Epistemic Injustice Research Articles

Can theorising epistemic injustice help us decolonise?

ABSTRACT The paper argues that some tools from the epistemic injustice literature can be fruitfully applied to the debate on epistemic decolonisation. The first step for such a project is to defuse recent misgivings about the liberatory potential of epistemic injustice scholarship. I group these misgivings under the slogan ‘Epistemic injustice is white-people stuff’, or ‘the WPS challenge’, for short, and use them to set desiderata for good theorising with epistemic injustice tools. I then look at three such tools – epistemic oppression, white ignorance, and contributory injustice – and argue that they advance theorising epistemic decolonisation while meeting the three desiderata. If the argument works, its implications for the topic of this special issue are that we don’t need to decolonise epistemic injustice; we can instead use the tools of the epistemic injustice literature to advance the decolonisation project.

Detecting your depression with your smartphone? – An ethical analysis of epistemic injustice in passive self-tracking apps

AbstractSmartphone apps might offer a low-threshold approach to the detection of mental health conditions, such as depression. Based on the gathering of ‘passive data,’ some apps generate a user’s ‘digital phenotype,’ compare it to those of users with clinically confirmed depression and issue a warning if a depressive episode is likely. These apps can, thus, serve as epistemic tools for affected users. From an ethical perspective, it is crucial to consider epistemic injustice to promote socially responsible innovations within digital mental healthcare. In cases of epistemic injustice, people are wronged specifically as epistemic agents, i.e., agents of the production and distribution of knowledge. We suggest that epistemic agency relies on different resource- and uptake-related preconditions which can be impacted by the functionality of passive self-tracking apps. We consider how this can lead to different forms of epistemic injustice (testimonial, hermeneutical, and contributory injustice) and analyze the influence of the apps’ use on epistemic practices on an individual level, in mental healthcare settings, and on the structural level.

Shallow pedagogies as epistemic injustice: how uncritical forms of learning hinder education’s contribution to just and sustainable development

This paper draws on findings from the JustEd study to discuss the shallow pedagogies that have emerged in Peru in the context of learner-centred and outcomes-based reforms that have been poorly implemented in a context with many limitations in terms of policy orientations, resources, and teacher training and support. These pedagogies promote little to no critical thinking, are disconnected from students’ experiences and do not encourage them to problematise reality nor to grasp complexity. Such pedagogies constitute a form of epistemic injustice in that they do not help to develop students’ capacity to participate as equals in the consumption and production of knowledge. Through this, these pedagogies also limit education’s potential contributions to justice, peace and sustainability. Our discussion of shallow pedagogies leads us to articulate some more positive elements of what rich and just pedagogies might entail.

Racism, epistemic injustice, and ideology critique

Since its 2007 publication, Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice has sparked a vigorous conversation in analytic philosophy about how social power corrodes individual’s epistemic capacities and distorts collective meaning-making in unjust ways. Yet for all its normative insights into social silencing, I argue that Fricker’s theorization of epistemic dysfunction remains too individualized, cognitivist, and dematerialized to account for racialized imaginaries. Rather than view racisms as normal and normative in racist cultures, Fricker frames identity-driven prejudice as a troubling aberration from otherwise unblemished epistemic and moral norms. This leads her into adopting an overly voluntarist and idealist theory of social change that centres training better knowers rather than unmaking racialized worlds. Ultimately, I contend that we should return to a materialist theory of ideology, following the work of Stuart Hall. Doing so jettisons the narrow focus on individual epistemic failures and instead problematizes how certain social ideas consolidate and reproduce racial hierarchies.

Person, People, Planet: Eco-Systematic Analysis of Older Adults’ Experiences of Engagement with Nature and Discourse About Nature

ABSTRACT This study combined ecological, environmental, nature-based, and epistemic interpretations of older adulthood to gain a previously unresearched look at how older adults feel that their relations with nature are treated by others. Sixty older adults were interviewed in-depth, and data was analyzed using the Eco-Appreciation framework and Thematic Content Analysis. The results indicate the concurrence of processes of withdrawal of older adults from spaces of nature and discourse about nature. These processes obstruct older adults’ wellbeing; entail the infliction of existential epistemic injustices and “eco-ageism” toward them; and emphasize the crucial role social work can play in responding thereto.

