TY - JOUR
T1 - Can theorising epistemic injustice help us decolonise?*
AU - Mitova, Veli
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2024
Y1 - 2024
N2 - The paper argues that some tools from the epistemic injustice literature can be fruitfully applied to the debate on epistemic decolonisation. The first step for such a project is to defuse recent misgivings about the liberatory potential of epistemic injustice scholarship. I group these misgivings under the slogan ‘Epistemic injustice is white-people stuff’, or ‘the WPS challenge’, for short, and use them to set desiderata for good theorising with epistemic injustice tools. I then look at three such tools–epistemic oppression, white ignorance, and contributory injustice–and argue that they advance theorising epistemic decolonisation while meeting the three desiderata. If the argument works, its implications for the topic of this special issue are that we don’t need to decolonise epistemic injustice; we can instead use the tools of the epistemic injustice literature to advance the decolonisation project.
AB - The paper argues that some tools from the epistemic injustice literature can be fruitfully applied to the debate on epistemic decolonisation. The first step for such a project is to defuse recent misgivings about the liberatory potential of epistemic injustice scholarship. I group these misgivings under the slogan ‘Epistemic injustice is white-people stuff’, or ‘the WPS challenge’, for short, and use them to set desiderata for good theorising with epistemic injustice tools. I then look at three such tools–epistemic oppression, white ignorance, and contributory injustice–and argue that they advance theorising epistemic decolonisation while meeting the three desiderata. If the argument works, its implications for the topic of this special issue are that we don’t need to decolonise epistemic injustice; we can instead use the tools of the epistemic injustice literature to advance the decolonisation project.
KW - Epistemic injustice
KW - contributory injustice
KW - epistemic decolonisation
KW - epistemic oppression
KW - white ignorance
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85188096855&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/0020174X.2024.2327489
DO - 10.1080/0020174X.2024.2327489
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85188096855
SN - 0020-174X
JO - Inquiry (United Kingdom)
JF - Inquiry (United Kingdom)
ER -