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published on June 22, 2018
Ben Almassi
Epistemic Injustice and its Amelioration
Toward Restorative Epistemic Justice
Recent works by feminist and social epistemologists have carefully mapped the contours of epistemic injustice, including gaslighting and prejudicial credibility deficits, prejudicial credibility excesses, willful hermeneutical ignorance, discursive injustices, contributory injustice, and epistemic exploitation. As we look at this burgeoning literature, attention has been concentrated mainly in four areas in descending order of emphasis: (1) phenomena of epistemic injustice themselves, including the nature of wrongdoings involved, (2) attendant consequences and repercussions, (3) individual and structural changes for prevention or mitigation, and (4) restorative, restitutive, or retributive responses. This project urges greater attention to the last of these, and to that end offers a relational approach to epistemic justice drawing upon Margaret Walker’s work on moral repair and reparative justice. In developing and enacting better epistemic practices, how can such practices be made meaningfully restorative: not only recognizing the prospects for epistemic improvement, but responding to the perpetration and experience of epistemic injustice with effective epistemic amelioration?