Much work on epistemic injustice has identified the operation of negative stereotypes relating to gender and race; for instance, when someone’s testimony is dismissed, doubted, or accorded low credibility due to racist or sexist prejudices on the part of the listener (Dotson, 2011; Fricker, 2007; Kidd et al., 2017; Medina, 2013). But in recent years research has drawn attention to epistemic injustice in healthcare generally, and more specifically within psychiatry, pediatrics, and among people with disabilities (Blease et al., 2016; Carel & Kidd, 2014; Crichton et al., 2016; Kidd & Carel, 2016, 2019; Potter, 2015). What has been revealed is the systematic stifling of the voices and interpretive tools available to both ill and disabled persons: in particular, their information providing, testimonies, and interpretations. These types of epistemic injustice have been associated with the medical deficit model that dominates much of medical and psychiatric discourse (Kidd & Carel, 2018, 2019). Moreover, physically disabled persons’ claims that they are happy and living good lives have also been dismissed due to prejudices about the possibility of living well whilst disabled (Blease et al., 2016; Carel, 2016, ch. 6).
Neurodiversity, epistemic injustice, and the good human life – Chapman – 2022 – Journal of Social Philosophy – Wiley Online Library
We’ve suggested that autistic individuals encounter testimonial injustice, when they claim to be happy or living good lives, and hermeneutical injustice, seen in the exclusion of neurodivergent modes of flourishing. But it is also vital to consider how these forms of injustice combine and interlock in practice. In day-to-day life, prejudiced stereotypes regarding autistic flourishing and wellbeing culminate in autistic individuals encountering a “catch-22”-like framing, whereby the possibility of being both autistic and living a good life is, to varying extents, unthinkable for many.
Neurodiversity, epistemic injustice, and the good human life – Chapman – 2022 – Journal of Social Philosophy – Wiley Online Library
Epistemic injustice refers to how people from marginalized communities are denied the opportunity to create knowledge and define their own meaning from their experiences. It’s about who is believed. Epistemic injustice happens when those in power have defined which narratives actually “count.”
To consider any single meaning or knowledge as superior or the truth is a form of epistemic injustice.
Epistemic Injustice, the pathology paradigm and psychiatry are inherently connected because the pathology paradigm imposes a single truth onto us: that our differences, altered states, voices, plurality, trauma responses and distress are a result of an illness or something wrong with us.
The Neurodiversity Paradigm is a tool of resistance against epistemic injustice and a way to practice epistemic justice. We are reclaiming our right to understand, describe and name our experiences, our differences, our altered states, our distress, our voices, our plurality and our minds outside of the dominant narrative that says they’re a mental illness or disorder.
If your neurodiversity affirming practice includes saying differences or altered states or hearing voices or trauma responses or plurality are illnesses and disorders, you are committing epistemic injustice, you are saying you know best and you are denying one’s autonomy.
You are denying one’s right to know and understand themselves on their own terms.
“Epistemic injustice refers to how people from marginalized communities are denied the opportunity to create knowledge and define their own meaning from their experiences.” by Sonny J Wise
We also feel the use of medicalised language in relation to developmental forms of neurodivergence is worthy of note. Epistemic injustice occurs when marginalised persons or groups are either discredited as knowledge producers or are excluded from societal meaning-making practices and concept development (Fricker, 2007). One form of epistemic injustice is hermeneutic injustice, where the marginalised group does not have the societal resources – including language – available to describe issues because their experiences have been excluded during the development of such resources. Arguably, much of the other language used about and by neurodivergent people, including pathologizing medical model categorisations and language, including terms that include the word ‘disorder’, has been developed without our input. As the term neurodiversity was developed by neurodivergent (albeit mainly Autistic) people (Botha et al., 2024), it may be expected that it would reduce hermeneutic injustice. However, recent research with neurodivergent and neurotypical faculty and students shows that neurodiversity terminology does not necessarily result in thoughts aligned to the neurodiversity paradigm, with only a small number of those using neurodiversity terminology doing so in ways aligned to the neurodiversity movement (Accardo & Cormier, 2025). It may also explain why so many of our neurodivergent participants felt very strongly about neurodiversity terminology being used accurately; inaccurate use may feel like another form of epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice, where a minority group’s views are disregarded by the majority. This inaccurate usage of neurodiversity terminology may be evidence of a ‘euphemism treadmill’ – where new diversity-related words are constantly needed because newer words lose their positive meaning when more widely adopted, and become stigmatised once again (Pinker, 1994). Further study of neurodiversity-terminology and its relation to epistemic injustice and the euphemism treadmill would be beneficial.
