the students’ environment as teaching material with global knowledge.

Although intersectionality has become part of the everyday lexicon, the field of psychology has demonstrated resistance to the theory, which we argue reflects epistemic exclusion. Epistemic exclusion is the devaluation of some scholarship as illegitimate and certain scholars as lacking credibility. We suggest that intersectionality has been epistemically excluded because it challenges dominant psychological norms about the scientific process and has been most readily endorsed by psychologists from marginalized groups. We provide evidence that epistemic exclusion has occurred through formal means (e.g., exclusion from mainstream journals) and informal processes (e.g., repeated misrepresentation of the theory). We use visibility theory to highlight the role of disciplinary power in this process, such that dominant psychologists act as gatekeepers. Finally, we discuss how the epistemic exclusion of intersectionality is a barrier to social issues scholarship and social justice in psychology, and offer structural recommendations for intersectionality's epistemic inclusion.

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...

Drawing from the philosophical work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the perspectives of theorists Mikhail Bakhtin and Kenneth Burke, the aim of this paper is to critically reflect on the meaning of the word "shared." The authors draw on the concept of epistemic justice, which they argue permeates the clinical encounter, to discuss how various forms of, and claims to, knowledge may influence the attainement of shared decision-making in health care contexts. The specific objectives are twofold: first, the authors draw key concepts from key Gadamerian, Burkean, and Bakhtinian philosophical perspectives to consider shared decision-making in relation to two types of epistemic injustice: testimonial and hermeneutic epistemic injustice. Second, building on philosopher Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy, the authors emphasize that major changes in educational structures and systems are required to promote the critical reflexivity required to address issues of epistemic justice, in the broader pursuit of authentic shared decision-making. They propose three main areas of focus for helath professions education: (a) changes in content (moving from a focus on biomedical knowledge to more content on social sciences) and methods of teaching (more dialogue and the creation of moments of dissonance); (b) a re-examination of teachers' role in promoting epistemic justice; and (c) inclusion of patients as partners. Without major transformation in what, how, and with whom we teach, future clinicians may be unprepared to enact shared decision-making in a manner that does justice to the various ways of knowing.

The goal of this exploratory paper is to begin to explicate the concept of epistemicide and articulate its function within the information field. We define epistemicide as the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a knowledge system. It is not that we are unaware of the injustices happening within our field, but rather, that we are not in discussion across sub‐fields considering the idea that the collective injustices exist and are problematic on individual and systemic levels. We believe epistemicide happens when several epistemic injustices, such as hermeneutical or testimonial injustices, occur collectively reflecting a structured and systemic oppression of particular ways of knowing. We present epistemicide and epistemic injustice as a concept for understanding and addressing ways knowledge systems are silenced, devalued, or annihilated within library and Information Science (LIS).

The integration of Sustainable Development Goals in educational systems is a key issue for a sustainable future. India's National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 presents the transformative approach to education that focuses on educational practices aligned with a global sustainability agenda. This paper critically examines the role of NEP 2020 in furthering SDGs through its impact on educational policy, governance, and pedagogical innovation. The research focuses on three main dimensions: (1) Policy reforms that support inclusivity, equity, and lifelong learning; (2) Governance frameworks that foster decentralization, community engagement, and collaborative leadership; and (3) Pedagogical innovations, such as technology integration and competency-based education, to make the learning experience more meaningful and foster sustainable development. The study, which presents an analysis of these reforms, shows how NEP 2020 can provide a strong framework for changing the educational outcomes and responding to global challenges. The paper maintains that NEP 2020 not only reshapes India's educational landscape but also becomes an excellent model for aligning the national education systems with the SDGs. The findings highlight that these policies have the potential to drive sustainable societal changes in society through education.

Purpose The article highlights the significance of the centre-(semi-)peripheries dynamics in the co-construction of global public goods and the limits of openness in global knowledge production. Challenging the assumption of global public good is not to discount the benefits of openness, but rather to initiate a conversation about the political economy, regionalism and internationalism of global knowledge production. Design/methodology/approach By examining “information/knowledge as a public good” and historical incidents where information flows were expedited and prohibited, this article shows that the public good justification for openness demands further examination. Findings First, although intangible information is inherently a public good, publicly funded research outputs are tangible information and they are not necessarily qualified as public goods. Second, intellectual property rights and private ownership can be conducive to the creation of public goods. Third, openness can become a convenient slogan for commercial interests or national priorities without regard to common or public good. Furthermore, national borders, international relations and geopolitical tensions can slow and stop transnational information flows because not every kinds of information are permitted to be global public goods. Originality/value The paper considers some assumptions of openness that have been overlooked or understudied in the context of global knowledge production.

ABSTRACTThe ongoing movement in applied linguistics towards decolonisation and dehegemonisation demands that we acknowledge multilingualism and comprehend how marginalised multilingual researchers are excluded from global knowledge creation. In light of this, this qualitative study investigates the realities and lived experiences of applied linguistics and English language teaching (ELT) scholars in Bangladesh. Research participants include 14 applied linguistics and ELT academics who publish in national and international journals as well as on other platforms. The data analysis shows that English is the preferred language for academic publications among multilingual Bangladeshi applied linguistics and ELT academics. The acceptance and status of Scopus‐indexed journals in academic avenues, policies, and practices for academic advancement and promotion based on publications in English and a fixation with the English language seem to be the main reasons for their preferences. Furthermore, despite their admiration for Bangla as a national language, they do not recognise it as a medium for scientific publications. However, they are aware that their scholarly publications in English do not have much impact on the local educational and social development or linguistic justice and equity in Bangladeshi society. The paper concludes that only when multilingualism is accepted within the circuits of knowledge production and only when workable ways are identified to invite policymakers, university authorities, educators and researchers to pursue more fruitful cooperation between the Global North and South, linguistic and epistemic inclusion and transformation of the ontology and epistemology of applied linguistics will be possible.