Epistemic Justice and Injustice in Social Contexts

Epistemic justice concerns the fair distribution of credibility, interpretative resources and opportunities to participate in knowledge practices. Epistemic injustice manifests when individuals or groups are unfairly marginalised in communicative exchanges or when collective voices are suppressed by dominant power structures. Two principal forms are recognised: testimonial injustice, where prejudicial stereotypes diminish the credibility of a speaker, and hermeneutical injustice, where social structures deny a group the resources to make sense of their own experiences. Beyond these, scholars have identified systemic dimensions, including linguistic injustice and the erasure of entire knowledge traditions. Such injustices arise across domains as diverse as healthcare, sustainable development, artificial intelligence, education and international politics. Their effects range from misdiagnosis and disempowerment in clinical settings to the undermining of community‐led solutions for environmental challenges. Recent work emphasises both individual and collective remedies, from enhancing epistemic agency through participatory methods to redesigning institutional protocols that shape who counts as a knower. The field increasingly explores the interplay between ethical imperatives and epistemological norms, demonstrating that redressing epistemic harm is vital for social cohesion, innovation and the pursuit of global equity.

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Epistemic Justice and Injustice in Social Contexts publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in epistemic justice and injustice in social contexts across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Epistemic injustice: Unjust treatment or marginalisation of individuals or groups in knowledge‐related practices.

Testimonial injustice: Credibility deficit imposed on a speaker due to prejudicial attitudes.

Hermeneutical injustice: Structural gap in collective interpretative resources that hinders understanding and communication.

Epistemicide: Systematic destruction or suppression of entire knowledge traditions.

Automated hermeneutical appropriation: Algorithmic imposition of interpretative frameworks that override human understanding.

References

1. Doing epistemic justice in sustainable development: Applying the philosophical concept of epistemic injustice to the real world. Sustainable Development (2023).
2. From ethics to epistemology and back again: informativeness and epistemic injustice in explanatory medical machine learning. AI & SOCIETY (2024).
3. Automated opioid risk scores: a case for machine learning-induced epistemic injustice in healthcare. Ethics and Information Technology (2023).