Lost in translation

Social computing scholars have long known that people do not interact with knowledge in straightforward ways, especially in digital environments. While policies around knowledge are essential for targeting misinformation, they are value-laden; in choosing how to present information, we undermine non-traditional, often non-Western, ways of knowing. Epistemic injustice is the systemic exclusion of certain people and methods from the knowledge canon. Epistemic injustice chips away at one's testimony and vocabulary until they are stripped of their due right to know and understand. In this paper, we articulate how epistemic injustice in sociotechnical applications leads to material harm. Inspired by a hybrid collaborative autoethnography of 14 CSCW practitioners, we present three cases of epistemic injustice in sociotechnical applications: online transgender healthcare, identity sensemaking on r/bisexual, and Indigenous ways of knowing on r/AskHistorians. We further explore signature tensions across our autoethnographic materials and relate them to previous CSCW research areas and personal non-technological experiences. We argue that epistemic injustice can serve as a unifying and intersectional lens for CSCW research by surfacing dimensions of epistemic community and power. Finally, we present a call to action of three changes the CSCW community should make to move toward its own goals of research justice. We call for CSCW researchers to center individual experiences, bolster communities, and remediate issues of epistemic power as a means towards epistemic justice. In sum, we recount, synthesize, and propose solutions for the various forms of epistemic injustice that CSCW sites of study---including CSCW itself---propagate.

Reflecting on the rapid growth of epistemic injustice scholarship, this article proposes an ‘active alignment account’ for relating epistemic and social justice. The account contains both critical and constructive elements. The critical aim of the article is to argue that debates about epistemic and social justice are commonly misaligned. A focus on epistemic injustice can distort social justice agendas and epistemic recognition can be actively turned against the material interests of epistemically recognized actors. The constructive aim of the article is to show that epistemic justice nonetheless remains central to many social justice agendas. Recognizing both distortions and centrality leads to the demand of ‘active alignment’ according to which epistemic justice needs to be proactively connected with material conditions of social justice.

This PhD by publication explores how ‘knowledges’ in social work research are authorized often to those who use and provide services. It draws together 11 publications, which are a mixture of sole and co authored peer reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and co authored publications for a range of charitable and public bodies both within the UK and Europe. The concept of ‘epistemic injustice’, is used to examine the connections between my published works. Stemming from the tradition of feminist philosophy, epistemic injustice is when the capacity to hear another’s testimony is diminished. With its focus on the interrelationship between hearing and being heard, epistemic justice has an under utilised value in social work practice and research. Building on the central themes of voice and justice, I argue that the discrediting of an individual testimony leads to individual and collective harm, as the opportunities for some to contribute to the common store of social meanings are diminished, including asylum seeking young people, victim and survivors of child sexual exploitation, child sexual abuse and child trafficking. My published works are examined as case studies to consider which and whose knowledge is taken seriously and why. I considers the harms done through the process of being discredited; both to the individual (their testimony and their identity –as sense of self is shaped by these negative associations) and to a developing knowledge (as accounts are missed and the potential growth of connections (be they defeating, justifying or inferential) is lost. Although all knowledge is partial and co-produced, I consider the obligation to make relevant efforts to understand how the world looks from different points of view, especially those who use and provide services.

This conceptual article critically examines the pervasive issue of epistemic injustice within educational settings. Drawing from critical theory and social justice frameworks, this paper aims to uncover and critically analyse the various forms of epistemic injustice in education settings, focusing on marginalised and underrepresented groups. Through lensing within the transformative worldview and employing conceptual analysis to make sense of the arguments, this paper explores how epistemic injustices manifest through biased curriculum design, pedagogical approaches, and assessment methods. The article argues the detrimental impact of epistemic injustice on marginalised students. Additionally, it evaluates strategies and interventions to address epistemic injustice in education, such as inclusive pedagogical practices, curriculum reforms, and the promotion of diverse perspectives in knowledge systems. I propose alternative approaches for creating inclusive learning environments towards dismantling epistemic injustice. This paper contributes to the scholarly discourse on epistemic justice, calling for the transformation of educational practices and policies to promote equity, inclusion, and the recognition of diverse knowledge and experiences, inspiring stakeholders to actively work towards achieving epistemic justice for all students.

I shall first briefly revisit the broad idea of ‘epistemic injustice’, explaining how it can take either distributive or discriminatory form, in order to put the concepts of ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ in place. In previous work I have explored how the wrong of both kinds of epistemic injustice has both an ethical and an epistemic significance—someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. But my present aim is to show that this wrong can also have a political significance in relation to non-domination, and so to freedom. While it is only the republican conception of political freedom that presents nondomination as constitutive of freedom, I shall argue that non-domination is best understood as a thoroughly generic liberal ideal of freedom to which even negative libertarians are implicitly committed, for non-domination is negative liberty as of right—secured non-interference. Crucially on this conception, non-domination requires that the citizen can contest interferences. Pettit specifies three conditions of contestation, each of which protects against a salient risk of the would-be contester not getting a ‘proper hearing’. But I shall argue that missing from this list is anything to protect against a fourth salient threat: the threat that either kind of epistemic injustice might disable contestation by way of an unjust deflation of either credibility or intelligibility. Thus we see that both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice can render a would-be contester dominated. Epistemic justice is thereby revealed as a constitutive condition of non-domination, and thus of a central liberal political ideal of freedom.

