This contribution develops a defence of a universalist conception of Global Citizenship Education against three prominent critiques, which are, among others, put forward by postcolonial scholars. The first critique argues that GCE is essentially a project of globally minded elites and therefore expressive both of global educational injustices and of the values and lifestyles of a particular class or milieu. The second critique assumes that GCE is based on genuinely ‘Western values’, which are neither universally accepted nor universally valid (...) and therefore unjustly forced on members of non-Western cultures and societies. GCE, according to this critique, is assumed to be another version of the educational justification of a hegemonic and unjust global Western regime. The third critique focuses on the epistemological preconditions of GCE. It assumes that GCE relies on a particular, culturally embedded ‘Western epistemology,’ which perpetuates historically grown global educational and epistemic injustices by dominating and subjugating alternative epistemological approaches. With respect to the first critique I argue that it is to a certain extent sociologically plausible, but wrong when it is applied to the educational and political legitimacy of GCE. The second critique overestimates the consensus within the ‘Western tradition’ and underestimates the transnational dissemination of universalist ideals and values as well as its own reliance on universalist validity claims. I argue that in order to provide a plausible criticism of historically grown global educational and political injustices, it is imperative for GCE to integrate central insights provided by the postcolonial critique, without giving up on universalist ideals and values. The third critique is, according to my argumentation, based on flawed epistemological assumptions, which do not withstand critical scrutiny. Instead of identifying epistemic and scientific claims as the expressions of a particular ‘culture’ or geographical location, I defend the position that philosophical and scientific research should ideally be conceived as a democratic and universalist project, whose emancipatory potential can only be realized on the basis of a universalist epistemology. (shrink)

Hermeneutical injustice occurs when there is a gap in the interpretive resources available to members of a society due to the marginalization of members of a social group from sense‐making practices. In this paper, I address two questions about hermeneutical injustice that are undertheorized in the recent literature: (1) what do we mean when we say that someone lacks the interpretive resources for making sense of an experience? and (2) how do marginalized individuals develop interpretive resources? In response (...) to (1), I argue that to lack interpretive resources is to lack conceptual skill or know how. In response to (2), I draw on resources from Gilbert Ryle and Andy Clark and provide a model of how marginalized individuals develop new conceptual skills by naming their shared experience and using it as a tool for scaffolding each other's conceptual performance. At the same time, I draw on the work of Gaile Pohlhaus and Kristie Dotson to show how these practices succeed only through the redistribution of epistemic power across differently situated social groups. (shrink)

Epistemic injustices are wrongs done concerning a person’s capacity as a knower. These actions are usually caused by prejudice and involve the distortion and neglect of certain marginalized groups’ opinions and ways of knowing. A type of epistemic injustice is hermeneutical injustice, which occurs when a person cannot effectively communicate or understand their experience, since it is excluded in scholarship, journalism, and discourse within their community. Indigenous Peoples (IPs) are especially vulnerable to hermeneutical injustice because their way (...) of life is unfamiliar or inaccessible to others. This leads to the exclusion of their ideas from public discourse, especially those important for human and societal development. This phenomenon is particularly evident in instances related to IP education. José Medina claims that there are cases of hermeneutical injustice which hinders the ability of people to share and make meaning, or simply, hermeneutical death. Ben Kotzee, on the other hand, identifies the specific educational dimension of epistemic injustice. Using both of these frameworks and citing the results of local studies on indigenous education as illustrative points, we attempt to show instances and scope of hermeneutical injustice in the education of IPs in the Philippines. (shrink)

Some of the students in our classrooms doubt their intellectual strengths—their knowledge, abilities, and skills. They may be unaware of the intellectual strengths they have, or may ignore, lack confidence in, or under-estimate them. They may even incorrectly judge themselves to be intellectually inferior to their peers. Students who do such things consistently are deficient in the virtue of intellectual pride—in appropriately ‘owning’ their intellectual strengths—and are on their way to developing a form of intellectual servility. Can the ‘standard approach’ (...) to intellectual character education help these students make progress toward intellectual pride? This article argues that there are two limitations in its ability to help. First, the standard approach isn’t likely to help unless it is combined with classroom strategies for ameliorating servility. Second, even when it is combined with ameliorative strategies, any progress it might make in the classroom is likely to be fleeting when a student’s servility is caused by systemic epistemic injustice. This article suggests that rather than prioritize the standard approach, we prioritize strategies that aim at systemic change and amelioration. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there are significant instances of educational injustice in the context of philosophy teaching that can be effectively reduced by an increased implementation of digital technologies. More specifically, I show that there are good reasons to believe that testimonial injustices constitute serious instances of educational injustice that will frequently occur in philosophy classes. Using digital tools to anonymize student contributions opens up a promising way of dealing with these injustices. If convincing, (...) my arguments give reason to perceive epistemic injustices in educational settings as a serious threat to educational justice and to reconsider the implications of increased digitalization for issues of educational justice. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce a special case of epistemic injustice that I call ‘structural contributory injustice’. This conception aims to capture some dimensions of how policy—separately from individual agential interactions—can generate epistemic injustice at a group level. I first locate the case within Kristie Dotson’s original conception of contributory injustice. I then consider one potential case of structural contributory injustice—namely, the policy problem of significant financial risk burden on students considering university in the USA. (...) Finally, I consider potential policy reforms in response to this injustice. (shrink)

