Researching to Transgress: The Epistemic Virtue of Research With

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.

“Conjoint Communicated Experience”: Art as an Instrument of Democracy

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).

This empirical study examines the impact of epistemic injustice on child soldiers while exploring the potential of the Baraza structure – a local jurisprudence in the Democratic Republic of Congo – to pursue the “the best interests of the child” principle, particularly in the process of holding young soldiers accountable. Epistemic injustice, conceptually developed by Miranda Fricker, consists of “testimonial injustice”, when the hearer gives a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word due to prejudice; “hermeneutical injustice”, which takes place when a structural breach in collective interpretive imagination resources unfairly disadvantages a person or social group when trying to render intelligible their social experiences; and “distributive epistemic injustice”, which happens when “epistemic goods” (education and information) are inequitably distributed. The research outcomes suggest that Baraza jurisprudence has the potential to avert epistemic injustice, and to promote a non-discriminatory treatment of accused former child and adolescent soldiers.

In her groundbreaking text Epistemic Injustice, Miranda Fricker evaluates types of harms incurred by individuals undergoing unrecognized and inarticulable oppression. At issue in epistemic and hermeneutic injustice are prejudicial comportments to and evaluations of reality. In the following, I focus on hermeneutic and epistemic injustice in relation to the formation of intellectual and ethical virtues. When reading Fricker and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics together, there is a clear pathway to improve ethical development. In particular, ethical development ought to cultivate the proper virtues that promote understanding. Gadamer’s emphasis on the qualities of a researcher and the epistemic virtues that Fricker highlights reveal an educative path for addressing injustice. In other words, cultivating these virtues counteracts injustice wherein recognition and articulation of reality is challenged or at issue.

Miranda Fricker (2007) explains that hermeneutical injustice occurs when an area of one’s social experience is obscured from collective understanding. However, Fricker focuses only on the injustice suffered by those who cannot render intelligible their own oppression. I argue that there is another side to hermeneutical injustice that is other-oriented; an injustice that occurs when one cannot understand, to a basic extent, the oppression of others. Specifically, I discuss the hermeneutical injustice suffered by nonhuman animals made possible by objectifying concepts available in the collective hermeneutical resource.

Hermeneutical injustice is an epistemic injustice that happens when a person's experience cannot be well understood or articulated because of the problem with the collective hermeneutical resource -- a collection of concepts and words that we use to understand one's experience and to communicate with one another about it. Previously, Miranda Fricker and Rebecca Mason have suggested two types of hermeneutical injustice: Hermeneutical Gap and Hermeneutical Distortion. Fricker believes that hermeneutical injustice is a gap between hermeneutical resources, whereas Mason suggests the collective hermeneutical resource can also be distorted when the words and concepts that comprise it are inferentially related in ways that are invalid or inductively weak. However, in this paper, I identify a novel type of hermeneutical injustice that I call Hermeneutical Weakening. In a case of HW, hermeneutical injustice is neither caused by the collective hermeneutical resource being deficient nor it being distorted, but due to it being weakened. I define Hermeneutical Weakening as the loss of word significance when the lexical effect of the word is weakened due to overuse. I then differentiate hermeneutical weakening from both hermeneutical gap and distortion. In particular, I analyze the subtle differences between weakening and distortion and argue the lexical effect can also be weakened through non-literal uses of words when the literal standard meaning of words to which distortion tied is suspended. Finally, I explain the generation of hermeneutical weakening and how it is also a form of oppression of the marginalized group generated systematically under the social system.

This paper identifies and analyses a novel species of hermeneutical epistemic injustice (HI). Fricker’s traditional account analyses HI in terms of a collective conceptual gap. (Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007). Building on this, Simion’s analysis (in: Bondy P, Carter JA (eds) Well-founded belief: new essays on the epistemic basing relation. Routledge, New York, 2019) suggests the phenomenon is broader, and thus more ubiquitous: specifically, that agents who have been hermeneutically marginalised can be susceptible to HI through failing to ground their social experience in conceptual resources that are already available. This paper advances the literature further and presents a novel strand of the phenomena, where agents both have, and base, their experience on available concepts but are still subject to HI. I argue that this is an important species of HI that should be investigated and accounted for, and I suggest that in virtue of being hermeneutically marginalised, often agents only have available to them defective or oppressive concepts. I further provide a case study of what this can look like online and new concerns social media presents for this kind of HI. CW: Mentions of transphobia, racism, sexism, rape.

