EPIC Seminar: Expertise, Lived Experience and Legal Processes

 Sheelagh McGuinness reports from an EPIC seminar in February 2026.

In February 2026 EPIC hosted the first in a series of seminars examining the relationship between legal processes and epistemic injustice. The event brought together researchers from philosophy, law, and social science to consider how legal and regulatory frameworks can exacerbate or ameliorate the epistemic marginalisation of those who engage with them.

Professor Lisa Bortolotti (EPIC/University of Birmingham) opened with a conceptual analysis of expertise and its relationship to epistemic injustice, arguing that expertise should be understood both in terms of the knowledge an individual possesses and as a form of performance in a particular environmental context. An agent may hold relevant expertise yet be unable to exercise it if the conditions necessary for effective performance are not in place. Examples include not being invited to contribute, if space constrains or excludes their perspective, or if their testimony is challenged or reframed without genuine engagement.

Bortolotti paid particular attention to experts by experience, focusing on people with lived experience of mental health services participating in healthcare research. She identified three stages at which such expertise may be obstructed: exclusion from participation entirely; inclusion on terms that do not permit meaningful contribution; and formal inclusion accompanied by insufficient uptake of testimony. Each stage, she argued, can be understood through existing concepts in the epistemic injustice literature, including participatory injustice and testimonial injustice.

You can read more about this research here.

Dr Lucy Series (University of Bristol) introduced the labyrinthine world of mental health and mental capacity law, offering an account of how lived experience has (or has not) shaped these frameworks in England and Wales. Series’ presentation began by outlining the commonly accepted distinction of mental health law as a coercive instrument and mental capacity law as a more benign mechanism for substitute decision‑making in a person’s best interests. She proceeded to detail the ways in which this distinction is inaccurate. In particular, she highlighted how the 2005 Mental Capacity Act can in practice authorise detention and involuntary treatment and often with fewer procedural safeguards than those available under the 1983 Mental Health Act.

Series traced the involvement of disabled people and mental health service users in shaping these legal frameworks over several decades. She concluded by considering the relationship between legal complexity and genuine participation. Where legal frameworks are highly technical and their implications difficult to foresee, consultation processes that do not invest in participant understanding risk generating outcomes that diverge sharply from what advocates intended. She closed by asking what structural conditions are necessary for expertise by experience to be genuinely incorporated into legal and regulatory processes.

The final presentation applied the conceptual frameworks outlined in earlier presentations to empirical research on bereaved families' experiences of two distinct legal processes: coroner's inquests and fitness to practise hearings. Professor Sara Ryan (Manchester Metropolitan University) presented findings from research with family members who had engaged with these processes following healthcare-related harm, including the deaths of relatives with learning disabilities or autism. You can read more about this research here.

Families reported entering these processes as relative novices, surrounded by professionals whose familiarity with procedural norms gave them significant epistemic advantage. Families were expected to provide instruction without understanding what that meant procedurally, leading to a form of disconnection that Ryan characterised as epistemic marginalisation. The fitness to practise hearings produced comparable difficulties including:

• witness statements were altered or reduced in scope without notification
• charges were revised between referral and hearing
• participants who had prepared to give evidence were informed at very short notice that their testimony was no longer required.

Some participants stated that they would not make a referral again and one described the fitness to practise process as more distressing than the bereavement itself.

Ryan concluded by emphasising how modest reforms, for example, clearer communication, named contacts, and acknowledgement of the person who died as an individual have the potential to meaningfully ameliorate epistemics injustices.

The event offered compelling insights into how epistemic injustice operates across healthcare, law, and regulatory practice. A consistent pattern emerged across all three contexts (through the obstruction of expertise by experience in clinical settings, the failure of legal frameworks to meaningfully incorporate the perspectives of those they affect, and the systematic marginalisation of bereaved families in coronial and fitness to practise processes). The people with the biggest stake in these processes are routinely denied the epistemic standing to influence them. Addressing this requires not only conceptual clarity about what epistemic justice demands but also sustained attention to the structural and institutional conditions that make genuine participation possible.