Theological education in Aotearoa New Zealand has developed within the structures of whiteness which inhibit the flourishing of indigenous students. This article employs Willie Jennings’s work, especially from After Whiteness, as an analytical frame to interpret the experience of a wahine Māori (an indigenous woman) student and her Pākehā (European) supervisor during the completion of her capstone integrative theology project at Carey Baptist College in Aotearoa. This project, which intersected Māori knowledges with theology to develop a theological account of land, (...) unveiled the structural injustices that often prevent Māori from flourishing in theological education. We examine the historical legacy of theology's role in instituting educational injustice in Aotearoa and detail the shape this legacy takes in contemporary theological education. We reflect on our distinct experiences in the process of change undertaken to address some of the educational injustices and develop a form of assessment that enabled a Māori student to flourish as Māori. (shrink)

This article analyses arguments and concerns about the emergence of feelings of anger amongst students, when issues of injustice are encountered in the study of the subject civic education. The aim is to determine the extent to which such concerns supply grounds for regulating anger as counterproductive. In particular, it is argued that to encourage students to forgo all feelings of anger that might be aroused by issues of injustice that students have encountered in civic education—in the name (...) of positive psychology and students’ well-being—not only constitutes a form of ‘affective injustice’, but also unfairly asks students to engage in harmful emotion regulation that reproduces existing exclusions. A crucial task for civic education is to provide learning spaces in which teachers and students can explore the affective complexities of political anger and its consequences. (shrink)

When you expect something bad to happen, you take action to avoid it. That is the principle of action that underlies J. Y. Lee’s recent paper (2021), which presents a new form of epistemic injustice that arises from anticipating negative consequences for testifying. In this brief reply article occasioned by Lee’s essay, I make two main contributions to the discussion of this idea. The first (§§2–3) is an intervention in the discussion between Lee and Eric Bayruns García regarding the (...) relationship between anticipatory epistemic injustice and Kristie Dotson’s concept of testimonial smothering. The second (§§4–5) is to expand the concept of anticipatory epistemic injustice into the educational context, and to illuminate yet another form of anticipatory epistemic injustice, which I call anticipatory zetetic injustice (§6). (shrink)

What it means to be a knower together with the social practices through which we come to know are irreducibly complex ethical concepts (Congdon, 2018). Extant analyses of epistemic injustice typica...

Since the publication of Miranda Fricker’s seminal book Epistemic Injustice, philosophy of education scholarship has been mostly limited to analyses of culprit-based epistemic injustice in education. This has left structural manifestations relatively underexplored with great detriment to those who are most vulnerable to experience such injustice. This paper aims to address this oversight and open avenues for further research by exploring approaches to theorizing structural epistemic injustice in education and envisioning efficacious remedies. The author identifies three (...) approaches: one that focusses on educational institutions; one that focusses on institutional processes that impact educational outcomes; and one that focusses on epistemological processes that are internal to education. Whilst the approaches differ as to their explanatory power and ease of implementation, it is argued that all three demonstrate that epistemic injustice in education is often the result of structural factors which cannot be attributed to individual epistemic agents. The author concludes by suggesting that educational philosophers must examine each of these approaches in greater depth to make significant progress in disrupting the impact of epistemic injustice in education. (shrink)

