Ep-i-what? Using The Force to Understand Epistemicide

Beth Patin and Melinda Sebastian

In a galaxy very close to here and not too long ago, while evaluating research presentations, a peer critiqued one candidate, “I don’t understand why she talked about herself so much in the beginning. This isn’t a biography; she should have just focused on her research.” I heard growing mumbles of agreement. So, I interjected: “I’m not a critical scholar but I understand critical methodology; that wasn’t a biography, it was her positionality.”

Positionality “describes an individual’s worldview and the position they adopt about a research task and its social and political context” (Holmes, 2020, p. 1) and is a fundamental aspect of Indigenous, feminist, and critical methodologies. I walked out of that meeting and knew there was some type of injustice happening but I just did not know what to name it. Eventually, I found the concept I was looking for: epistemicide (Santos, 2014). Say it with me: ep-i-stem-i-cide. Epistemicide is the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a way of knowing (Patin et al., 2020). 

Framing Epistemicide

Interrupting Epistemicide (Patin et al., 2021) is about epistemology; more accurately, it’s about the injustices we experience as we are developing and exercising our epistemologies. Epistemology is the study of “philosophical problems in concepts of knowledge and truth” (Hill Collins, 1990, para 1). In other words, epistemology is concerned with what we know, our ways of knowing, and how we know at all. Epistemic injustices (Fricker, 2008), then, are those transgressions people experience on their path to knowing. If these injustices are not interrupted or corrected, we are at risk of epistemicide: the devaluation or annihilation of particular ways of knowing. Worse still, if these kinds of injustices persist, they radiate out from individuals to the collective and eventually cause harm to generations when particular ways of knowing are forcibly lost or erased this way.

So, why should information professionals care about epistemicide? Well, the nature of our work means that we are gatekeepers of knowledge and information, not just for our field of study but for ALL the fields. This means without a close and critical examination of how our policies and practices harm individuals’, or entire communities’, ways of knowing, we contribute to people experiencing epistemic injustices and thus to epistemicide. Patin et al.’s (2021) contribution to Fricker’s grounding work on the first and second harms is the Third Harm, which outlines the generational impact particular of epistemic injustice.

A new PhD student misses the opportunity to study with a scholar whose work wasn’t given space or acknowledged as part of the accepted and dominant paradigm of knowledge. That process is repeated and compounded for generations, and that knowledge and any potential discoveries are lost along with it. This concept is fundamental to understanding why epistemicide is so important and why it has so much potential to harm our ways of knowing.

Understanding Epistemic Injustices

It’s important that we understand different types of epistemic injustices so that we can identify these transgressions and so that we can interrupt and stop them. Interrupting Epistemicide (Patin et al., 2021) discusses four unique types of epistemic injustices: testimonial, hermeneutical, participatory, and curricular. To better understand the manifestations of each injustice, we will look to Star Wars and contemplate what form injustices can take, who experiences or proliferates harm, and why good intentions do not go far enough as an ethical position for the gatekeepers of knowledge.

Testimonial Injustice

Testimonial injustice happens when we don’t give someone enough credit when they share their experiences or testimony. When we devalue someone’s narrative or actual testimony because of a bias, we may or may not realize that we have done so. In Episode II, Senator Padmé and Gregar’s concerns about an attempt on her life are initially dismissed, to the point that even Gregar questions their validity, stating, “I guess I was wrong. There was no danger at all.” However, the authority of their testimony becomes clear when Senator Padmé’s ship is blown up in front of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxf7be8QbPM