Sheelagh McGuinness

Sheelagh McGuinness is professor of law at the Centre for Health Law and Society, University of Bristol. Her research interests include the regulation of reproduction, and health law more generally. Sheelagh is currently a co-investigator on two projects: Epistemic injustice in healthcare funded by the Wellcome Trust and Reproductive Borders and Bordering Reproduction (RBBR): Access to Care for Women from Ethnic Minority and Migrant Groups funded by the AHRC. Sheelagh is a member of the Board of Trustees of the British Pregnancy Advisory Board (BPAS). 

Who knows what in mental health? The conference (part one)

Radboud University hosted a conference on 11th and 12th June 2025 examining the interplay between the study of epistemic injustice and the debates on expertise by experience in mental healthcare. This is a brief report of some of the talks presented on the first day of the conference.

From the poster of the event

Roy Dings (one of the organisers together with Linde van Schuppen and Derek Strijbos) kicked off the event with a brief introduction to the motivation for a more in-depth analysis of experiential knowledge.

Roy Dings on experiential knowledge

First keynote talk was by philosopher of science and psychiatry Şerife Tekin. She started her presentation discussing sources of knowledge in psychiatry, including intervention-oriented science, clinical practices, cognitive science research, and self-related resources (self-reports). Self-related phenomena have been traditionally undermined.

Şerife Tekin and the cover of her new book 

Tekin argued that one problem is that the self has not been considered a legitimate topic of psychiatric investigation and this suggests that studying the self is not scientific. Another problem is that self reports are considered to be unrealiable due to the wide presence of biases and confabulation. Next, there are concerns about internet self diagnosis (what Tekin calls the TikTok problem) as some people see their entire identity as defined by the diagnosis they have and this does not offer insight into their own specific experiences. Finally, there is an objectivity problem: it is often thought that self reports are subjective and don't deliver the type of knowledge we need.

Tekin proposed a new model to represent the various facets of the self in experiential experience (physical, social, conceptual, narrative, and experiential). This model is a model of the patient that can offer responses to all the challenges usually faced by experiential knowledge. Even if self reports by themselves have epistemic limitations, it is by engaging with such reports that we make progress with understanding what people are going through.

Dings on the Attuned Responsiveness framework

The next talk was by Roy Dings and Derek Strijbos. They started asking what an expert by experience can contribute: what is unique and valuable about their contribution. Dings observed that it is not easy to be explicit about what it is that we should add to experiential knowledge to obtain expertise. So he developed with Strijbos a new framework called Attuned Responsiveness. One element is responsiveness: things matter to different people in different ways (what we notice and why) and a number of factors can be relevant (biology, culture, experience, self-reflection).

The other element is attunement: this is about being responsive to other people's responsiveness (being open) and about being active (making an effort to bridge dissimilarities in responsiveness by asking questions). Attunement is a core aspect of everyday social expertise but between people with lived experience there may be fewer dissimilarities. So we should include people with lived experience in psychiatric knowledge because they notice the right things and find the right words.

Strijbos on how to reconcile different types of expertise

Strijbos argued that experiential knowledge is not just knowledge of one's own experience. It is the acquisition of perceptual and agential skills that bring epistemic benefits and have an impact on how one addresses problems. What experience does is increase attuned responsiveness, in a way that would be hard or impossible to achieve in other ways (with more depth and detail). This framework can also explain and help tackle conflict among experts: different experts can be responsive to different aspects of a situation.

After lunch, Themistoklis Pantazakos presented on the scope of epistemic injustice in psychiatry and discussed the debates about whether the construct is useful when applied to interactions between healthcare professionals and mental health patients. There is a lot of push back against the overapplication of the notion of epistemic injustice to the mental healthcare context, based on criticism about some cases that are considered paradigmatic.

Pantazakos on the debate on testimonial injustice

Pantazakos argued that testimonial injustice in psychiatry is predominantly about the person's phenomenological experience: the patient is an authority when it comes to what it is to be them. Most of the cases cited as cases of testimonial injustice in psychiatry are not cases of phenomenological epistemic injustice and they are not even cases of testimonial injustice so the notion of testimonial injustice is not compromised by the failure of these cases to be convincing.

