By Sarah Cummings, Charles Dhewa, Gladys Kemboi, Stacey Young and Mike Powell.
Can you imagine that you are in a situation where no-one listens to you or believes what you have to say? And the reason they are not listening or believing is because of your race or your gender or where you come from or your accent, or an intersectional combination of all four?
Or imagine that the knowledge of your community is seen as worthless and ignored, even when the community will suffer most when efforts to change it go awry?
This phenomenon is called epistemic injustice. Originally elaborated by social philosopher Miranda Fricker (2007), epistemic (or knowledge-related) injustice comprises unfair treatment in which the voices, experiences and solutions of marginalized individuals, communities and societies are ignored. We consider that it poses an existential threat to individuals and communities. As the author, Rebecca Solnit (2017) wrote:
“If our voices are essential aspects of our humanity, to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanized or excluded from one’s humanity.”
Epistemic justice
Based on an extensive literature review of epistemic injustice from many academic fields, we have recently developed a framework of epistemic justice, as shown in the figure below, to better signpost the way towards more just knowledge practices. We have done this not only because it will increase fairness and justice as it relates to knowledge but also because listening and valuing the knowledge of all stakeholders will lead to better knowledge and more effective change processes. The framework has three components: individual/collective, structural and systemic.
Most directly relevant to individuals and collective groups is counteracting intersectional identity prejudice on the part of the hearer. Testimonial justice comprises giving equal credibility to testimony without identity prejudice on the hearer’s part.
Secondly, ‘epistemic justice of the interpretative burden’ is where the interpretive burden is shared across epistemic actors, rather than being placed unfairly on marginalised groups.
Structural epistemic justice comprises two main interlinked concepts, hermeneutic justice and network justice. Hermeneutic justice provides socially disadvantaged groups with tools and terminologies to access and use knowledge, whilst requiring researchers to equip themselves to work with unfamiliar concepts. It combats hermeneutical marginalisation, broadening society’s interpretative resources, and emphasising the importance of participation and ‘reflexive critical sensitivity’ where listeners recognize that a speaker’s intelligibility may be affected by collective understanding gaps.
Network justice involves access to helpful epistemic peers, countering the deprivation of access seen in epistemic network injustice.
Systemic epistemic justice involves linguistic justice, decolonization of knowledge systems, and curricula justice. Linguistic justice involves identifying and counteracting epistemic linguistic biases, fostering metalinguistic awareness, and supporting speakers beyond mainstream ‘international’ languages.
Decolonization of knowledge systems seeks to identify and dismantle coloniality in patterns of knowledge production and distribution, including their institutional and commercial arrangements. In the process, it promotes intersectional epistemologies, new discourses, and practices that value local knowledge. These new discourses and practices involve endogeneity, namely a process of re-centring and localising aesthetic and political structures. For example, the work of one of us (Charles Dhewa) both explores and demonstrates the need for increased recognition of the role of indigenous markets in Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa.
Curricula justice advocates for inclusive and contextually relevant educational and research content.
Epistemic justice and transdisciplinary research
Our framework for epistemic justice can enable successful transdisciplinary research. At the individual/collective level, it involves the voices of stakeholders being heard and listened to, with more powerful actors defending the voices of the marginalized.
At the structural level, it involves marginalized groups having the cognitive tools and terminologies to access and communicate knowledge, supported by their participation in networks.
At a systemic level, it involves new approaches to language and curricula which facilitate access to knowledge and education, as well as the decolonization of knowledge systems to create appropriate institutional, management and distribution arrangements to support a new and more open research practice.
Concluding questions
Does our framework resonate with your work? Are there additional issues that you would cover? Can you imagine a situation in which you might be able to use the framework of epistemic justice yourself?
To find out more:
Cummings, S., Dhewa, C., Kemboi, G. and Young, S. (2023). Doing epistemic justice in sustainable development: Applying the philosophical concept of epistemic injustice to the real world. Sustainable Development, 31, 3: 1965–1977. (Online – open access) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.2497
This article provides sources for our work.
References:
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic justice: Power and the politics of knowledge. Oxford University Press: Oxford, United Kingdom.
Solnit, R. (2017). Silence and powerlessness go hand in hand – women’s voices must be heard. The Guardian (8 March 2017). (Online): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/08/silence-powerlessness-womens-voices-rebecca-solnit. (The article is an extract from Rebecca Solnit’s book, The Mother of All Questions.)
Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Generative artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution. (For i2Insights policy on generative artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)
Sarah Cummings PhD aims to have a positive social impact by changing policies, practices and understanding which reduce knowledge-related inequalities. She currently works at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands as PhD coordinator and as a consultant at her own company, Knowledge Ecologist. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Knowledge Management for Development Journal and co-leader of the KM4Dev community of practice
Charles Dhewa MPhil is a knowledge broker and knowledge management specialist in agriculture and rural development. Based in Harare, Zimbabwe, he is the Chief Executive Officer of Knowledge Transfer Africa which he founded in 2006 after realizing that agricultural value chain actors needed knowledge brokering services.