Addressing Epistemic Injustice: Engaging Children as Environmental Communicators to Support the Long-Term Sustainability of Forest Ecosystems

Closure of a forest for biosecurity purposes led to the marginalisation and disconnection of Year 6 children from a local forest of significance to them in Aotearoa, New Zealand. The marginalisation of children’s voices and concomitantly of their knowledge, ideas, and values from environmental issues can be viewed as an example of epistemic injustice, which manifests widely in the environmental area, particularly in relation to marginalised groups. To counter this marginalisation and promote epistemic justice, we explored how the creative arts involving a child-driven environmental communication project could foster children’s sense of agency by supporting the protection of a local forest affected by a tree disease. We show that the creative arts could facilitate the children’s meaningful engagement in environmental issues in a learning environment that fostered child-centric approaches that enabled children to express their visions for sustainable futures in distinctly unique ways that were relevant to them. Furthermore, enabling the children to participate as environmental communicators re-established their relationship with their local forest and re-balanced the power structures that had led to the children’s sense of marginalisation. The insights on how this child-centred relational approach can promote epistemic justice and provide a meaningful contribution to the long-term sustainable management of forest ecosystems has implications for other marginalised groups.

Conformism, Ignorance & Injustice: AI as a Tool of Epistemic Oppression

Abstract From music recommendation to assessment of asylum applications, machine-learning algorithms play a fundamental role in our lives. Naturally, the rise of AI implementation strategies has brought to public attention the ethical risks involved. However, the dominant anti-discrimination discourse, too often preoccupied with identifying particular instances of harmful AIs, has yet to bring clearly into focus the more structural roots of AI-based injustice. This paper addresses the problem of AI-based injustice from a distinctively epistemic angle. More precisely, I argue that the injustice generated by the implementation of AI machines in our societies is, in some paradigmatic cases, also a form of epistemic injustice. With a particular focus on AIs employed as gatekeepers of our epistemic resources, this paper shows how their epistemically conformist behaviour is responsible for the marginalisation and the ostracism of minoritarian perspectives. Because it clarifies key structural flaws and weaknesses of current AI design, this paper helps make headway in critical discussion of current AI technologies. And because it forges new theoretical tools to understand forms of epistemic oppression, this paper also contributes to the advancement of feminist theorisation.

Phenomenological Approach to Legal Epistemic Injustice

Injustices in legal contexts are widespread, yet we usually tend to think of them through a social lens. The study of epistemic injustices increases the resolution of this lens; it identifies how we wrong others as "knowers." In this paper, I propose that the tradition of phenomenology may be invoked to describe and identify instances of epistemic injustice in legal contexts. In order to justify this claim, I establish a phenomenological methodology predicated on the synthesis of two ideas: (1) the phenomenological recognition of the Other, and (2) society's duty to endow its members with an epistemic sphere of action.

Epistemic Injustice and Digital Disinformation: Addressing Knowledge Inequities in the Digital Age

Epistemic Injustice and Digital Disinformation: Addressing Knowledge Inequities in the Digital Age

Examining (in)justice, environmental activism and indigenous knowledge systems in the Indian film Kantara (Mystical Forest)

AbstractThe acquisition of knowledge encompasses various dimensions that should be consolidated to facilitate a comprehensive and holistic advancement of its trajectory. In this context, the article explores the film Kantara: A Legend (Shetty in Kantara: a legend [film], Hombale Films, 2022), a Kannada-language production from India and its significance in highlighting the importance of indigenous knowledge systems, local customs, demigods and the sacredness attributed to the forest. The article explicates the marginalization of these knowledge systems and the community’s vulnerability to epistemic and environmental injustices. Additionally, the article highlights the importance of the sacredness of their land and the community’s engagement in activism. The study concludes by examining how a film such as Kantara serves as a means to disseminate the notion of environmental activism to a wide audience.

From vulnerable subjects to research partners: a critical policy analysis of biomedical research ethics guidelines and regulations

Over the last three quarters of a century, international guidelines and regulations have undergone significant changes in how children are problematised as participants in biomedical research. While early guidelines enacted children as vulnerable subjects with diminished autonomy and in need of special protection, beginning in the early 2000s, international regulatory frameworks defined the paediatric population as vulnerable due to unaddressed public health needs. More recently, ethical recommendations have promoted the active engagement of minors as research partners. In this paper, I adopt a post-structuralist approach to policy analysis to examine deep-seated assumptions and presuppositions underlying the changes in the problematisation of children as biomedical research participants over time. While biomedical research ethics focuses on the autonomy and vulnerability of minors, ethical guidelines are situated in specific sociocultural contexts, shaped, among other things, by contingent public health needs and changing conceptions of the value of research and science for society. In the process, I demonstrate the challenge of moving away from an approach that in taking adults as the model overshadows the complexity of children’s lived experiences as well as their personal, cultural, and social lives. The lack of acknowledgement of this complexity makes children vulnerable to epistemic injustice, which is particularly crucial to address in public involvement initiatives.