In South Africa there is widespread recognition amongst university educators that the new outcomes‐based education system can prevent instrumental thinking, particularly in view of OBE's agenda to encourage critical learning. However, what these educators do not necessarily take into account is that many students are not always ready to deal with critical learning because of the apparent persistence of instrumental thinking at some universities in South Africa. Simply put, many students seem to be quite willing to be taught about some (...) of the ends of education, rather than the reasons behind these ends. With this idea of desired student learning in mind, in this article, I argue that it has become necessary to fulfil the promise of democratic justice on the African continent through educating for friendship, rather than perpetuating uncritical modes of learning which could further extend the violation of human dignity on the African continent. Reflecting on several moments in my classroom pedagogy and conversations with colleagues at different universities, I firstly argue that critical learning cannot be blind to prescriptiveness, since students have to be made attentive in some way to the public realm of a democratic post‐apartheid South Africa and post‐colonial Africa. In short, they have to be taught what it means to be democratically just. Thereafter, I argue that teaching students about democratic justice can entail critical learning and, hence, be non‐instrumental, provided that university educators become more responsible educators. Finally, I examine how actions can potentially fulfil the democratic justice project, the success of which is so desperately needed on the African content. (shrink)

What an honor to have political and educational theorists of such caliber take up ideas from my work! What a daunting task to try to respond! My remarks will touch on the following questions: What are some key issues of distributive justice in education today? Why does defining justice in terms of oppression and domination imply that issues of justice cannot be reduced to distribution? How does normalization constitute a major process enacting oppression, and what does this imply for (...) education? What does it mean to include marginalized groups in economic opportunity and democratic process, and how can educational institutions foster such inclusion? Why do issues of religion and other forms of cultural expression belong to a distinct category of justice? Are values of freedom of expression and tolerance in tension with the project of democratic inclusion? How shall we consider transnational issues of educational justice? (shrink)

The 2007 publication of Miranda Fricker’s celebrated book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing gave way to a burgeoning area of study in philosophy of education. The book’s arguments create a context for expanding the scope of work on epistemic issues in education by moving beyond direct explorations of the distribution of epistemic goods and the role of power in curriculum development. Since that time, the rich scholarship on epistemic injustice in philosophy of education examines a (...) variety of topics, including the impact of epistemic injustice on the experiences of teachers and learners more broadly (focussing mostly on students who are marginalized along lines of race, gender, class, and ability, amongst others) and the implications of epistemic injustice for educational research, policy, and practice. This special issue extends this line of work by compiling a set of articles that address a broad range of topics, some of which are well established in the literature and some of which open new lines of inquiry in the field. In doing so, the issue aims to establish the intersection of epistemic injustice and education as a distinct area of study that holds great significance and potential. In this paper, A. C. Nikolaidis and Winston C. Thompson introduce the issue by discussing these contributions, explaining why education is central to the study of epistemic injustice (and vice versa), and exploring the complex nature of epistemic injustice and education as revealed in the articles that comprise this collection—namely, education’s simultaneous complicity as a perpetrator and promise as a disruptor of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

This book argues that the mainstream view and practice of critical thinking in education mirrors a reductive and reified conception of competences that ultimately leads to forms of epistemic injustice in assessment. It defends an alternative view of critical thinking as a competence that is normative in nature rather than reified and reductive. This book contends that critical thinking competence should be at the heart of learning how to learn, but that much depends on how we understand critical thinking. (...) It defends an alternative view of critical thinking as a competence that is normative in nature rather than reified and reductive. The book draws from a conception of human reasoning and rationality that focuses on belief revision and is interwoven with a Bildung approach to teaching and learning: it emphasises the relevance of knowledge and experience in making inferences. The book is an enhanced, English version of the Italian monograph Epistemologia dell’Educazione: Pensiero Critico, Etica ed Epistemic Injustice. (shrink)

This paper explores the philosophical concept of epistemic injustice and contends its significance and relevance to mental health nurse education and clinical practice. The term epistemic injustice may be unfamiliar to mental health nurses, yet the effects are readily visible in the dismissing, silencing, and doubting of service users’ knowledge, testimony, and interpretation. Existing professional values and clinical standards lack depth and critical exploration pertaining to epistemology and associated ethical concerns. Despite central tenets of person-centred care and valuing (...) the service users’ voice, epistemic injustice continues to occur. Epistemic injustice cannot be summed up merely by asking nurses to listen to service users. This represents an oversimplification of epistemology, ignoring the complexities of social influence and knowledge exchanges. Epistemic injustice brings something new and innovative to the nursing curriculum and fits within the principles of heutagogy. It encourages deep reflexivity surrounding the ethical issues of power inequalities and intersectionality. Inclusion in mental health nursing education allows for the social and political powers of psychiatric diagnosis as a form of silencing and stigma to be examined. Practical application is made to mental health nursing education and practice with epistemological values and ethical reflexive prompts. These can be utilised by educators and lecturers for pre-registration mental health nurse education, post-registration, and continued professional development. (shrink)

