Miranda Fricker Notre Dame Review of Epistemic Injustice
Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, past Miranda Fricker. New York: Oxford Academy Press. August 2007. ISBN: 9780198237907. 192 pages.
Author Note
Star Plaxton-Moore, Leo T. McCarthy Centre for Public Service and the Common Good, University of San Francisco.
Correspondence regarding this book review should be addressed to Star Plaxton-Moore, Managing director of Community-Engaged Learning, Leo T. McCarthy Middle for Public Service and the Common Expert, Academy of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco, CA 94117-1080. Phone: (415) 422-2156. Email: smoore3@usfca.edu
Since November 2018, my colleagues and I at the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good at the University of San Francisco take been working with a few long-time community partners to update our professional person development curriculum. Our efforts led recently to the launch of the Customs Partner Co-Educator Fellowship, a serial of six two-60 minutes workshops designed to deepen nonprofit staff members' understanding of customs-engaged learning and to develop practices for cultivating reciprocal partnerships and fostering students' civic learning. Every bit we moved through the program design process, we were committed to integrating customs voices into this fellowship, but we struggled to discover publications that emanated purely from community expertise. Though community partners have participated in some qualitative studies, their voices are ofttimes shared past researchers as brusk quotes to illustrate overarching themes (Bacon, 2002; Blouin & Perry, 2009; Cronley, Madden, & Davis, 2015; Sandy, 2007; Sandy & Kingdom of the netherlands, 2006; Tinkler, Tinkler, Hausman, & Tufo-Strouse, 2014; Worrall, 2007). In fact, we could only discover i peer-reviewed article authored past a community partner (Reyes, 2016). Is it truly the instance that so few resources reverberate the perspectives of those community-based wisdom-holders meant to be collaborators in the piece of work of community-engaged learning?
Knowing that peer-reviewed journals were designed equally competitive outlets for scholars to share their knowledge in a rigidly defined written format, we asked: What other resource might be more attainable for community partner voices to permeate the field of community date? At the McCarthy Center, our strategy for including community partner voices has involved inviting (and compensating) partners every bit guest lecturers, panelists, commission members, and contributors to outreach and orientation media. Even so, while nosotros have constitute a way to invite these voices into our institution, information technology seems that the broader field still fails to honour the reciprocal exchange of cognition needed to create new noesis with customs partners.
This item gap in the customs engagement literature highlights myriad questions that I have wrestled with in my fourteen years as a community engagement professional person, and I know many others are asking and attempting to answer similar questions. Indeed, I believe it is our responsibility as community date scholars and practitioners to explore such questions as:
- If nosotros look to the literature on customs engagement, whose voices shape the field, and whose voices are missing or on the margin?
- How is knowledge actually exchanged across campus-customs boundaries, and how is that knowledge used and valued?
- To what extent are community partners positioned as co-educators of students and collaborators in scholarship and enquiry?
- In what ways are students' various learning styles, strengths, and limitations accommodated in community-engaged courses, and how are they encouraged to demonstrate learning beyond the cosmos of traditional work products?
- How are faculty recognized and rewarded for educational activity and scholarship that emanate from a commitment to creating community change?
I have found the framework of "epistemic in/justice"—described in Miranda Fricker'southward Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing—to exist useful in analyzing these big, complex questions nigh the limitations and aspirations of college education community engagement. I have had the privilege of working with colleagues from institutions across the United States and with our customs partners to apply and accommodate this framework in professional person development venues and in the literature. (To acquire more than about this ongoing project, delight visit https://epistemicjusticeiarslce2018.wordpress.com/.) Indeed, I see this book review as one more opportunity to enliven and extend critical conversations well-nigh higher educational activity customs engagement.
In gild to situate an test of community engagement in light of the epistemic in/justice framework, I call up information technology is helpful to briefly zoom out to acknowledge the college educational activity context. Higher teaching originated every bit a breastwork for the production and broadcasting of elite knowledge for the primary do good of wealthy White men. Though today'due south colleges and universities accept get far more accessible for students and faculty beyond various genders, races, ethnicities, and socioeconomic statuses, the legacy of elitism and exclusion within higher education continues to shape what knowledge is valued, shared, and celebrated. Looking to the field of study of philosophy as an case, ane finds that, as of 2015, only 13% of authors of articles in the top five philosophy journals were women (Schwitzgebel, 2015), and betwixt 2003 and 2012, merely .32% of authors featured in the top 15 philosophy journals identified every bit Black (Vivid, 2016). Farther, as of 2014, women fabricated up only 10% of the 267 most cited gimmicky authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and only iii% of cited authors identified as people of colour (Schwitzgebel, 2014). These statistics point a lack of diversity in the epistemological content of higher education texts, fifty-fifty as faculty and pupil demographics have become more than diverse. To exist fair, this problem pervades virtually academic disciplines. Scholars have argued that underrepresentation of women and people of color in top-tier publications is due to myriad factors, including implicit bias and stereotype threat (Saul, 2013). Implicit bias shapes how scholars and editors select publications to be featured, and stereotype threat prevents people from underrepresented groups from pursuing particular career paths and practices that are not traditionally seen as inclusive.
