Epistemic Injustice: Complicity and Promise in Education

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 (focusing mostly on students who are marginalized along lines of race, gender, class, and ability, among 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.