In this paper, Caitlin Murphy Brust and Rebecca Taylor examine the responsibilities of college educators to resist conditions of epistemic injustice within their institutions. Pedagogy alone cannot bring about epistemic justice in higher education, for no individual epistemic agent can single-handedly transform their epistemic environment. The roots of such injustices are structural and thus require structural interventions. However, college educators do retain some agency to engage in epistemic resistance. Brust and Taylor argue that they can and should take steps (...) to foster just relations within the epistemic communities of their classrooms — calling for pedagogy that both recognizes the unjust features of the broader epistemic environment and responds to the unique forms of epistemic injustice that manifest in the classroom, with particular attention to seminar-style courses. (shrink)

In this paper I individuate and analyse a new type of epistemic injustice that can arise in education and depends on the so-called ‘backtracking fallacy’ in student assessment, which occurs when a teacher confuses (or does not distinguish between) the logical dimension of a framework of disciplinary concepts and its psychological dimension. I will also touch upon a different type of social injustice that might transpire in education. I suggest that familiarity with Paul Hirst's view of liberal education, (...) which presupposes a neat distinction between a public framework of knowledge and the psychological process of gradually learning it, can contribute to prevent or reduce both forms of injustice. (shrink)

This essay argues that prediction markets, as one approach for aggregating dispersed private information, may not only be praised for their epistemic accuracy. They also feature characteristics that are morally desirable from the point of view of epistemic justice. Notably, they are a promising approach when we are trying to address testimonial injustice. The impersonality of market transactions effectively tackles the issue of identity prejudice, which underlies many forms of testimonial injustice. This is not to say that prediction (...) markets do not pose challenges for epistemic justice of their own like the risk of excluding knowers based on ability to pay. Or, in light of identity prejudice’s systematicity, the risk of discouraging some knowers because of differences in education or social background that lead to a certain unease when faced with prediction markets. The essay discusses these challenges, concedes limitations but also offers countermeasures to certain worries – e.g. hosting prediction markets on a play-money basis. Throughout, the essay addresses the question of the potential scope of using prediction markets for epistemic purposes, notably by means of the practical example of a prediction market for monetary policy. (shrink)

This article examines some aspects of the entanglement between aesthetic injustice and epistemic injustice, paying special attention to how aesthetic injustice can be resisted in the classroom. The article brings into conversation Boal’s notion of aesthetic injustice with Rancière’s work on the overlapping of aesthetics and politics to suggest that a truly democratic education must work on the level of senses, so that students learn how to identify and resist aesthetic injustice in their everyday lives. (...) Specifically, it is argued that the democratic potential of education is inextricably linked to resisting aesthetic and epistemic injustice in practice. The main point of the article is that resistance to aesthetic injustice in the classroom operates as an instance of politics that mobilizes struggle against oppression. In this sense, the nature of political work conducted in democratic education is to undo the oppressive distribution of the senses. (shrink)

Sociologists exploring educational injustice often focus on socio-economic segregation as a central measure of injustice. The comprehensive ideal, furthermore, has the idea of socio-economic integration built into it. The current paper argues that socio-economic segregation is valuable only insofar as it serves other, more fundamental values. This matters because sometimes policy-makers will find themselves facing trade-offs between increasing integration and promoting the other, more fundamental values that underpin the value of integration.

The authors argue that from the perspective of distributive justice, school district fragmentation—meaning both the existing reality of hyper-proliferated school districts and the practice of further breaking larger districts into smaller ones—produces three distinct injustices. First, it undermines racial solidarity and the bonds of community. Second, it violates the demands of procedural justice. And third, it leads to substantively unfair outcomes. Taken together, these concerns suggest that to create a more just educational system we ought to resist further fragmentation (...) and push for larger, more consolidated school districts coupled with progressive redistributive funding. To support this central normative argument, the article provides two justifications for conceptualizing education as a fundamental entitlement and its provision as a form of mutual aid. (shrink)