Next talk was based on the methodological assumptions embedded in the political turn in analytic philosophy: the claim to be assumed is that lived experience enables the acquisition of knowledge and is authoritative, and the philosophical work is to explain why this is the case. The authors of the paper, Cristina Borgoni, Miguel Núñez de Prado, Manolo Pinedo, contended that neurodivergent people face systematic barriers in making contributions to collective knowledge. The discussion analysed some of these barriers. 

Miguel Núñez de Prado presenting at the conference

The more constructive part of the talk proposed that we move beyond the concept of experiential knowledge and focus on the pluralism of types of knowledge, using instead the concept of knowledge by lived experience. Knowledge by lived experience is a distinct type of knowledge that arises from having a specific lived experience although what is known may not be itself part of the experience. Often this involves interlocking self-knowledge and knowledge of a specific situation or condition. Authority comes from self-knowledge and standpoint: questioning self-knowledge attributions is an ethical and an epistemic wrong and there is no such thing as neutral reason-giving, so being perspectival is not just inevitable but constitutive of knowledge.

Lubomira Radoilska started with a quote from Elyn Saks' memoir, The centre cannot hold, to exemplify what expertise by experience might look like. This prompted a detailed analysis of lived experience as a form of knowledge by acquaintance that, in the mental health context, comes with a credibility deficit due to stigma. Calling lived experience a form of expertise could serve as a way to counter the deficit. But there are also cases (extracted testimony) in which drawing from lived experience as a source of authority means that the reporting of the experience in situations of duress is attributed a credibility excess, and outweighs independent, conflicting evidence.

Lubomira Radoilska on the zetetic model

Radoilska developed an account of a ‘zetetic’ initiative showing that a shift of focus toward norms of inquiry would better support a sustained resistance to epistemic oppression than further attention to general epistemic or evidential norms. This is because the zetetic initiative emphasises the ongoing exercises of epistemic agency by marginalised inquirers with lived experiences rather than their pre-existing experiential knowledge as a resource they could share with, or transfer to others. The notion does justice to the dynamic and creative aspects of epistemic advantage gained in circumstances of social marginalisation, in contrast to the static habits of thought that help maintain ignorance of social privilege, e.g., effortless belief that everything is as it appears to be.

Slide on empathy by Julian Kiverstein

The final talk of the day was by Julian Kiverstein who focused on the ameliorative project: how to improve the lives of people with mental illness. The starting point is that lived experience escapes operationalisation and psychiatric knowledge is based on operationalising mental disorders (e.g. in the DSM). So lived experience is the blind spot. One account Kiverstein challenges is that by Matthew Broome and Lucienne Spencer who criticise radical empathy as an appropriation. According to Kiverstein, radical empathy is not a case of appropriation but encompasses the skill of active listening, and the virtues of humility, curiosity, and diligence.

The discussion throughout the day was very inspiring and helped bridge different approaches to experiential expertise and different philosophical frameworks.

Who knows what in mental health? The project

In this post, Lisa Bortolotti interviews Roy Dings and Linde van Schuppen on their new project, Who knows what in mental healthcare. To stay tuned on their project, follow them on Bluesky, or join their LinkedIn group.

Doctor or patient: who is the expert?

Lisa: How did you get interested in “Who knows what in mental healthcare”? 

Roy: Trends such as democratization of knowledge and increasing distrust in traditional ‘experts’ have made the question of ‘Who knows what?’ in mental health care an urgent one. Dutch mental health care is rapidly transforming to integrate so-called ‘experts-by-experience’ in health practice and organization. But what does an expert-by-experience ‘know’?

I got particularly interested when my wife was asked to help set up a training program for expertise-by-experience at a university of applied science. When I’d ask her about it, she would regularly talk about ‘experiential knowledge’ and as a philosopher, I was immediately intrigued. I would ask “What do you mean by that?” but she, nor her colleagues, could give me an answer that I found satisfactory from a philosophical point of view. 

