IMPLISITT - project closing conference: Decolonizing Epistemic Injustice and Implicit Bias

DAY 1 - Wednesday, January 25th

DAY 2 - Thursday, January 26th

Theories of Epistemic Colonialism

Ezgi Sertler & Elena Ruiz 

We start this paper with two diagnostic questions: 1. What is the nature and the purpose of the work of epistemic injustice, as the term becomes more and more ubiquitous in many academic projects? And 2. What is the nature and the purpose of the work of decolonizing epistemic injustice? The first question probes critical as well as creative potential of the term epistemic injustice and the limits of its non-structural projects. Answering the second question, we argue, requires both an investigation of the terms under which the work of decolonization is performed and an inquiry into how decolonization is understood, by whom, and for whom.

In light of these inquiries, we first demonstrate how the project of decolonizing epistemic injustice can itself be a colonial project. It can specifically be a colonial epistemological project that structures the terms of engagement between dominant and non-dominantly situated knowers through a hermeneutic pay-to-play exchange that recenters the terms, epistemic concerns, languages, and conceptual orthodoxies of Anglo-European intellectual traditions and their feminist inheritors and beneficiaries in philosophy. Here, we draw parallels to projects such as ‘decolonizing Aristotelian political philosophy’ and ‘decolonizing Rawls’ and ask: How are these projects relevant to the rematriative, reciprocal, reparative, restorative, and structural justice projects of Indigenous people and people of color in settler colonial societies who are actively trying to dismantle the vast reaches of European settler colonial whiteness and settler white supremacist violence in our lives? In other words, we question the value, but more importantly, the purposes of the epistemic labor that goes into enumerating and extracting non-whitewashed versions of whitewashed theories of injustice. Here, we also investigate whether this kind of project can decouple people’s colonial education from serving the interests of the culture that propagated that system of education.

 We track the histories of long-standing theoretical traditions in Indigenous and women of color feminisms in order to demonstrate a project of decolonizing epistemic injustice with different orientations. We argue that these particular theoretical traditions offer non-deal framings of epistemic injustice as epistemic colonialism, where the norms of prioritization are written and enacted differently than a hermeneutic pay-to-play exchange. We identify discussions and theorizations of structural epistemic violence as an impactful systemic force in women’s lives by multiple feminist theories in the global south, and we argue that these projects of structural epistemic violence work tirelessly to highlight mechanisms of corruption, destruction and silencing in colonial epistemological systems.

An Epistemology of the Oppressed: Resisting and Flourishing under Epistemic Oppression

Gaile Pohlhaus

Overcoming Epistemic Injustice in Africa: A Global South Perspectiv

Dennis Masaka

In this chapter, I seek to show how the problem of epistemic injustice in Africa could best be approached in a way that will possibly lead to the attainment of envisioned genuine epistemic justice. I particularly posit that substantive attention ought to be focused on how knowledge production in Africa could be recast so that the knowledges that are produced identify with existential situations of their producers. This dimension has largely been under-emphasised in debates about epistemic injustice in Africa which have so far focused more on showing the merits of counterbalancing the stake of the dominant knowledge tradition of our time in learning arenas through creating space for other knowledges. In the first section, I attempt to indicate what African peoples typically regard as epistemic injustice and how it has constrained the flourishing of their epistemologies. In the second section, 1 highlight what has been commonly believed in extant literature to be viable solutions to this problem. In the final section, I attempt to show what possibly needs to be done to attain genuine epistemic justice in Africa, that is, ensuing that the knowledges that are produced reflect the aspirations and terms of cultures from which they emerge. The overall objective is to offer a proposal from a typical global South perspective that, on balance of scale, offer a compelling basis on which to ground efforts to overturn epistemic justice and engender epistemic justice.

Knowledge-specific forms of epistemic injustice and the remnants of colonialism

Kerstin Reibold

Successful integration often hangs on whether trust can be established between the native and the immigrant population. Trust, in turn, is related to different forms of knowing. Trusting someone means, among other things, to believe that the other person has not just the will but also the knowledge to fulfill whatever one is trusted with (competences, norms etc.). This chapter analyzes how prejudices about former colonial subjects and their assumedly lower competence, differing norms and nature still influence whether immigrants that can be visibly identified as belonging to a former ‘colonial population’ are believed when they communicate their trustworthiness. The chapter argues that colonial prejudices are fostering different kinds of epistemic injustice that directly undermine the establishment of trust, and thus integration, of immigrants in Western states.

On Epistemic Freedom and Epistemic Injustice

‘Seek ye epistemic freedom first’ is how Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni begins his book Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization (2018:1). The book constitutes a nuanced study of the politics of knowledge, and particularly of the African struggle for epistemic freedom. In the opening stages of the book Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018:3) develops an account of epistemic freedom as the right to think, theorize and develop one’s own methodologies to interpret the world, and write from where one is located unencumbered by Eurocentrism. He argues that extant struggles for epistemic freedom stem from the continued entrapment of knowledge production in Africa within Euro- and North America centric matrices of power, and that control of the domain of knowledge production is central to the maintenance of asymmetric global power structures. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018) describes his project as one driven by a restorative epistemic agenda centred around epistemological decolonisation, provincializing Europe, and deprovincializing Africa. He argues that epistemic freedom speaks directly to what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) has called cognitive justice. That is the recognition of the diverse ways of knowing by which humans from across the globe make sense of their experiences. In this chapter I explore the intersection of Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s account of epistemic freedom with a different set of theories pertaining to justice and injustice in the epistemic realm, namely the theorizing of epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression. In doing so I demonstrate that Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s theory of epistemic freedom, and theories of epistemic injustice and oppression intersect. Further I argue that they are complementary and can be fruitfully combined both to theorize and expose unjust conditions and structures that shape epistemic lives and practices. Further I argue that doing so will serve ameliorative and, in the words of Ndlovu-Gatsheni, restorative purposes.

Decolonizing Epistemic Injustice: Ambivalent or Multiple Borders?

Europe’s Suppressed Jewish Episteme

Elad Lapidot

In Search of a “Truly-Feminist” Agency? Rethinking Feminist Epistemology in the Context of Partition-Induced Forced Migration in India