The previous publication and citation statistics illustrate that identity-based bias blocks collective access to valuable knowledge considering sure groups of people are left out of the academic conversation. However, given that the central mission of academia is to produce and disseminate cognition, scholars and practitioners have an obligation to take issues of epistemic exclusion seriously and seek proactive approaches to ensuring equity and inclusion of diverse forms of noesis. Moreover, considering exclusion of certain types of knowledge is based on dominant conceptions of which types of knowledge are valuable, and because these conceptions are inextricably linked to aspects of scholars' identities, the imperative to accost this injustice is besides an ethical one. How does one attend to the epistemic and ethical harms that have been baked into higher education since its inception?
Enter Fricker's work on epistemic injustice, which focuses on the manifestation of injustice in two everyday homo practices: conveying knowledge and making sense of experience. From this starting betoken, Fricker diagnoses how identity-based power and prejudice harm individuals in their capacities as knowers, and go along them from accessing essential truths about human experience. She and then offers practical approaches for edifice individuals' capacity to be more simply in their epistemic interactions with others, and in their cultivation and stewardship of collective knowledge.
Though the concept of identity-based oppression is neither new in academe nor uniquely theorized in philosophy, Fricker's analysis of identity-based oppression equally having both upstanding and intellectual dimensions warrants attending considering it offers fresh insight into the multifaceted and cumulative nature of harms committed in daily communication and significant-making. Cartoon upon the work of critical social theorists, philosophers, and scholars, including Iris Marion Young (1992), Fricker posits that epistemic injustice is i facet of the status quo of identity-based domination and highlights many examples of how it plays out in coincidental social situations as well as high-stakes contexts like courtrooms and classrooms. In essence, epistemic injustice manifests as the exclusion of people with marginalized identities from (1) beingness heard and understood by others in interpersonal communications (i.eastward., testimonial injustice), and (2) contributing to broader and deeper social understandings of the human experience (i.e., hermeneutical injustice).
Fricker introduces testimonial injustice in the get-go chapter of Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ideals of Knowing and elaborates on the nature and manifestations of the concept in Chapters ii and 6. Testimonial injustice occurs interpersonally when the hearer/receiver of knowledge allows identity prejudice to undermine the credibility of the speaker/knowledge-holder. The result is a dysfunction in noesis dissemination that leads simultaneously to three types of harm. Epistemic harm results when of import cognition is not integrated into the hearer's agreement, significant untruth is perpetuated to the detriment of both the immediate discussion parties and potentially others to whom they transmit knowledge. Upstanding impairment results when the knower's noesis is devalued and, because knowledge transmission is an essential aspect of what it ways to be human being, their humanity is degraded. The cumulative effect can exist a growing sense of self-doubt that inhibits the knower's participation in social interactions. Practical damage results from dysfunctional knowledge transmission that shapes actions and events to exclude, censure, or dismiss the knower. Equally an example of this harm, Fricker highlights the case of an individual'southward self-defense testimonial not being believed by a approximate or jury, resulting in jail time.
In the context of a service-learning course, applied harm might manifest in the experiences of depression-income students who must prioritize paid work over service activities continued to their grade in order to maintain financial stability. When the student approaches their instructor to limited concern near schedule conflicts and clear the need to maximize paid work hours, the instructor may dismiss these concerns as the pupil non having their priorities directly or as if they are trying to get out of class assignments. Instead of validating the student's assessment of their ain situation and working with them to come up with alternative ways to fulfill the community-engaged component of the course, the teacher adopts a hard line, forcing the student to choose between a passing grade and financial stability. While this may happen in interpersonal interactions within unimposing service-learning classrooms, scholars have as well pointed to this as a systemic issue related to service-learning not being designed to include and conform low-income students (Butin, 2006; Cruz, 1990; Mitchell, 2014), thereby exemplifying hermeneutical injustice.
