Epistemic Justice and the Decolonization of the University

The philosopher Miranda Fricker, in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford University Press, 2007), distinguished two forms of wrong done specifically to someone in their capacity as a knower. Testimonial injustice occurs when a hearer, influenced by prejudice against a speaker's social identity — for instance, their race or gender — assigns that speaker's testimony a deflated level of credibility it does not deserve. Hermeneutical injustice occurs at a more structural level, when a gap in a society's shared interpretive resources — its available concepts and vocabulary — leaves members of a marginalized group unable to make proper sense of, or communicate, their own experience to others, a condition Fricker illustrates with the historical absence, before feminist activism coined the term, of any widely available concept of "sexual harassment." Though Fricker's own examples are drawn mainly from Anglo-American contexts, decolonial and African philosophers have drawn extensively on her framework to analyze whose knowledge, and whose very conceptual vocabulary, counts as legitimate within university institutions historically built on European epistemic models.