Pathocentric epistemic injustice is a form of epistemic injustice that affects ill persons. In this paper I deal with pathocentric epistemic injustice in psychiatry that impacts persons with psychiatric conditions. There are several sources of such epistemic injustice, ranging from the agential level to the structural, institutional and even to the theoretical level of healthcare and medicine. In this paper I explore theoretical conceptions as sources of pathocentric epistemic injustice in psychiatry. Specifically, I focus on the notion that the naturalistic conception of health is an epistemically unjust theoretical conception when it exclusively privileges the epistemic resources of biomedical sciences. Supposing this claim is correct, this paper tries to offer a way of ameliorating the pathocentric epistemic injustice caused by the naturalistic conception of health. I argue that the first step of the ameliorative project lies in emphasis and acknowledgement of the concepts that embody the patient perspective, such as harm, well-being and suffering. While these concepts are found in the theoretical sphere of psychiatry, they are underdeveloped and lack proper attention. Furthermore, while elaborating on these concepts is necessary, it is not sufficient for epistemic justice in psychiatry. Thus, I introduce the idea of epistemic pillars of psychiatry - scientific research, clinical work and patient's perspective. Epistemic justice in psychiatry does not rely on any one these elements, rather it rests on the collaboration, compromise and mutual recognition of these spheres. It lies in harmony of the three pillars of psychiatry, rather than in either element being the dominant one.

Originally conceptualized by the philosopher, Miranda Fricker, epistemic injustice—unfair treatment of individuals and groups in knowledge‐related and communicative practices—is increasingly being employed to delineate individual and collective injustice in healthcare, information sciences, education and sustainable development. Embedded in many other forms of social injustice and inequality, epistemic injustice is a particularly serious problem for sustainable development, undermining the global community's ability to deal with ‘wicked’ problems. Building on the more conceptually developed, philosophical framework of epistemic injustice and recent research from other fields, this article develops a holistic action‐oriented framework of epistemic justice, namely fair treatment in knowledge‐related and communicative practices, for sustainable development and beyond. It also adds to the current framework of individual and collective injustice by including a range of new insights on structural and systemic epistemic injustice, such as linguistic injustice and epistemicide.

The global shortage of qualified mental health professionals has necessitated task-shifting models such as Problem Management Plus to treat mental health conditions in low-resource and humanitarian contexts such as the Syrian conflict. The required clinical supervision to support task-shifting is often challenging to source, requiring cross-cultural supervision, which involves culturally distinct supervisors from outside the context supporting local/national Mental Health and Psychosocial Support practitioners. To address the gap in research on cross-cultural supervision in humanitarian settings, we interviewed Australian and Syrian co-supervisors and Syrian supervisees in our Caring for Carers program. Decolonising practices and cultural safety were explored through an epistemic injustice lens. We found that epistemic justice was facilitated through epistemic respect: cultural humility in Australian supervisors and the role of Syrian supervisors as cultural mediators. Epistemic injustice was reinforced through accreditation disparities between Australian supervisors and supervisees and misalignment between supervisors’ contextual inexperience and use of a reflective approach, and practitioner needs. In particular, interviewees continuously emphasised gaps in training to treat severe mental health conditions, which Problem Management Plus and supervision cannot address. It is recommended that future programs facilitate epistemic justice, responding to practitioner learning needs through supervision–training hybrid models and access to formal training and accreditation.

The idea of draws together three branches of philosophy - political philosophy, ethics, and epistemology - to consider how epistemic practices and institutions may be deployed and structured in ways that are simultaneously infelicitous toward certain epistemic values (such as truth, aptness, and understanding) and unjust with regard to particular knowers. This chapter seeks to convey knowledge concerning the varieties of epistemic injustice does, by definition, engage in epistemic activity. It provides some initial examples of epistemic injustices so that readers may begin to understand the grammar of the term 'epistemic injustice' for future and new uses. The chapter then presents four lenses with which to think about varieties of epistemic injustice. It also provides readers a sense of some ways epistemic injustices can take shape without foreclosing the possibility of thinking about epistemic injustices along other trajectories, and especially along trajectories that may be more readily noticed by those who are differently located than the author.