Recent studies confirm that definitions of experiential knowledge are typically lacking and, when provided at all, relatively uninformative. For instance, people may define experiential knowledge simply as ‘knowledge derived from personal experience’ or ‘knowledge that is lived through’. But what exactly is this kind of knowledge that we gain from experience, that cannot be obtained by reading a book, or practicing skill? What makes it so that it cannot be obtained in any other way? And to what extent can such knowledge be transferred to a person that has not lived the experience itself?

When I talked about these open questions with people in the field of expertise-by-experience, many of them seemed to cherish the ‘mysterious’ nature of experiential knowledge and found that answers could fundamentally not be put into words. Some added that I represented a ‘typical academic’ in my emphasis on conceptual rigor. They would sometimes discard what I had to say on the basis of me being an academic, and therefore a part of the system that the movement of expertise-by-experience is trying to change. I could understand this, and even felt that this was justified to some extent, but I also worried that this attitude (of being reluctant to elaborate on what is meant, precisely, with experiential knowledge) would be detrimental to the movement in the long-run.

At this point, I had already developed some strong intuitions myself – that expertise-by-experience is indeed vital to mental health care, that experts-by-experience do add something valuable, complementary and possibly unique. But I too struggled to explicate what this experiential knowledge consisted of. And so, as an ally, I felt that it had to be clarified in order to convince our ‘opponents’ (scientists or clinicians who are critical and dismissive about experiential knowledge ). Importantly though, given that experiential knowledge is ‘the new kid on the epistemic block’, I also felt that it was up to proponents of this concept to elucidate it. 

Linde: I had seen Roy working on the topic for a while before I joined the project. By that time, we had already had some lively discussions about the subject, and we still do! It is not a topic that is easily exhausted.

Linde van Schuppen

Lisa: What are the aims of the project?

Roy and Linde: The ultimate aim of our project is to provide some conceptual tools that allow various parties in mental health care to tackle implementational questions. The main question that people have been addressing has been something to the extent of ‘Should people with lived experience be included in mental health care, policy organization and science?’, where proponents respond with a ‘Yes, because they add experiential knowledge’, opponents counter with ‘No, their contribution remains unclear’. 

However, implementation-focused discussions take the affirmative answer as a given, and shift the emphasis to ‘HOW should we include people with lived experience’? That is, what roles should experts-by-experience play, exactly? How should disagreements between, for example, clinicians and experts-by-experience in practice be resolved? How can we substantiate the value of their input in everyday practice? In order to answer these questions, we need to understand what experiential expertise and knowledge consists of. 

In a recent paper, we distinguish between a descriptive and a normative challenge. The descriptive challenge is to clarify what the unique and complementary epistemic contribution is of people with lived experience, precisely. In other words, it aims to get clear on what experiential knowledge or expertise-by-experience consists of. In addition, the normative challenge asks how we should evaluate the contributions of people with lived experience. We think there are a number of normative issues related to expertise-by-experience that often get ignored in this field, such as whether and to what extent a person with lived experience can speak ‘on behalf of’ another group of people who have more or less similar experiences. 

Importantly, the project also aims to oscillate between fairly practical issues (such as implementation and suitable tasks for experts-by-experience) and theoretical ones (such as whether and to what extent can we disentangle strictly epistemological or phenomenological analyses from more political and ethical ones). For this reason, we are also very keen to connect to the EPIC project, given that epistemic injustice and expertise-by-experience have some interesting but underexplored connections.

This brings us to a last set of aims for our project: on the one hand, we are trying to ‘pioneer’ some of the dimensions of the phenomenon of expertise-by-experience. That is, rather than providing a ton of answers, we are also still in the phase of identifying the right questions. On the other hand, we are trying to bring together experts from a range of fields who have meaningful things to say about the complex phenomenon of expertise-by-experience (including phenomenologists, epistemologists, ethicists, but also clinicians, cognitive scientists and of course experts-by-experience). In order to enable the creation of this kind of epistemic community of sorts, we organize a variety of events, which we hope will result in establishing an international ‘network’ of interested and collaborating experts.

Lisa: Do you consider the project interdisciplinary? What are the methodological challenges you envisage?