You're Not Really Black, You're Not Really White

The distinctive experiences of multiracial people have been underexplored in philosophy. For instance, it is not uncommon for a multiracial person to anticipate or encounter racial denials. A racial denial occurs when a person’s assertion of their racial identity, e.g. “I am Black,” is challenged or called into doubt. While monoracial individuals can generally assert their race without being challenged (e.g. “I am Black” or “I am White”), a multiracial person may be met with the rejoinder, “You aren’t really Black” or “You aren’t really White.” Utilizing Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice, this essay argues that some racial denials arise because our existing racial vocabulary has gaps, and that these gaps can be traced to unjust origins. Ultimately, this essay’s aim is threefold. First, it aims to understand the nature of racial denials. Second, it demonstrates that attending to the lives multiracial people can yield important insights into race and epistemic injustice. Third, by focusing on multiracial experience, this essay aims to redress — in a limited way — the marginalization of multiracial lives within philosophical theory.

Language as a Source of Epistemic Injustice in Organisations

AbstractAlthough there is now a substantial body of literature exploring the effects of language diversity in international management contexts, little attention has been paid to the ethical dimensions of language diversity at work. This conceptual paper draws on the concept of epistemic injustice in order to explore how language, and in particular corporate language policies, may act as a source of epistemic injustice within the workplace. It demonstrates how language competence affects credibility judgements about a speaker, and also considers how corporate language policies can create situations of hermeneutic injustice, in which marginalised groups are denied the vocabularies to understand their own experiences. Finally, ways in which such epistemic harms can be reduced are discussed, and the possibilities for management education to create epistemically responsible managers are highlighted.

Responsible assessment of what research? Beware of epistemic diversity!

Schönbrodt et al. (2022) and Gärtner et al. (2022) aim to outline in the target articles why and how research assessment could be improved in psychological science in accordance with DORA, resulting in a focus on abandoning the impact factor as an indicator for research quality and aligning assessment with methodological rigor and open science practices. However, I argue that their attempt is guided by a rather narrow statistical and quantitative understanding of knowledge production in psychological science. Consequently, the authors neglect the epistemic diversity within psychological science, leading to the potential danger of committing epistemic injustice. Hence, the criteria they introduce for research assessment might be appropriate for some approaches to knowledge production; it could, however, neglect or systematically disadvantage others. Furthermore, I claim that the authors lack some epistemic (intellectual) humility about their proposal. Further information is required regarding when and for which approaches their proposal is appropriate and, maybe even more importantly, when and where it is not. Similarly, a lot of the proposed improvements of the reform movement, like the one introduced in the target articles, are probably nothing more than trial and error due to a lack of investigation of their epistemic usefulness and understanding of underlying mechanisms and theories. Finally, I argue that with more awareness about epistemic diversity in psychological science in combination with more epistemic (intellectual) humility, the danger of epistemic injustice could be attenuated.

Hypocrisy and Epistemic Injustice

AbstractIn this article I argue that we should understand some forms of hypocritical behaviour in terms of epistemic injustice; a type of injustice in which a person is wronged in their capacity as a knower. If each of us has an interest in knowing what morality requires of us, this can be undermined when hypocritical behaviour distorts our perception of the moral landscape by misrepresenting the demandingness of putative moral obligations. This suggests that a complete theory of the wrongness of hypocrisy must account for hypocrisy as epistemic injustice.

Injustice by design

ABSTRACT Systemic epistemic failings in institutions are often explained through settler epistemologies and settler colonial frameworks that both obscure and reproduce the conditions necessary for those failings to endure. What is never questioned in the standard picture of institutional epistemic injustice is the implicit origin myth of an ‘institutional big bang’ that spawned many modern social institutions out of presumably noble orienting goals for a well-functioning society in democratic nation-states. We are concerned with the functional outcomes of institutions in settler colonial societies, and how these outcomes consistently undermine whitewashed narratives of any inherent institutional design allegedly aimed at promoting testimonial justice in settler colonial societies. Institutions are built to target and maintain a status quo, especially (but not only) when they are charged with securing part of the social order or fabric of settler colonial societies. We will illustrate this concern through a discussion of various functional outcomes of the U.S. institution of asylum using Shannon Speed’s (2019. Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State. The University of North Carolina Press) analysis of the violence Indigenous women migrants from Latin America experience within the complex administrative web of U.S. migration and asylum systems.