The concept of epistemic injustice was coined by the philosopher Miranda Fricker. Her original statement of the concept was the landmark monograph, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Fricker, Citation2007). Fricker describes her work as sitting at the intersection of ethics and epistemology, and the concept of epistemic injustice as capturing an injustice done to someone in their capacity as a knower, an epistemic agent. The two main kinds of epistemic injustice described in the book are testimonial injustice, where negative prejudice causes a hearer to deflate the credibility assigned to a speaker, and hermeneutical injustice, where a collective gap in hermeneutical resources prevents understanding some or all of the social experiences of certain groups (Fricker, Citation2007, chs. 1 and 7.). Fricker subsequently refined and elaborated her ideas in later publications, although the original Frickerian framework is what has come to be central to epistemic injustice studies (e.g., Fricker, Citation2017).
Since the 2007 book there have been three main developments in the philosophical literature. First, there has been critical refinement and elaboration of the original account. For example, an account of structural testimonial injustice was added to augment Fricker’s account of agential testimonial injustice (Wanderer, Citation2017: section 3). Rebecca Mason distinguished hermeneutical injustices that involve the absence of conceptual resources from those involving a collective refusal of uptake of conceptual resources available in specific communities (Mason, Citation2011).
Second, scholars identified other kinds of epistemic injustice, other than those focused on by Fricker. Examples include what Kristie Dotson (Citation2011) called testimonial smothering: a preemptive self-censoring of the content and expression of testimonies by speakers. Christopher Hookway (Citation2010) identified another pair of preemptive epistemic injustices. Informational prejudices involve prejudices about what kinds of people will possess the sense of relevance necessary to being a worthwhile informant, while participatory prejudice prevents one from recognizing someone as a potential participant in a shared epistemic activity. Other scholars have described kinds of contributory injustice and discursive injustice; doubtless others exist (Kukla, Citation2014; Tate, Citation2019).
Alongside identifying other kinds of injustice, philosophers have also offered alternative accounts of the nature and normative status of epistemic injustices. David Coady (Citation2017) argues that Fricker’s account presents the wrongs of epistemic injustice in discriminative terms – we unfairly and harmfully discriminate against certain epistemic agents (women, disabled persons, and so on). Coady proposes an alternative distributive account according to which the wrongs of epistemic injustice concern misdistribution of epistemic goods, such as credibility and intelligibility, in a social environment (compare Byskov, Citation2020). Dotson has argued that the real wrong of many epistemic injustices is that they are specific expressions of a wider phenomenon of epistemic violence, a concept introduced by Gyatri Spivak (Citation1988). If the violent character of epistemic injustices is occluded, we may risk understating their full nature and significance (Dotson, Citation2011, pp. 237–242).
Another expansion was Pohlhaus (Citation2012) account of willful hermeneutical injustice. She suggests that dominantly situated individuals need to take up currently local hermeneutical resources to grant them widespread epistemic force. Without uptake of these hermeneutical resources, marginalized individuals cannot successfully communicate their experience beyond their own communities. Pohlhaus Jr. argues that privileged social groups often need to “maintain their ignorance by refusing to recognize and by actively undermining any newly generated epistemic resource that attends to those parts of the world that they are vested in ignoring” (2012, p. 729). Turning away from marginalized groups’ experiences in this way is an act of willful hermeneutical ignorance. Emmalon Davis (Citation2018) suggests a further epistemic harm, which she dubs epistemic appropriation, in which marginalized knowers are harmed through the dissemination and intercommunal uptake of their epistemic resources, in ways that detach those resources from the knowers who created them. Moreover, such resources are utilized in dominant discourses in ways that disproportionately benefit the powerful.
A third important development in epistemic injustice studies has been the identification of earlier philosophical projects that aimed at understanding and rectifying epistemic injustices. These include pragmatism, phenomenology, and social epistemology. The broad phenomena of social injustice (which includes an epistemic dimension) have been recognized prior to Fricker’s analyses, and the earlier projects often employed quite different vocabularies, as well as developing within different communities. Certainly, one can find examples within certain traditions in philosophy, religious studies and theology, heritage studies, and educational theory (see the chapters in Kidd et al., Citation2017, Parts III and V). Moreover, there is a multidisciplinary body of work – encompassing history, sociology, Disability studies, and Mad studies – which also analyses forms of what philosophers conceptualized as epistemic injustices (Morgan, Citation2021; Reaume, Citation2021). This sort of multidisciplinary approach is demonstrated by Mohammed Rashed’s work, which draws on philosophy, history of psychiatry, Mad studies, and Disability studies to offer a philosophical justification for “a broadening of our cultural repertoire as it pertains to madness beyond medical and psychological constructs and frameworks” (Rashed, Citation2019, xxxiii, see. esp. chapters. 1 and 11). Such pluralism is important for a further reason: our critical discourses about complex and contested phenomena should not be conducted using a single style of critical discourse (Rashed, Citation2020).