The article addresses the implications of Prevent and Channel for epistemic justice. The first section outlines the background of Prevent. It draws upon Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd’s concept of the collective imaginary, alongside Lorraine Code’s concept of epistemologies of mastery, in order to outline some of the images and imaginaries that inform and orient contemporary counter-terrorist preventative initiatives, in particular those affecting education. Of interest here is the way in which vulnerability is conceptualised in Prevent and Channel, in particular (...) the way in which those deemed ‘at risk of radicalisation’ are constituted as vulnerable and requiring intervention. The imaginary underpinning such preventative initiatives is, I argue, a therapeutic/epidemiological one. If attention is paid to the language associated with these interventions, one finds reference to terms such as contagion, immunity, resilience, grooming, virus, susceptibility, therapy, autonomy, vulnerability and risk—a constellation of images/concepts resonant with therapeutic and epidemiological theories and practices. I outline some of the implications of this therapeutic/epidemiological imaginary for epistemic injustice. If people, in this case, students, teachers and parents, feel that their voice will not be given credence, this leads to testimonial injustice. If one group is constituted as a suspect community, this risks hermeneutical injustice for that group—a situation facing Muslims at present. Given the requirements for educators and educational institutions to enact this particular iteration of preventative counter-terrorist legislation, the way in which vulnerability is understood and operationalised has direct bearing upon education and the educational experience of all stakeholders, in particular in relation to the conditions for epistemic justice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT There is growing interest in epistemic injustice and its connection to education. However, the relation between social studies and epistemic injustice has not yet been adequately explored and this topic has been given insufficient attention by social studies educators. But it is regarded as an important resource for students who are socially disadvantaged to render their experiences intelligible. However, due to its unique status, it has also been an effective tool for those who are in power and (...) want to maintain social inequalities. For that reason, social studies is the subject most likely to give rise to epistemic injustice in the classroom. In this paper, we address this issue that is currently coming to the fore in social studies. We argue that cultivating moral sensitivity plays a substantive role in overcoming epistemic injustice and this cultivation comes with shaping student’s schemas by integrating the interpretive resources into social studies. (shrink)

Tolstoy had a lifelong interest in education and philosophy. However, he was suspicious of using philosophy as a foundation for educational practice or applying philosophy to the educational problems of his day, most importantly, the development of an education system in Russia around the time of the emancipation of the serfs. Tolstoy’s rejection of the philosophy of education arose from his concerns about what would be identified in contemporary terminology as ‘epistemic injustice’ or ‘epistemicide’. How could European (...) philosophy inform a curriculum and pedagogy for the Russian peasantry when the peasants’ own forms of knowledge were more valuable to their ways of life? Tolstoy sought to answer this question by engaging with children in peasant schools. This experience informed the development of his own worldview, articulated in the latter years of his life—a vision of uniting the insights of indigenous peoples from various times and places to inform what he considered to be the pursuit of authentic knowledge. This article considers Tolstoy’s apparent rejection of the philosophy of education, exploring how this seemingly bombastic position led to the evolution of an innovative meta-philosophy that offers some contribution to thinking about contemporary educational problems. (shrink)

This article describes the causes and health consequences of environmental degradation and social injustice. These issues, which impact primarily on the poor and underserved (both in the United States and internationally) are rarely or inadequately covered in the curriculums of traditional health care professions. The discussion offers ways for health care professionals to promote equality and justice and uses the example of Rudolph Virchow’s social activinsm to illustrate how one physician can lead society toward major public health gains. There (...) is also an examination of the roles of institutions and organisations in enhancing environmental preservation and promoting social justice. Specific curricular suggestions from history and the humanities are offered for those teaching and mentoring new health professionals. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The academic discussion concerning justice in education tends to center around questions of equal educational opportunity and the distribution of educational resources. This paper responds to a special issue which collects different approaches to educational justice that move beyond the boundaries set by traditional, hegemonic perspectives in the field. I point to some important strands in which the different papers converge and outline how they attempt to produce a shift in the understanding of educational justice; (...) how they bring into view and touch upon ways of thinking through educational justice which have previously not received attention or been obscured by more conventional paradigms. Different papers do this in different ways, but there is a joint effort to self-critically turn philosophy onto itself as well as a common tendency towards what could be called a shift beyond discourse towards more worldly, materialistic, bodily and embodied notions of justice and injustice. (shrink)