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.

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This article explores the relationship between hermeneutical injustice in religious settings and religious trauma (RT) and spiritual violence (SV). In it I characterize a form of hermeneutical injustice (HI) that arises when experiences are obscured from collective understanding by normatively laden concepts, and I argue that this form of HI often plays a central role in cases of religious trauma and spiritual violence, even those involving children. In section I, I introduce the reader to the phenomena of religious trauma and spiritual violence. In section II, I describe the role normatively laden concepts play in shaping our social experience. I then elucidate how they can contribute to HI. In section III, I provide a brief overview of the history of some significant identity prejudices in the history of Christianity and argue that children can properly be understood as victims of HI within some religious communities. I then return in section IV to the examples of religious trauma and spiritual violence offered throughout the article and demonstrate that HI plays an important causal role in each of them. HIs sometimes constitute spiritual and religious harms; at other times they create an epistemic environment conducive to spiritual abuse.

This chapter defends a novel view of hermeneutical epistemic injustice (HEI). To this effect, it starts by arguing that Miranda Fricker’s account is too restrictive: hermeneutical epistemic injustice is more ubiquitous than her account allows. That is because, contra Fricker, conceptual ignorance is not necessary for HEI: hermeneutical epistemic injustice essentially involves a failure in concept application rather than in concept possession. Further on, I unpack hermeneutical epistemic injustice as unjustly brought about basing failure. Last, I show that, if this view is right, HEI is a form of distributive injustice, and affords the corresponding traditional normative theorizing.

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.).

This paper explores how University as social entity has great potential to confront epistemic injustices by expanding epistemic capabilities. To do this, we primarily follow the contributions of scholars such as Miranda Fricker and José Medina. The epistemic capabilities and epistemic injustice nexus will be explored via two empirical cases: the first one is an experience developed in Lagos (Nigeria) using participatory video; the second is a service learning pedagogical strategy for final year undergraduate students conducted at Universidad de Ibagué (in Colombia). The Lagos experience shows how participatory action-research methodologies could promote epistemic capabilities and functioning, making it possible for the participants to generate interpretive materials to speak of their own realities. However, this experience is too limited to address testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. The Colombian experience is a remarkable experience that is building epistemic capabilities among students and other local participants. However, there is a hermeneutical and structural injustice that tends to give more value to disciplinary and codified knowledge at the expense of experiential and tacit knowledge.

In 2024 University of Amsterdam’s launched a new research priority area, "Decolonial Futures," which centers on transforming archives, museums, and cultural institutions to address colonial legacies. This article focuses on colonial archives managed by archival institutions. The central question is what forms of injustice are embedded within these archives and how can archival institutions build better archival futures based on the recognition of those injustices. Colonial archives are inherently problematic as knowledge resources, as they primarily reflect the perspectives of colonial authorities, often distorting and silencing the voices of colonized populations. Drawing on Miranda Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice, two main forms of injustice can be identified: hermeneutical injustice and testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs according to Fricker when a hearer gives "a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word", often based on the speaker’s gender or race. Testimonial injustice frequently results from hermeneutical injustice, which involves structural identity prejudice. Fricker defines hermeneutical injustice as "the injustice of having (…) one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource". Using the lens of epistemic injustice offers valuable opportunities to better understand the problematic nature of colonial archives, while also providing archival institutions with guidance on how to avoid perpetuating injustices when creating digital archival spaces. This article shares experiences from a project initiated by the Dutch National Archives to map how representatives from affected communities, as well as those from the academic and heritage sectors, view the necessity and possibilities for archival institutions to engage with these archives in a different, decolonial way, with the aim of creating a more inclusive historical record and better serving communities marginalized by history.