Chapter 2: Recognizing Epistemic Injustice
Heather Campbell, Lea Sansom, and Kathryn Holmes
Learning Objectives
By the end of the chapter, learners will be able to:
- Define epistemic injustice, including epistemicide
- Recognize how epistemic injustice influences everything we watch, read, listen to, and access, including academic research
- Consider how epistemic injustice impacts your field or discipline
Introduction
In Chapter 1, we learned that our positionality impacts the way we view and interact with the world. Our positionalities offer each of us a unique and valuable perspective. However, they are also tied to power and privilege, bringing some identities closer to dominant structures of influence while pushing others to the margins.
We will build on this in Chapter 2, exploring the concept of “epistemic injustice”, or the ways in which Canadian society privileges certain knowledge and perspectives, while other worldviews are overlooked or dismissed.
Recognizing epistemic injustice involves identifying the harmful biases embedded within the things we read, listen to, or watch. This can be difficult because sometimes bias is more evident in what we don’t see, rather than what we do.
Definition
The term “epistemic injustice” comes from epistemology, or the study of knowledge. We’ll explore these terms more below and in Chapter 2.
When people "undermine, undercut, disvalue, curtail, exclude, outright dismiss, or, in some cases, gaslight a person/or persons in their capacity as potential knowers" (Dunne, 2020).
A branch of philosophy that studies knowledge and belief. Within the context of knowledge justice, epistemology is often used to describe a person’s worldview, theory of knowledge, or way of knowing.