Sexuality education for disabled children and youth in Ontario, Canada: Addressing epistemic injustice through school‐based sexuality education

AbstractWhile conversations pertaining to school‐based sexuality education are becoming more prominent, the experiences of disabled children and youth are still under‐discussed in research. Despite disabled childhood studies emerging as a field of inquiry, there is still a lack of critical conversation pertaining to disabled students' sexuality education within their respective schooling. This article draws from Fricker's theory of epistemic injustice to describe some of the ethical questions that arise in the denial of disabled children and youth's access to sexuality education in school contexts. By engaging with relevant literature on sexuality education and disabled students in schooling, this article puts forward that the continual exclusion of disabled students from accessing school‐based sexuality education promotes a form of epistemic injustice and silencing of the voices, perspectives and experiences of disabled students.

Misunderstanding the Ngen Kintuantü: a study from the legal pluralism of water rights in the conflict around Statkraft’s hydroelectric power plants on the Pilmaiquén River, Futawillimapu, Chile

This paper draws analytical attention to the debates on legal pluralism to understand Mapuche-Williche expressions of water rights in southern Chile in the context of Chile’s environmental institutions, based on a case study of the long-standing conflict over the hydroelectric power plants developed by the Norwegian state-owned company Statkraft on the Pilmaiquén River. The analysis focuses on the hermeneutical problems that emerge from the process through which the Chilean environmental institutions translated the dense cosmogony of the Mapuche-Williche communities around the Pilmaiquén River during the environmental assessment of the Osorno Hydroelectric Power Plant, through the category of a “site of cultural significance”, and the impacts that this process has had over time. I argue that, although the category of site of cultural significance made the meaning of water in the normative world of the Mapuche-Williche communities of this territory commensurable, understandable, and partially comparable, it deprived it of its complex meanings, giving rise to various equivocations that imply forms of epistemic injustice of a hermeneutic type.

Ontological relativity and conceptual analysis as theoretical frameworks for epistemic injustice: Exploring applications

AbstractThis article introduces a novel theoretical framework for addressing epistemic injustice—a phenomenon where certain groups or individuals are systematically excluded from knowledge creation and dissemination processes—by employing ontological relativity and conceptual analysis. “Ontological relativity” refers to a philosophical perspective that posits our understanding of reality as being shaped by our toolbox of concepts, categories, language, and social practices; “conceptual analysis” is a method of inquiry that involves the rigorous examination and deconstruction of a particular concept or set of concepts in order to uncover their constituent elements, relationships, and underlying assumptions. To exemplify the effectiveness of the ontology‐based approach, two paradigmatic applications are explored: (a) educational practices and (b) clinical practice and access to health care. Through the presentation of these applications and the step‐by‐step illustration of the applied methodology, the aim of the article is to showcase the efficacy of ontology in tackling epistemic injustices, suggesting innovative paths for future research in this domain.

Cultural Awareness of Intersex in Malta: Invisibility, Stigma and Epistemic Injustice

In 2015, Malta introduced ground-breaking legal reform designed to protect the bodily integrity of intersex infants in Malta. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with healthcare professionals, lawyers, policy-makers and advocates, this article considers the extent to which this reform has improved the cultural visibility and recognition of intersex people in Malta. Engaging with literature on epistemic injustice, this article provides new evidence for a cultural silence around intersex bodies that operates not only at a level of public knowledge but also at the individual and institutional levels. Our findings relate to three categories of visibility: political, cultural and medical. While the political visibility of intersex was an important factor in the introduction and shape of law reform in Malta, our respondents felt that the legislation had had very little effect on public understandings and familiarity with intersex issues. Moreover, respondents felt that many intersex people would be unlikely to know that they were intersex due to the limited conceptual and critical resources available to them: issues such as stigma and shame further encourage the epistemic silencing of intersex issues. The lack of cultural and medical visibility has significantly limited both the intended and hoped-for effect of the legislation. The article considers the broader implications of these results beyond Malta for those seeking to use the law to improve the lived experiences of intersex people.