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Academia is the place where knowledge is produced and distributed. In theory, this production and distribution should be equitable for all those seeking to be educated or devote themselves to teaching; however, some variables affect the experience of educators, teachers, educational staff, researchers, theorists, and other members of the academic community. To understand these factors of imbalance, one must introduce the concept of epistemic justice.
What is epistemic justice? Is an area that studies the equality of opportunities in access to education, in the distribution of resources, content, and educational discourse; as well, it considers the faculty and the credibility of people belonging to the academic community. When any of these variables are unbalanced, we talk about epistemic injustice.
The term was coined in 2007 by the English philosopher Miranda Fricker, who argues that in concept, it is an injustice committed explicitly against a person’s capacity for knowledge or their testimony. According to Fricker, there are two types of epistemic injustice, namely, testimonial and hermeneutic. But what does each mean, and how does each influence the dynamics of academia?
Testimonial epistemic injustice: losing credibility
This kind of injustice is directly related to the credibility of a person’s discourse. It happens when a person is not considered or not taken seriously because of prejudice. A simple way of understanding testimonial epistemic justice would be to refer to a crime that a person of color has witnessed, and the authorities did not take the witness’s story seriously because of racial prejudice. How does this example of social imbalance apply to academia?
There are many examples where this imbalance is seen nullifying the knowledge and the contributions of minority groups in the academic, scientific, humanist, educational, and artistic communities. One example is found in the work of Rosalind Franklin, which was used to discover the basic structure of DNA. Still, she was not given the same weight of recognition or scientific credibility as Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins. Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the pulsars, an achievement that was attributed to her supervisor, Zelda Fitzgerald, who was only known through the publications of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald; she stole from Burnell’s work to nurture hers.
Nowadays, cases of epistemic injustice are less tragic, but they still keep happening. In previous articles, we mentioned how writer Rebecca Solnit was not paid enough attention by an interlocutor to realize she was the author of her own book; this happened in 2012. In 2016, a Twitter user wanted to lecture a female NASA astronaut about physics in space. In 2007 at the Emmys, the writer and comedian Mindy Kaling was excluded from the list of producers of The Office, nominated that year. Kaling had to write an essay about her contributions to the creative team and include statements from the other producers to be considered.
All these stories about minimizing and discrediting the work of women are supported by a structure that reinforces the idea that it is not credible for people in this profile (women) to discover the DNA chain, to walk in space, or write books or television series worthy of awards. There is disbelief about their knowledge and skills and, therefore, about the testimony that their work represents.
Hermeneutic epistemic injustice: lost in translation
Hermeneutic injustice is directly related to the interpretation of ideas, concepts, and events. It happens when there are no cognitive and linguistic resources to understand one’s own or others’ experiences or when these benefits are denied to someone to understand their experiences.
An example of understanding how hermeneutic epistemic injustice works is the problem of passive racism in universities and workplaces. Until the term “social code” came up, there was no way to frame and understand the experiences of people of color in educational and workspaces. The social code consists of elements of conduct, verbal and non-verbal language, tone of voice, and other characteristic variables that reflect the cultural and personal story of a person. When these stories do not belong nor tie with those of the dominant group, the minority group is urged to make a change of code to fit in.
“The change in social code involves alternating between languages, using different registers of tone, making a dialectical change,” explains Dr. Kimberly Harden, a professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Seattle. This suppression of cultural diversity in academia and the workplace implies a form of veiled and persistent passive discrimination, which had not been factored until the terms describing it was generated, and those words were admitted into the common lexicon.
Hermeneutic epistemic injustice was present in the days when academicians had these experiences and lacked the resources to understand, explain, and communicate them. It could also be said that there are still present the cases of people who have had similar experiences but have not been in contact with the content that describes the situation of passive discrimination to which they are subject.
This type of epistemic injustice is more complex and profound because it not only affects people; instead, it harms the way we construct perception, knowledge, and language, making it much more persistent and challenging to eradicate.
How to fight epistemic injustice?
Epistemic injustice is a very complex problem; there are no simple remedies for a mechanism that goes so deep that it influences our perception and construction of knowledge, but we can chart a path to begin to unravel the elements that weave it.
Miranda Fricker speaks publicly about one of the practices for dismantling and reducing epistemic injustice on the social level. Fricker, a Presidential Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, explained in a presentation that the key element to analyze is freedom of expression. According to her, freedom of speech is not only the inalienable right to discourse, but it also extends to the validation of that discourse in the process of producing knowledge through it.
“For the message of someone to be heard, one must hear it without prejudice; for the basis of one piece of knowledge to pass through and be transmitted, it needs to be heard without punishment and fully understood in its meaning,” argues Fricker, who adds that the source of the problem is not having that joint base. Without this understanding, the thoughts of that perso
n, as well as her voice and experiences, can be externalized, but they will not pass to the forum where knowledge is produced. In this context, the work to be done to reduce instances of epistemic injustice is not something that is in the faculty of the persons affected by this problem; it must be done by those who exercise the injustice.
If prejudice is where this cognitive and social dynamic starts, what is necessary is to analyze the sources of bias and the mechanisms that reinforce it. Only in this way will the academic and scientific community be capable of integrating the knowledge produced by social groups who live under this prejudice into the general repository.
By having the capacity to contribute to the production of knowledge and the construction of the general perception of the world, social groups that are subject to epistemic injustice will have the basis to challenge the conditions that put them at a social and epistemic disadvantage against the dominant groups. It is not a final solution, as Fricker argues; the problem is too complex to be addressed by a single answer, but it is a necessary step to start the process that will lead us to a balance in the way we generate knowledge and forge our worldview through what we know.
Disclaimer: This is an article of opinion. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the official opinions, points of view, and policies of Tecnológico de Monterrey.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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