This paper explores how University as social entity has great potential to confront epistemic injustices by expanding epistemic capabilities. To do this, we primarily follow the contributions of scholars such as Miranda Fricker and José Medina. The epistemic capabilities and epistemic injustice nexus will be explored via two empirical cases: the first one is an experience developed in Lagos using participatory video; the second is a service learning pedagogical strategy for final year undergraduate students conducted at Universidad de Ibagué. (...) The Lagos experience shows how participatory action-research methodologies could promote epistemic capabilities and functioning, making it possible for the participants to generate interpretive materials to speak of their own realities. However, this experience is too limited to address testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. The Colombian experience is a remarkable experience that is building epistemic capabilities among students and other local participants. However, there is a hermeneutical and structural injustice that tends to give more value to disciplinary and codified knowledge at the expense of experiential and tacit knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper I individuate some important differences between formal inference and material inference and how they affect two different ways of understanding human reasoning. I will claim that understanding reasoning as characterised by formal inference can generate epistemic injustice in education. To explain this claim, I will go through two examples of errors in evaluation. In the first one—the “shelves case” — I will show how epistemic injustice generates oppression because it does not take into account the (...) difference generated by the consideration of individuals as concrete individuals rather than abstract individual or “the generalised other”. I will contend that given the nature of human reasoning, thought is not reducible to "logical" reasoning but rather requires knowledge of conceptual contents. In the second example—the “Backtracking fallacy”—I will contend that a fallacy in assessment procedures may arise from the lack of distinction between the "public" framework of knowledge and individual epistemic states. From what will emerge about the two examples, the importance of the transmission of cultural heritage, in the form of knowledge and content, also as the sets of inferences involving concepts, will be seen. For it becomes necessary to set aside the misleading idea that these legacies are mere conceptual structures that have always been implicitly present in the student’s mind, and that it is sufficient to stimulate the student’s mind to make them explicit. -/- . (shrink)

We observed that despite international declarations on child-rights, outsourced domestic girl-child labour still persists. Raising the question whether outsourced domestic girl-child labour constitutes hermeneutical injustice, we respond affirmatively. Relying on two indigenous victimology-narratives that are newspaper reports, we expose some of the horrors that the victims of outsourced domestic girl-child labour suffer. Comparing these reports with other victimology-narratives of hermeneutical injustice as reported by Miranda Fricker and Hilkje Hänel, we argue that the victims of outsourced domestic girl-child labour (...) suffer a hermeneutical gap and hermeneutical interference; and that the perpetuators of this practice, help to foster what we call ‘hermeneutical obstruction’. We recommend different counteracting measures such as: a radical feminization of educational curricula, which will allow for the introduction of the relevant hermeneutical resources that female children need in making sense of their experiences, into the classrooms and other places of learning; establishing feminist liberation agencies in all schools, religious institutions and hospitals, as ways of increasing the level of awareness about the rights of the girl-child in children and adults; feminizing legislation and legislative processes, to allow for the enactment of laws to protect the rights of the girl-child; and campaigning for a more rigorous enforcement of child-rights laws. (shrink)

For Martin, the right to free higher education may be claimed only by those ready and willing pursue autonomy supporting higher education. The unready and unwilling, among whom may be counted carers, disabled, and devout, are excluded. This is unjust. I argue that this injustice follows from a tension between three elements of Martin’s argument: (1) a universal right to autonomy supporting higher education; (2) qualifications on entitlements to access this right in order to preserve the value of higher (...) educational goods; (3) luck egalitarian motivations in Martin’s distributive ethics. I consider options for avoiding such injustices and their implications for Martin’s argument. (shrink)

Does the imperative that we ought to try to understand one another make any sense? Presumably not – if it is correct that there are indeed different truths, and that the quest for objectivity is appropriate only in certain cultural contexts. After carefully mapping out the epistemological and ethical terrain, with special reference to the notions of ‘outsider understanding’, ‘other ways of knowing’ and epistemic injustice, this article presents a case for outsider critique. Education for belief and commitment necessarily (...) includes education for understanding. Given our shared humanity, with many overlapping facets that make up our identities, and considering that the standard arguments against outsider understanding fail to stand up to critical scrutiny, this arguably also paves the way for the possibility of critical interrogation ‘from the outside’. Such interrogation should display virtues such as sensitivity, patience, perseverance, imagination, empathy and open-mindedness – and should be guided by an honest attempt at understanding. (shrink)

Sexuality injustice differs significantly in form from racial and gender injustice. Because persons who are gay or lesbian can evade being publicly identified and treated as gays or lesbians, sexuality injustice does not consist, as racial and gender injustice does, in the disproportionate occupation of disadvantaging and highly exploitable places in the socio-economic structure. Instead, sexuality injustice consists in the displacement of homosexuality and lesbianism to the outside of society. I examine, in particular, (1) the (...) production of society as heterosexual through the requirement that all citizens adopt a real or pseudonymous heterosexual identity as a condition of access to the public sphere; (2) the reproduction of heterosexual society through legal, psychiatric, educational, and familial practices whose aim is to prevent future generations of lesbian and gay people; and (3) the legitimation of heterosexual society through the construction of criminalizing stereotypes of gay and lesbian identity. (shrink)

