Epistemic Injustice in Practice

Abstract

Epistemic gives a name to experiences that we struggle to articulate due to the injuries of hegemonic speech. This normative grammar seeks to enable social philosophers and activists alike to name experiences of that have not been previously addressed as such. This includes experiences that we cannot make sense of because the society we live in does not provide a vocabulary to make them intelligible or because we are not entitled to give them a name due to our specific identity position, which supposedly disables us from judging matters objectively. By looking at in practice, this scholarly endeavor is aimed at making experiences of marginalized groups readable, pointing to hidden practices of power, and detecting silences of what is not on the agenda in public discourse - forms of domination and exclusion that a conventional vocabulary of social critique cannot grasp so easily and oftentimes is itself complicit in reproducing.The debate triggered by Miranda Flicker's pioneering monograph entitled Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007) has resulted in manifold layers of discussion. It is now time to investigate epistemic injustice in different realms of social life within contemporary societies. The aim is to examine how this normative grammar - stemming from social philosophy, critical race studies, and feminist epistemology - can be used to identify, investigate, and critique a range of injustices experienced by a variety of people(s). Reflecting on the workings of epistemic injustice promises to be a radical tool - if used, multiplied, and adapted to the needs and experiences of people in different cultural settings, social locations, and with divergent epistemological underpinnings of their respective life worlds. The vocabulary itself, hence, shall remain a permanent locus for a struggle over just representation.On a level of theorizing, it appears timely to ask: In which ways must the grammar of justice be adapted (and not merely extended or assimilated) in order to grasp a diversity of cases of harm? How can scholars, as well as activists, appropriate this vocabulary in order to express their non-hegemonic subject positions? In which ways can the theoretical debate around epistemic injustice be pluralized in order to account for a variety of cases without, however, getting blurred, voided of sense, thereby losing its critical force?In her 2007 monograph, Miranda Fricker bases her conception of on cases of race, class, and gender discrimination. She develops a conceptual vocabulary within justice theory that moves beyond the established frames of distributive accounts of economic disparities or political accounts of proceduralism at the institutional level. Moreover, Flicker's theory focuses on the level of representation and participation in knowledge production. She warns of two cases of injustice: First, testimonial injustice, according to which the testimonies of certain agents are not granted credibility due to their social identity status and prevalent negative stereotypes in society. People inhabiting such identity positions are made objects of knowledge formation rather than taken seriously as subjects of knowledge in their own right. As speakers, persons suffering from testimonial injustice, are invisible.Second, hermeneutical refers to cases in which a person can neither articulate nor adequately make sense of the harm experienced due to a hermeneutical gap between her linguistic means of expression and her lived demeaning experience. For example, we can only shame cases of sexual harassment if we can name them as such and if the concept is accepted by large parts of our society.As a remedy for testimonial injustice, Fricker suggests the intellectually- and ethically-demanding virtue of testimonial sensitivity, which takes into account the unfair disadvantages of marginalized groups in order to actively counteract marginalization and exclusion by means of careful listening. …