Fricker describes hermeneutical injustice in the culminating chapter of the volume (Chapter 7). Whereas testimonial injustice plays out at the interpersonal level, hermeneutical injustice occurs at the systemic level through identity-based marginalization, keeping whole groups of knowers from participating in shaping social understandings of the human experience. Lodge excludes groups either because the knowledge they hold does non comport with the ascendant worldview—and therefore cannot exist understood using existing cognitive frames—or considering marginalized peoples' methods of expressing certain kinds of knowledge are non accustomed as legitimate by the dominant civilization. Fricker uses the example of how women were historically bars to their households, limited to discussing what was accounted polite or appropriate and labeled as not-rational, emotionally-driven beings in an attempt to prevent them from generating a collective agreement of their experiences of gender-based oppression and acting confronting it. Experiences of post-partum depression or domestic violence were mutual and consequential, but they were non identified or addressed until somewhat recently in human history because of systems and structures excluding women as valid knowledge producers and disseminators. Similar to the impacts of testimonial injustice, the harms of hermeneutical injustice have implications for emotional and psychological well-beingness, merely also for social and economic status. Because of the systemic nature of hermeneutical injustice, the harms impact entire identity-based groups.
Extrapolating this miracle to the experiences of faculty in higher education highlights how community-engaged scholarship continues to be marginalized in loftier-stakes tenure and promotion review processes. Though not necessarily defined equally an identity-based group, many customs-engaged scholars are faculty of color and women (Evans, Taylor, Dunlap, & Miller, 2009; Sturm, Eatman, Saltmarsh, & Bush, 2011). These scholars have professional person commitments, appoint in pedagogical practices, and disseminate scholarly products that emanate from engagement with customs (e.g., didactics service-learning courses, conducting community-based participatory research, etc.). Their scholarly work is grounded in transdisciplinary conceptions of knowledge (i.e., knowledge that transcends disciplines and the campus) and is characterized by nugget-based qualities of reciprocity, mutual respect, shared authority, and co-creation of goals and outcomes. This orientation to knowledge and scholarship leaves them occupying the margins of what is traditionally accepted in terms of teaching, research, and service. Thus, there is a high likelihood that their faculty peers (who practice not exercise customs-engaged teaching and research) may misunderstand, distrust, or devalue the piece of work products and narratives they nowadays in their dossiers. Information technology is common for customs-engaged scholarship to be accounted less rigorous and less valuable than traditional positivist approaches, which prioritize pure research methodologies and the discovery of new cognition (Eatman et al., 2018). I reason for the persistence of this problem is the gap in knowledge about how to properly ascertain and assess high-quality customs-engaged scholarship. Though guidelines and standards exist (Jordan et al., 2009), they have not been widely adopted beyond colleges and universities. Therefore, faculty members who "communicate" with the globe through community-engaged practices may discover themselves to be misunderstood inside the ascendant cerebral constructs of what constitutes loftier-quality faculty operation and therefore not selected for tenure or promotion.
Fricker as well illuminates examples of what is possible when typically marginalized knowers are heard and understood by those in power. In Chapters iii and four, she places the onus on individuals to cultivate a practice of reflection and analysis when taking on the office of knowledge-receivers, such that they can intentionally subvert their prejudicial tendencies from impeding epistemic and ethical connections to knowledge-givers. Doing this facilitates testimonial justice, which occurs when noesis is communicated interpersonally, unfettered by identity-based bias, in a way that affirms the credibility (and by extension the humanity) of the knower and builds the agreement of the knowledge-receiver. In Affiliate five, Fricker discusses the genealogy of testimonial injustice, referencing foundational philosophical theories and concepts to situate her framework in the broader field. In detail, she describes the "country of nature," as imagined by Williams (2002) and Craig (1990), every bit the condition for the inevitable emergence of identity-based prejudice (a pre-cursor to testimonial injustice). She also highlights virtues of truth, accuracy, and sincerity equally necessary for humans to be able to overcome identity-based prejudice in order to finer pool knowledge necessary for human survival.
As an antidote to hermeneutic injustice, Fricker, at the end of Affiliate 7, provides only a brushstroke of her vision of hermeneutical justice. Individuals enact hermeneutical justice equally a corrective virtue past displaying context-sensitive judgment in their interactions, recognizing that their lack of agreement in response to some other's testimony may be a issue of systems of knowledge that delegitimize certain ways of knowing, and not a deficiency within the speaker, and potentially taking responsibility for seeking boosted evidence in back up of the speaker's testimony. Writ large, hermeneutical justice occurs when gild holds infinite for and values diverse ways of making sense of the human experience.