Full article: Epistemic injustice in psychiatric research and practice
Epistemic injustice pervades autism research.
Epistemic injustice pervades autism research in a way that only ever marginalizes autistic people in knowledge creation while providing an almost all-encompassing blanket of protection for non-autistic researchers—non-autistic people have an assumed objectivity that means they do not have to defend their involvement in the creation of knowledge.
Frontiers | Academic, Activist, or Advocate? Angry, Entangled, and Emerging: A Critical Reflection on Autism Knowledge Production
I lean into my emotions because they inform my values, keep me tied to the autistic community, generate my sense of epistemic responsibility to the community I come from. I am open because when autistic students (whether undergraduate or postgraduate) approach me to ask how I handle the experience of feeling and living these accounts, they express a loneliness that silence only serves. I now have a policy of honesty and I tell them: I feel angry.
Frontiers | Academic, Activist, or Advocate? Angry, Entangled, and Emerging: A Critical Reflection on Autism Knowledge Production
Frontiers | Academic, Activist, or Advocate? Angry, Entangled, and Emerging: A Critical Reflection on Autism Knowledge Production
The moment we become an expert on someone else is the moment we allow our biases to rule in power, and it takes away honor.
What is anti-racist Universal Design for Learning (UDL)? feat. Tesha Fritzgerald – YouTube
Persons with psychiatric conditions are especially vulnerable to epistemic injustices.
…persons with psychiatric conditions are unusually or distinctively vulnerable to testimonial injustice and to hermeneutical injustice in the sense described by Fricker. They identify three contributory factors that explain that enhanced vulnerability: (i) the effects of various psychiatric conditions on one’s cognitive, mnemonic, and interpersonal abilities and one’s capacity to conform to the socially standard kinds of practical comportment, (ii) the epistemic privileging of scientific and medical evidence, language, and concepts in discourse about psychiatric health and illness, and (iii) entrenched negative stereotypes about psychiatric illness in general, or specific psychiatric conditions, reinforced by poor public understanding and problematic media and public representations of mental health.
Full article: Epistemic injustice in psychiatric research and practice
Epistemic justice is an essential component of good practice.
The central message I wish to convey is that the epistemic justice is an essential component of good psychiatric practice and there is no reason for the attitude of psychiatrists toward this framework to be one of antagonism. Medicine and psychiatry, practiced virtuously, are on the side of epistemic justice.
Epistemic justice is not something that is outside of good clinical care. Good clinical care is inclusive of our best ethical practices; just as good clinical care cannot be racist or sexist, good clinical care cannot be epistemically unjust. We cannot appeal to good clinical care to justify ignoring epistemic justice because epistemic justice clarifies a vital aspect of what good clinical care ought to be.
Epistemic justice is an essential component of good psychiatric care | Psychological Medicine | Cambridge Core
Who Can Speak?
When they speak, it is scientific;
Who Can Speak? by Grada Kilomba in ’Decolonizing Knowledge‘ (2016)
when we speak, it is unscientific.
When they speak, it is universal;
when we speak, it is specific.
When they speak, it is objective;
when we speak, it is subjective.
When they speak, it is neutral;
when we speak, it is personal.
When they speak, it is rational;
when we speak, it is emotional.
When they speak, it is impartial;
when we speak, it is partial.
They have facts, we have opinions.
They have knowledges, we have experiences.
We are not dealing here with a peaceful coexistence of words,
but rather with a violent hierachy, which defines
Who can Speak, and What We Can Speak About.
As a scholar, for instance, I am commonly told that my work on everyday racism is very interesting, but not really scientific, a remark that illustrates the colonial order in which Black scholars reside: “You have a very subjective perspective”; “very personal”; “very emotional”; “very specific”; “Are these objective facts?” Such comments function like a mask, that silences our voices as soon as we speak. They allow the white subject to place our discourses back at the margins, as deviating knowledge, while their discourses remain at the centre, as the norm. When they speak it is scientific, when we speak it is unscientific;
universal / specific;
objective / subjective;
neutral / personal;
rational / emotional;
impartial / partial;
they have facts, we have opinions;
they have knowledge, we have experiences.
These are not simple semantic categorizations; they possess a dimension of power that maintains hierarchical positions and upholds white supremacy. We are not dealing here with a “peaceful coexistence of words,” as Jacques Derrida (1981: 41) emphasizes, but rather a violent hierarchy that defines who can speak.
Kilomba, Grada. Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism (p. 26). Between the Lines.
Objectivity and Reason
…the Western educational focus on reason and cognition denies an understanding of the whole person in learning.
Ollis, T.. A Critical Pedagogy of Embodied Education: Learning to Become an Activist (Postcolonial Studies in Education) (p. 170). Palgrave Macmillan US.