Gladys Kemboi MSc is a global knowledge manager and communities of practice leader with over 10 years of knowledge management experience. She leads and executes knowledge management strategies, develops and improves knowledge management processes, tools and technologies, and builds sustainable communities of practice to meet evolving needs at global and local level. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, USA.
Stacey Young PhD is the US Agency for International Development’s first Chief Knowledge Officer, leading agency-wide knowledge and learning approaches. She also co-chairs the Multi-Donor Learning Partnership of 11 major donor organizations working to advance organizational learning and knowledge management in international development. She is based in Washington DC, USA.
Mike Powell is an independent consultant and researcher working on combining development practice and information management in a forthcoming book “Challenging Ignorance”. He is based in Alnwick, UK.
Sarah, Charles, Gladys, Stacey, and Mike,
It’s great to see your framework of epistemic justice extended to transdisciplinary research.
Some thoughts:
1. As I’ve raised previously, the coloniality of knowledge doesn’t only have its roots in the colonial past. It also has its roots in the modern geopolitical hegemony that has arisen since the Second World War, where the United States and its allies have been and are increasingly seeking to impose their political ideologies and values on other nations.
2. At the systemic level, the institutional aspect is critical. Researchers cannot expect to achieve epistemic justice in their transdisciplinary research arrangements if epistemic justice is not also embedded into all aspects of the operations of their research institutions.
3. For our own community, the global knowledge management (KM) community, to legitimately and credibly advocate for epistemic justice, then we need to be actively practicing it and reinforcing it ourselves. However, this is not currently the case, with for example KM approaches developed in a narrow Euro-American context seen as being superior to local ways of knowing about knowing, and knowledge-related expertise from outside KM organization power structures regarded as illegitimate and so excluded. Very significant changes need to made in this regard.
Bruce Boyes.
Dear colleagues, thank you for the excellent analytical work!
With your permission, I will philosophize a little on this topic.
It seemed to me that it was fundamentally important to clarify:
1. The content of the term “marginalized people, communities and societies”.
2. What does it mean that the voices, experiences and decisions of “marginalized people, communities and societies” are ignored?
Let me remind you that one of the directions of transdisciplinarity is called “the second type of knowledge acquisition (Mode-2). This direction is based precisely on the combination of academic knowledge and practical knowledge of people who are not related to academic science. Consequently, “marginalized people” whose voices, experiences and decisions are ignored by representatives of academic and professional communities may have six or more analogues:
• Carriers of knowledge that appear at the boundaries of epochs. For example, an absolutely marginalized group of early Christians in the first decades of the New Era.
• Bearers of knowledge, an emerging scientific field. For example, a marginalized group of the first transdisciplinarians in the first decades of the initial ideas of transdisciplinarity;
• Bearers of knowledge of a new scientific discipline, which is formed on an alternative view of the object of disciplinary research. For example, a marginalized group of the first nuclear physicists who claim that it is possible to obtain enormous energy from the almost empty space of the atomic nucleus;
• Bearers of knowledge related to a different worldview paradigm. For example, a marginalized group of people who insist that the movement and transformation of matter is the result of the “hands of God”;
• Bearers of rational knowledge, the so-called teachers of humanity. For example, a marginalized group of people who have shaped this knowledge into popular near-scientific areas such as Agni Yoga;
• Bearers of irrational knowledge that cannot be expressed in concepts, in a systemically ordered form and are not subject to logical justification. For example, a marginalized group of exalted people.
I am not sure that some of the bearers of the above analogues, for objective and subjective reasons, will want to move from “marginalized groups” to groups to which the term “epistemic justice” applies. Perhaps you should clarify which “marginalized groups” epistemic justice should be applied to. It seemed to me that in this case, “epistemic justice” is able to transform from a “declarative term” into a “practically useful principle” that can significantly enhance the effectiveness of solving complex multifactorial problems of modern society. I hope these discussions will be of interest to you.
With respect.
Vladimir Mokiy
Dear Vladimir
Many thanks for your thoughtful comments! We have developed the framework as a way of approaching knowledge for international development, and are particularly using this framework as a way of signposting more just knowledge practices. For us, this largely relates to knowledge stakeholders who are often ignored in development projects where the importance of local and Indigenous knowledge, and multiple knowledges is sometimes reified and sometimes ignored, depending on trends and fashions. With this framework, we aim to root these perspectives in a framework of justice. In our own work, we are very much concerned with the practical implications of such a framework and how it signposts more just knowledge practices. In a second article, we intend to show this.
Inviting my co-authors to respond if they wish to.
Kind regards
Sarah
Hello all. Yes your framework resonates well with me. I found very helpful your beginning section asking us to imagine when one’s individual or community’s knowledge and ways of knowing is ignored (based on social categorizations which are discriminatory). I found excellent your statement about trying to effect hermeneutic justice and also your statement about the importance of developing networks of peers. Your diagram also aptly depicted the various connections that you are elucidating. Thanks for this carefully thought out piece!
Dear Norma
Many thanks for engaging with our article and very glad to hear that it resonates with you.
Kind regards
Sarah Cummings