Considering the frequency and scale of interpersonal knowledge exchange in society, Epistemic Injustice has significant ramifications for transforming identity-based oppression. Fricker offers a coherent theory for a very particular, only common, man experience of identity-based injustice and a useful prescription for correcting it. Fricker is not the first or only scholar to proper name and describe the phenomenon of power relations inhibiting detail people's opportunities to participate fully in social club and how to address it. Indeed, she references a number of scholars in other fields who take offered theoretical frameworks for exposing and interrogating unjust actions and systems. Rather, Fricker's framework is a worthy improver to the myriad bodies of theory that transcend purely disciplinary and scholarly application to assist individuals analyze and ultimately dismantle oppression in practice. In making the case that exchanges of knowledge are fundamental to what it means to be human and to exist part of lodge, and then connecting the inhibition of cognition exchange to intellectual, ethical, and practical harms, Fricker makes a strong argument for why all people should intendance about and bear responsibility for creating a more than epistemically just world. Further, Fricker fosters optimism that alter is possible by suggesting how one might grow one's capacities for being a more virtuous noesis-receiver and ultimately galvanize others to elevate this practice to the level of hermeneutical transformation.
Equally someone who does non have a scholarly groundwork in philosophy merely who is immersed in the culture of academia, I found this book to be compelling and attainable. Fricker offers articulate and well-reasoned definitions of complex concepts and illustrates them with multiple practical examples. Further, she explicitly renders the relationships betwixt the theoretical components of her argument into a comprehensive framework. I admit that I struggled somewhat with the chapters on the "Genealogy of Testimonial Injustice" and "Original Significances" because of my lack of familiarity with foundational philosophical canons, only I was still able to glean the essential arguments from both chapters.
For readers operating in a higher education context, where the creation, synthesis, awarding, and dissemination of cognition are core functions, and where dominant cultural norms shape everything from student admissions to faculty tenure and review policies, Fricker's text provides both an ethical imperative and a framework for how we, as professionals within that context, might transform our institutions to be more epistemically simply. If nosotros hateful to be virtuous in our individual dealings equally professionals and participate in virtuous institutions, then we would do well to reverberate upon the post-obit questions in light of Fricker's theory and human activity in accord with her prescriptions: How can we create space for students, faculty, and staff to demonstrate and disseminate knowledge in diverse ways? How tin we design courses that benefit from the diversity of epistemic traditions? How can we provide faculty development opportunities that build capacity to enact epistemic justice in didactics, advising, research, and service? What skills and information do students need to prepare to engage ethically across epistemic differences in the higher education context and beyond? To what extent are the voices of diverse staff, faculty, and students able to guide institutional agendas and priorities? What institutional values and virtues are probable to foster epistemic justice in how policies and practices are designed and implemented?
Zeroing in on the exercise of customs date in higher education, implementation of an epistemically just framework becomes even more imperative considering of the relational nature of the work (both at the interpersonal and institutional levels) and its focus on employing cognition to address contemporary social and environmental problems. If we as customs-engaged scholars and practitioners believe that the condition of epistemic injustice is the status quo, as Fricker asserts, then information technology follows that nosotros are likely to crusade harm by conducting business organisation equally usual. By cartoon exclusively on existing bodies of academically legitimate knowledge to guide our understandings of justice issues, and past employing traditional positivist and extractivist methods to guide community interventions, we might hands reinforce neo-colonial dynamics between "town and gown." On the other hand, community engagement holds great potential every bit an incubator for higher education's burgeoning efforts to diversify its epistemological universe. Under the rubric of community date, pedagogical frames are rooted in a desire to democratize the exchange of knowledge in and out of the classroom, and research methodologies are participatory, oriented toward addressing community-identified problems.
Given this, our telephone call to activity as customs-engaged scholars and practitioners is to strive for greater alignment between the aspirational vision for customs engagement and exercise. What changes are needed for customs engagement processes, practices, and policies to reverberate equitable participation of diverse constituencies? How can the outcomes of this work achieve epistemic justice by perpetuating more nuanced understandings of both universal and unique aspects of the human being condition? What commitment can we make to demonstrate humility, intellectual curiosity, and empathy in our daily interactions? In which situations might nosotros abdicate our roles as experts when working with customs in order to dilate voices of expertise and wisdom not traditionally legitimized in academia? How might we create space for students to grapple with their own limitations and aspirations as they navigate customs-engaged experiences? How do we infuse the virtue of epistemic justice into the culture of our customs-engaged departments and centers? I suggest boldly that, armed with frameworks like Fricker'due south, we draw closer to answering these questions and achieving a more epistemically simply vision for our work.
References
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