The Dynamics of Epistemic Injustice: Situating Epistemic Power and Agency

Every day in the context of work, school, family, or social interactions, we are constantly using, producing, and transmitting information and knowledge: answering a question, proposing an idea, writing a paper, using concepts and representations to interpret our personal experience or describe social interactions. 

To put it in philosophical terms, we are exercising our epistemic agency: that is, we are doing various things (‘agency’) with knowledge (‘epistemic’), such as using it, producing it, transmitting it. We exercise our epistemic agency successfully when we are adequately believed and understood as a result: that is, when we receive appropriate levels of credibility and intelligibility. However, individual and societal biases – related to our social identity, for instance – can interfere with the exercise of our epistemic agency. 

For example, someone may not believe me or fail to recognize my competence and abilities because I am a woman (i.e., I might receive diminished levels of credibility because of my interlocutors’ conscious or subconscious gender biases); or it might be difficult for me to convey my experience of disability because mainstream interpretive tools, such as concepts and social representations of disability, are inadequate to capture this marginalized experience, which as a result might remain largely misunderstood or misrepresented (i.e., I might receive diminished levels of intelligibility because of societal biases regarding disability in the mainstream pool of interpretive resources). 

Some individuals are given less credibility due to some feature of their identity (e.g. their gender) and this impacts their epistemic agency.

When individual or societal biases give rise to these sorts of credibility and intelligibility deficits, the person thereby faces epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice is problematic because it undermines individuals’ exercise of their epistemic agency, or their capacity to use, produce, or transmit knowledge, which is central to our everyday lives, interactions, and exchanges.

The foregoing is a very brief and therefore very general glimpse of the large literature on epistemic injustice that has developed since the publication of Miranda Fricker’s 2007 book, which introduced the term ‘epistemic injustice’. My new book, titled The Dynamics of Epistemic Injustice: Situating Epistemic Power and Agency, makes three main contributions to this important literature on epistemic injustice and agency.

As the above suggests, the literature has so far focused on propositional knowledge and verbal modes of expression: oral or written contributions, the (lack of) production, use, or understanding of certain concepts, and so on. Philosophers, however, also recognize other kinds of knowledge besides propositional knowledge (or knowing that), namely non-propositional or experiential knowledge, including practical knowledge (or knowing how) and tacit, embodied, or affective knowledge (or knowing what it’s like). 

The cover of Amandine Catala's
The Dynamics of Epistemic Injustice:
Situating Epistemic Power and Agency.

Yet very little has been said about the non-propositional dimensions of our epistemic agency, or about non-propositional forms of epistemic injustice. This is the first contribution of my book: it provides a pluralist account of knowledge, epistemic agency, and epistemic injustice that takes into account not only their propositional but also their non-propositional aspects.

The second contribution of the book is that it provides a systematic account of epistemic agency and epistemic power. The literature often asserts that epistemic injustice is problematic because it undermines epistemic agency, and that epistemic injustice involves differential allocations of epistemic power. But the literature says almost nothing about what exactly epistemic agency and epistemic power are. Yet many fascinating and crucial questions arise if we want to grasp these two notions more precisely. 

The book offers a systematic account of epistemic agency that specifies its objects, expressive modes, contributing factors, and different stages, as well as a systematic account of epistemic power that identifies three types of epistemic power along with their various sites and mechanisms at both the individual and the structural levels.

Finally, the third contribution of the book is that it starts from case studies that bring up new forms of epistemic injustice. These case studies include deliberative impasses in divided societies, colonial memory, academic migration, the underrepresentation of members of non-dominant groups in certain fields, the marginalization of minoritized minds like intellectually disabled people, and the underdiagnosing of autistic women. 

Examples of the new forms of epistemic injustice that these case studies reveal include meta-epistemic injustice, testimonial domination, hermeneutical domination, meta-epistemic filtering, linguistic epistemic injustice, and existential hermeneutical injustice, among others.

Together, these three contributions yield a more complete and precise picture of epistemic injustice, power, and agency, thereby equipping us to more effectively and thoroughly address problematic yet transformable dynamics of epistemic injustice.

Amandine Catala is a Full Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), where she holds the Canada Research Chair on Epistemic Injustice and Agency. She is a Senior Research Associate at the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science at the University of Johannesburg. Her research interests include epistemic injustice and agency, epistemic repair, neurodiversity, linguistic justice, and decolonization. Her book, The Dynamics of Epistemic Injustice: Situating Epistemic Power and Agency, was published by Oxford University Press in 2025.