Roy and Linde: We definitely consider the project to be interdisciplinary. We are combining many different points of view: different domains of philosophy, clinical perspectives, experts-by-experience and some narrative and cognitive linguistic theory as well. 

It is also interdisciplinary in a more methodological sense. For starters, it is philosophical, as it tries to elucidate the ways in which we can meaningfully connect experience to various forms of knowledge and expertise (e.g. by drawing on epistemology, phenomenology and philosophy of mind and science). But we are using qualitative empirical methods as well. 

Experts-by-experience can add a lot to scientific research practices – not only with regards to the substantive contributions they make to theory forming about that which they have experienced, but also since they might have specific sensitivities about what is relevant and meaningful when looking at data. We will be working with several experts-of-experience throughout our project, both in the role of fellow researchers, and as interviewees.

An obstacle that we aim to overcome by being interdisciplinary, is that lay people and experts-by-experience are obviously not ‘trained’ in e.g. epistemology (or abstract thinking in general). As a result, when you simply ask experts-by-experience about what experiential knowledge is according to them, then you either get responses that mimic what those experts-by-experience were told during training (as in this study), or you get mixed responses, where experts-by-experience disagree whether they should be called experts or possess knowledge at all (as in this study). 

These studies hinge on the premise that lay people are able to explicate and articulate a very abstract thing, namely to offer an account of what a certain type of knowledge consists of. Philosophers themselves have struggled with the question of what experience teaches for decades, so we cannot reasonably expect lay people to solve this puzzle on the spot. 

Now, our project aims to bypass this obstacle in two ways. First, we rely on semi-structured interviews to ask various parties (not only experts-by-experience, but also other mental health professionals) what they think experiential knowledge consists of, but ask a lot more (philosophy-based) follow-up questions. Second, and more importantly, we try to explicate what experts-by-experience implicitly think about experiential knowledge. On the one hand, we want to ask them to provide concrete examples of cases where they feel their experiential knowledge was of real added value, or where they experienced conflict between perspectives in everyday practice. 

We aim to deduce from those examples some characteristics of the knowledge at stake. On the other hand, we also aim to use tools from linguistics to analyze testimony of experts-by-experience, patients (i.e. who have not been trained as experts-by-experience) and professionals, to again explicate the epistemic contributions that are taken to be at stake. For instance, we are now exploring the use of linguistic ‘certainty markers’ to explore what claims experts-by-experience are more and less certain about with respect to certain elements of illness or recovery. The idea is that the more conviction we feel about a certain claim, the more we consider it to be knowledge.

Finally, we will have Nina de Boer starting an associated postdoc project in October. Nina will explore whether and to what extent we may clarify experiential knowledge with tools and concepts from complexity science, premised on the idea that experts-by-experience seem able to “grasp” the complexity involved in mental illness from a first-person or tacit perspective.

Roy Dings

Lisa: What impact would you like the project to have on mental healthcare? 

Roy and Linde: We hope that a more solid (conceptual) foundation for expertise-by-experience will allow for a significant and long-term impact on the field. It will enable us to establish the importance of an integration of experts-by-experience in mental health care and in the decision-making bodies of institutions. 

We also hope to help shape epistemic practices in a way that provides tools to experts-of-experience to navigate difficult contexts in their everyday work. The vague expectations that professionals have around their role, can result in uncomfortable situations for them. Experts-by-experience can for example be expected to speak for people they are not comfortable speaking for, or put on the spot in sharing vulnerable experiences in a context that doesn’t facilitate them feeling safe. 

Some clarity on why expertise-by-experience should be involved in task A and role B, but perhaps not in task A and role B (which are better left to other epistemic parties, such as professionals or scientists), or in what context certain roles ‘work’ for them as well, might help to improve this. 

We also hope that a solid conceptual foundation can help bring confidence to experts-of-experience in these situations, and in general: you have something very valuable to bring to the table, and it is not vague, or up for discussion, and you are the best person for this task.