Technologies that deploy data science methods are liable to result in epistemic harms involving the diminution of individuals with respect to their standing as knowers or their credibility as sources of testimony. Not all harms of this kind are unjust but when they are we ought to try to prevent or correct them. Epistemically unjust harms will typically intersect with other more familiar and well-studied kinds of harm that result from the design, development, and use of data science technologies. However, (...) we argue that epistemic injustices can be distinguished conceptually from more familiar kinds of harm. We argue that epistemic harms are morally relevant even in cases where those who suffer them are unharmed in other ways. Via a series of examples from the criminal justice system, workplace hierarchies, and educational contexts we explain the kinds of epistemic injustice that can result from common uses of data science technologies. (shrink)

In recent years, a significant body of literature has emerged on the subject of epistemic injustice: wrongful harms done to people in their capacities as knowers. Up to now this literature has ignored the role that attention has to play in epistemic injustice. This paper makes a first step towards addressing this gap. We argue that giving someone less attention than they are due, which we call an epistemic attention deficit, is a distinct form of epistemic injustice. (...) We begin by outlining what we mean by epistemic attention deficits, which we understand as a failure to pay someone the attention they are due in their role as an epistemic agent. We argue that these deficits constitute epistemic injustices for two reasons. First, they affect someone’s ability to influence what others believe. Second, they affect one’s ability to influence the shared common ground in which testimonial exchanges take place. We then outline the various ways in which epistemic attention deficits harm those who are subject to them. We argue that epistemic attention deficits are harms in and of themselves because they deprive people of an essential component of epistemic agency. Moreover, epistemic attention deficits reduce an agent’s ability to participate in valuable epistemic practices. These two forms of harm have important impacts on educational performance and the distribution of resources. Finally, we argue that epistemic attention deficits both hinder and shape the development of epistemic agency. We finish by exploring some practical implications arising from our discussion. (shrink)

In a climate of growing intolerance and violence, marked by various forms of injustice across the democratic world, human rights and democratic citizenship education have the potential to help cultivate knowledge, values and skills or competences in the young that are necessary to foster a culture of human rights and democracy. However, education about, through and for human rights and democracy needs to be critical and transformative by going beyond delivering content knowledge and prescribing values to practically developing distinctly (...) democratic habits and dispositions. We argue that the Community of Philosophical Inquiry as developed by Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp can contribute to creating a human rights and democratic culture by facilitating democratic experiences and the co-construction of knowledge through dialogue. This pedagogic process can be used to confront prejudices, discrimination, and violence as well as to address the problems of alienation facing young people today. (shrink)

This profound resource extends the concept of education as a human right to propose lasting solutions to educational disparities worldwide. Its multiperspective analysis probes the roots of educational inequities in recent and longstanding economic divisions, cultural domination, and political injustice, framing equal access to meaningful learning as a core aspect of a humane society. Characteristics of Educational Leaders without Borders (ELWB) are defined, and the challenges of their mission are examined in global context, from education of (...) girls in the Middle East to internet access in Haiti to the complex situation of U.S. minority students. In addition, an overview of historical precedents for ELWB in the work of Dewey and others helps to illuminate pressing issues that must be addressed by current and future humanistic leaders to improve educational access for the world's children. Among the topics covered: Education without nationalism: locating leadership when borders no longer hold. Toward a metanoia of global educational leadership. Teaching, technology, and transformation. The unique challenges of education in emerging West African countries. The economics of globalization in higher education. The transnational context of schooling. Educators, education researchers, and policymakers in education will welcome the clear-minded realism and ethically robust agenda found in Educational Leaders without Borders. (shrink)

