Researching to Transgress: The Epistemic Virtue of Research With

Abstract

In her book, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Miranda Fricker describes hermeneutical injustice as “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource.” Hermeneutical injustices are part of the systemic patterns of structural injustices that members of particular social groups (for example, women, GLBTQ, people of color, and dis/ abled individuals) are susceptible to; they are, therefore, aspects of oppression. A hermeneutical injustice occurs when “a collective hermeneutical gap impinges so as to significantly disadvantage some group(s) and not others.” Those wronged in this way are excluded from participating in the spread of knowledge; a significant area of their social experience is not intelligible through collective understanding or dominant narratives because a gap in the collective hermeneutical resource renders them marginalized. Fricker offers the condition of women before the legal and social term “sexual harassment” existed to describe their inappropriate treatment by men in the workplace as an example of hermeneutical injustice. Owing to a lacuna in the collective hermeneutical resource, women were unable to fully express workplace experiences without the concept of sexual harassment and the legal and social assumption the concept now communicates (for example, “boys will be boys” does not justify inappropriate touching in the workplace). The lack of a shared concept, “sexual harassment,” harmed women in terms of physical and mental stress, but it also occasioned an “epistemic harm” because the experience of women was unintelligible to others.