Rationalism has always dominated western educational thought (Beckett & Morris 2003). Since the Enlightenment and Descartes’ dictum, “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am) (Descartes 1983), the focus on rationalism has taken primary importance in understanding learning. The emphasis on cognition through the development of critical thinking leaves the focus on learning as an intellectual activity alone (Brookfield, 1985), denying the connectivity of mind, emotions, and the body in learning (Hunter 2004; O’Loughlin 2006). Dewey claims education has moved away from its initial intention, “It ceased to mean ways of doing and being done to, and became a way for something intellectual and cognitive” (Dewey, 1930, p. 312). A focus on disembodiment in adult education denies the reality of somatic learning (Beckett & Morris 2003). As Dewey rightly claims, being human is about experiencing the world around us and learning occurs through experience, “ . . . every experience influences in some degree the objective conditions under which further experiences are had” (Dewey, 1938, 1999, p. 30).
It is demonstrated in this book that learning is embodied , including the physical body, not just with speech and communicative actions but the physicality of actually being present in a classroom or learning space (Beckett & Morris 2003). We physically move the body as we learn and teach—we interact with others, teachers, students, and colleagues, we move our bodies in the space of learning when we work in groups with other learners; learning, therefore, requires a physical presence. We bring our bodies into learning when we walk into the classroom or workplace. Our bodies represent our present and past experiences of learning and our constituted educational discourses (Hunter 2004). Students bring their own lived experiences of class or privilege into the classroom (Hooks 2003a). They bring their own experiences of education both constituted by their corporeal experiences of education and by the hegemonic educational discourses and practices that have been worked on them (Hunter, 2004).
Ollis, T.. A Critical Pedagogy of Embodied Education: Learning to Become an Activist (Postcolonial Studies in Education) (pp. 166-167). Palgrave Macmillan US.
“Lower Status” Knowledge
…within the Western tradition, embodied knowledge of the disempowered or disenfranchised has, for too long, been deemed suspect, illegitimate, or of little value to the process of knowing, even within some radical political circles. In contrast, Ollis rightly argues that it is impossible to truly understand the development and identity formation of activists without careful attention to the manner in which the whole body is implicated in their learning practices and in the evolution of their participation within social movements.
Ollis, T.. A Critical Pedagogy of Embodied Education: Learning to Become an Activist (Postcolonial Studies in Education) . Palgrave Macmillan US.
Activists are active in communities and social movements. They are connected to communities; they meet with politicians, advocate for reform or change, resist dominant discourses of oppression, they socialize and meet with other activists. They develop knowledge about systems of government by understanding key players and stakeholders in their area of interest, sometimes advocating for change within the existing system and, at other times, marching in protest and taking direct action. In doing this they actively construct, renew, and remake their practice. This constructivist and interpretive knowledge is in contrast to the abstract and immaterial learning founded in behaviorism and in contemporary education pedagogy and practice. It is at times referred to as lower status knowledge or practical knowledge (Beckett & Morris 2003; Maddison & Scalmer 2006). Lower status knowledge, which stems from our concrete material experiences of the world, is often viewed by educators as the “junk” category of knowledge (Schön 1987; Beckett 2008;). There is a need to understand why some people have more knowledge than others, but rather than view the whole person as a site of knowledge, “outstanding practitioners are not said to have more professional knowledge than others, but greater ‘wisdom,’ ‘talent,’ ‘intuition,’ or ‘artistry.’ ” (Beckett 2008, p.13). Schön develops this point further:
Unfortunately, such terms as these serve not to open up inquiry but to close it off. They are used as junk categories, attaching names to phenomena that elude conventional strategies of explanation. So the dilemma of rigor or relevance here reasserts itself. On the basis of an underlying and largely unexamined epistemology of practice, we distance ourselves from the kinds of performance we need most to understand ( p. 13).
Beckett (2008 ) raises the importance of taking seriously embodied knowledge and believes “low status knowledge, typically called ‘intuition’; or ‘commonsense’, or ‘know-how’, is receiving long-overdue critical attention” (p. 2). His contribution to the literature on embodied learning in adult education is important because he focuses on the hitherto neglected area of the whole person or embodied learning at work (Beckett & Hager 2002; Beckett & Morris 2003; Beckett 2008). In The Reflective Practitioner, Schön (1983) argues that the Western educational focus on reason and cognition denies an understanding of the whole person in learning. In contemporary adult learning theory it is sometimes called deeper rather than surface learning, but is more broadly connected to critical pedagogy (Darder, Baltadano, & Torres 2003). Educators need to move away from a cognitive focus of “knowing why” to an embodied focus of “knowing how” (Gonczi 2004).
Ollis, T.. A Critical Pedagogy of Embodied Education: Learning to Become an Activist (Postcolonial Studies in Education) (pp. 169-170). Palgrave Macmillan US.