At a Body Worlds exhibition, human corpses are displayed as museum pieces for educational purposes. The bodies are preserved by plastination, a technique invented by Gunther von Hagens and engineered at the Institute for Plastination in Heidelberg, Germany. Because of the wide controversy surrounding the displays, it is necessary to study how justice obtains. Understood from a Thomistic perspective, the use of a plastinate by Body Worlds is unjust because it dishonors the donor. The goodness of that use fails (...) in terms of object, end, and circumstance. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.4 (Winter 2010): 667–676. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that epistemic injustice can result from transformative learning. Transformative learning causes a radical change in the structure of a student’s personal epistemic resources to bring them in line with the structure of a discipline’s shared epistemic resources. When those shared epistemic resources are biased, this transformation prevents students from retaining aspects of their personal epistemic resources which it is strongly in their interests (as well as in the interests of the broader epistemic community) to (...) retain. In these cases, transformative learning causes epistemic injustice in the form of inferential injustice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Activists and writers on injustice have highlighted as a structural problem that injustice is experienced differentially. What injustices of privilege lie hidden in my daily academic life? Three deeply discomforting moments relating to Class, climate, and Whiteness privilege, form the core of an account of gradually admitting to my passive acceptance of injustice in the form of privileges from which I benefit. My ignorance has perpetuated privilege despite this not being my conscious will. From this crisis, (...) the paper explores the inner work for healing injustice individually, and the outer work of changing collective habits of dominance within the Academy. A starting point is befriending my will to injustice and facing up to my privileges. Effort needed from White, Middle Class academics ‘like me’ includes uncovering ways in which we benefit from privilege whether or not we want to. Proposals are made for inner growth through building community among academics. (shrink)

The question of our educational obligations to disadvantaged students has typically been conceptualized using the language of achievement gaps: how and to what extent should we ameliorate gaps between students in terms of their attainment of certain valuable outcomes that are correlated with education? Recently, some have argued that the language of achievement gaps is misconceived and problematic, and that we should instead conceptualize our obligations to students as an education debt that is owed to certain disadvantaged students as (...) descendants of historic and structural injustices. Underlying this argument is a deeper conviction that the moral requirement to bring about a fair patterned distribution of educational outcomes is constrained by an obligation to rectify historical injustices. By conceptualizing the issue as a debt, rather than a gap (the argument goes), we can keep the priority of historical obligations squarely on the table. In this article, I defend the conceptual framework of achievement gaps in primary and secondary education by arguing that patterned principles of educational justice are not constrained by any claims and obligations that arise in virtue of historic injustices. (shrink)

In this article we challenge the notion that diversity serves as a good proxy for educational justice. First, we maintain that the story about how diversity might be accomplished and what it might do for students and society is internally inconsistent. Second, we argue that a disproportionate share of the benefits that might result from greater diversity often accrues to those already advantaged. Finally, we propose that many of the most promising and pragmatic remedies for educational injustice (...) are often rejected by liberal proponents of “diversity first” in favor of remedies that in most cases are practically impossible, and often problematic on their own terms. We argue that schools that are by geography and demography not ethnically or socioeconomically diverse still can successfully confront the obstacles that their students face in creating a life they have reason to value. (shrink)

In this article, James Joshua Coleman and Jon Wargo interrogate the (queer) child as a concept and specter that haunts civic life in the United States. Whereas scholars across a range of fields and standpoints have questioned the value of LGBTQ+ inclusion in public school curricula, and society more broadly, together Coleman and Wargo wonder at the capacity of civics education to include queer (as opposed to LGBTQ+) citizens within the cis-straight nation-state. To explore this possibility, they read across two (...) bills: (1) H.R. 9197 (Stop the Sexualization of Children Act), and (2) Illinois House Bill 246 (Inclusive Curriculum Law). In so doing, they highlight how the (Queer) Child operates as an organizing binary logic within these bills and examine how hermeneutical injustice impedes the formation of a truly queer civics education. Specifically, Coleman and Wargo demonstrate how hermeneutical injustice limits the nature of inclusion for LGBTQ+ citizens, both for exclusionary, anti-LGBTQ+ policy and for seemingly inclusive legislation. Pointing to scenes that demonstrate hermeneutical justice and queer survivance, they conclude by suggesting the construction of a queer civics education that stands outside the binary logics of the cis-straight nation-state. (shrink)

In her groundbreaking text Epistemic Injustice, Miranda Fricker evaluates types of harms incurred by individuals undergoing unrecognized and inarticulable oppression. At issue in epistemic and hermeneutic injustice are prejudicial comportments to and evaluations of reality. In the following, I focus on hermeneutic and epistemic injustice in relation to the formation of intellectual and ethical virtues. When reading Fricker and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics together, there is a clear pathway to improve ethical development. In particular, ethical development ought to (...) cultivate the proper virtues that promote understanding. Gadamer’s emphasis on the qualities of a researcher and the epistemic virtues that Fricker highlights reveal an educative path for addressing injustice. In other words, cultivating these virtues counteracts injustice wherein recognition and articulation of reality is challenged or at issue. (shrink)