One of the problems of contemporary epistemology, the exploration of which can contribute to a fuller understanding of cognition as both an individual and collective process, is epistemic injustice. It is defined as the denial of epistemic trust to the Other, grounded in explicit and implicit identity biases existing in society. The author believes that the issue of epistemic injustice extends beyond the scope of investigating social injustice in general, serving as a serious obstacle to the achievement of epistemic values by an individual and society as a whole. The impact of this phenomenon on human cognitive activity is due to the actual totality of communicative knowledge or testimonial knowledge. Testimonial knowledge is obtained not through direct interaction with objects, but rather through the beliefs held by other subjects about these objects. The ideal of a fully self-sufficient epistemic agent, i.e. the ideal of epistemic autarky, seems to the author to be unrealistic and unattainable, since a person cannot fully cognize the world around him/her or even himself/herself alone. The codependency of individuals in the cognitive process emerges as the main prerequisite not only for negative socio-political implications but also for the epistemic consequences of epistemic injustice. From the author’s point of view, epistemic injustice can be opposed not by unprejudicedness, but by such epistemic virtues as epistemic justice (Miranda Fricker) and proper epistemic trust (Benjamin McCraw). Context sensitivity is seen as an important element of these virtues, accompanied by the ability to revise and question certain criteria underlying trust in others as knowers and epistemic agents. The results of investigations related to these virtues can address practical problems and challenges within such fields of knowledge and practice as medicine and health care.

Analyzing social wrongs

The purpose of this case study is to examine if and how working with homework in general and translanguaging homework (TLH) in particular can support collaboration between home and school. Our aim is also to find out if TLH provides the ground for teachers and parents of migrant background to feel and act as epistemic subjects, i.e., as participants whose knowledge is given credibility. Prior research has shown the importance of collaboration between home and school. However, for migrant parents, collaboration has often proved to be problematic and unequal, due to for example language barriers. Research has shown that translanguaging bridges such problems. How the implementation of translanguaging is appreciated by parents and teachers has scarcely been researched. Neither has collaboration through TLH been studied regarding how they perceive each other as epistemic subjects. In this study, thematic content analysis has been applied on interview data with parents and teachers. The epistemic (in)justice framework has then been used to discuss the found themes in their answers. The findings show that teachers’ and parents’ perceptions of working with TLH differs. Some parents perceive that TLH enhances their chances to collaborate with school as epistemic subjects. Conversely, TLH may obscure other parents’ possibilities to collaborate, thus creating epistemic injustice. Lastly, TLH might be ignored altogether by some parents, thus neither enhancing collaboration nor creating epistemic justice. Concludingly, in order for TLH to work, reciprocal sensitive listening to each other, from both the teachers’ and the parents’ side, is important, and teachers need to be aware of the students’ family situation regarding their language choices and language use.

Epistemic injustice is inherently connected to epistemic power and epistemic agency: understanding and addressing the former allows us to better understand and address the latter, and vice versa. Yet, despite vast and rich discussions of epistemic injustice, which often invoke the notions of epistemic power and epistemic agency, both notions remain undertheorized and hence largely elusive. This book offers a systematic account of epistemic power and agency by turning to the dynamics of epistemic injustice—that is, the many forms epistemic injustice can take, the different sites and mechanisms through which it operates, and the various transformations consequently required to cultivate greater epistemic justice. Adopting standpoint theory both as a theory and as a methodology, the book focuses on several pressing social questions, such as deliberative impasses in divided societies, colonial memory, academic migration, the underrepresentation of members of non-dominant groups in certain fields, and the marginalization of minoritized minds, such as intellectually disabled people and Autistics. By analyzing these social questions through the lens of the dynamics of epistemic injustice, the book develops a systematic account of epistemic power and agency.

This paper is a reflection on my academic journey with regards to the ethico-political and methodological challenges in researching the ‘Other(s)’. In trying to rethink the narration of the Partition-induced forced migration (1947–1971) through the intersecting lenses of caste, gender, labour and region, I took the intersectional category of lowered caste (Dalit-Bahujan), refugee women, located in the non-metropolitan city of Asansol in West Bengal, as my protagonists. For the exercise, the question that became ethically and methodologically crucial was: How can an academic enterprise by a (part) upper(ed) caste (Savarna) woman, that is enabled by the consumption of devalued, feminized labour of women, mostly from lowered caste (Dalit-Bahujan) groups, seek to understand such lives? I argue that imposing Brahmanical frames of interpretation – born out of caste privilege of the feminist author – to narrate such lives is to commit epistemic injustice. But to achieve epistemic justice, a simplistic deployment of self-reflexivity and empathy is not enough. Taking a relational approach – one that posits not only the upper(ed) and lowered caste femininity as co-constituted but also the researcher-researched relationship and their conceptual worlds as such – however, may provide for possibilities of greater epistemic justice and decolonization of knowledge.

Whether in the form of testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, or contributory injustice, epistemic injustice is characterised as an injustice rather than simply an epistemic harm because it is often motivated by an identity prejudice and exacerbates existing social disadvantages and inequalities. I argue that epistemic injustice can also be utilised against some members of privileged social identity groups in order to preserve the dominant status of the group as a whole. As a case study, I analyse how the harm to male victims of sexual violence is aggravated by the failure of the law to recognise the rape of men as a crime and the failure of other people to recognise the testimony of male rape victims as credible. Analysing shifts in the legal concept of rape and examples from Project Unbreakable, I uncover how these failures of recognition undermine the victims’ status as legal, moral, and epistemic subjects and inflict epistemic injustice against them.