Addressing Epistemic Injustice from the Perspectives of Health Law and Bioethics

In this post, Lisa Bortolotti reports from a symposium organised by Mark Flear to explore interdisciplinary perspectives (law, philosophy of psychiatry, bioethics, sociology, and more) on epistemic injustice. The event was hosted by City University on 15th September 2023. The report covers two sessions of the event. The third session featured talks by Anna Drożdżowicz (on epistemic injustice and linguistic exclusion); Miranda Mourby (on reasonable expectations of privacy in healthcare); and Neil Maddox and Mark Flear (on epistemic injustice and separated human biomaterials). 

The City Law School, venue of the symposium

David Archard (Queen’s University, Belfast) talked about lived experience and testimonial injustice. Lived experience is being increasingly used in debates on a number of controversial areas—as a source of special authority on a given subject. The appeal to lived experience often works in resisting claims that contradict lived experience. Is refusal to listen to lived experience a form of testimonial injustice? For Fricker, testimonial injustice when the speaker receives less credibility than they deserve. The credibility deficit is due to an identity prejudice in the hearer. Testimonial injustice can manifest in different forms (disbelief, ignoring, rejecting). Are statements of lived experience reliable? How do we establish that? What if the people with lived experience are deluded or mistaken about what has been experienced? Lived experience can be source of advice (consultative) or authority (authoritative). Reasons to consult are not necessarily reasons to consider lived experience authoritative. Also, there is an important difference between what lived experience is and what can be inferred from lived experience. Injustice is in not listening and not giving weight.

The second talk by Lisa Bortolotti focused on research with Kathleen Murphy-Hollies (both at the University of Birmingham) on curiosity as an antidote to epistemic injustice. Lisa and Kathleen talked about the complex history of curiosity in the philosophical literature from a sin to a virtue, and argued that curiosity can be both an epistemic virtue when people disposed to attain knowledge have some basic skills for pursuing curiosity, use their judgement, are well motivated, and find pleasure in the pursuit of curiosity. Lisa and Kathleen also suggested that curiosity can be a moral virtue when directed at other people as it can support enhanced mutual understanding. To argue their case, they discussed cases in which people’s experiences are contested and people’s views are marginalised and pathologized. In those cases, an interpreter being curious helps them better understand the speaker’s perspective. 

The third speaker was Jonathan Montgomery (University College London) discussed public reason and religious voices in judicial reasoning. Jonathan focused on cases where courts and parents disagree on whether life support should be stopped for children. Often parents are motivated by religious views in arguing that life support should continue. Other cases are where a medical treatment or intervention is not wanted by the family due to religious convictions (e.g., refusing a blood transfusion that may be life saving). Are the courts dismissive of parents’ perspectives? Is there a shared reality that is misunderstood by one party and not the other? How are credibility markers distributed? Jonathan reviewed a number of interesting and controversial cases where there are several epistemic issues at play, including risk assessment and disability discrimination. How to address these problems? One suggestion is to avoid the court and try mediation first, on the assumption that less epistemic injustice occurs in a mediation effort. Another suggestion is to think clearly about epistemic authority: is it medical competence or lived experience? Whose voice is going to be powerful in the given context? The presentation finished with a super interesting table detailing different ways of thinking about events as instances of epistemic injustice.

Next, Priscilla Alderson (University College London) focused on epistemic injustice in the context of children having major surgery. She reviewed how we moved from children themselves and parents too from being removed from care to important questions being raised about the role of parents and children in making healthcare decisions. Priscilla’s research with patients and surgeons suggests that it is key to obtain consent from children for surgery, even very young children. They can be explained what is happening to them—we can inform and involve them in the procedures and the reasons for them. A famous case of conjoined twins was examined in some detail: a Senegalese father was pressurised into agreeing to surgery to separate his daughters after being told that one of them would not survive due to her weaker heart. In the BBC programme on this case there was a clear emphasis on medical expertise and undermining the parent’s view and there was absolutely no reference to what the twins thought or wanted. Even the ethics committee’s intervention was not helpful as it did not include the concern about how the surviving child would have felt after surgery, realising that she was alive because of her sister’s sacrifice. Priscilla talked about the need for a more engaged and embodied bioethics.

Magda Furgalska (York Law School) contextualised epistemic injustice within mental health law research. In Magda’s research with people who experience credibility deficits in legal context, she found that many participants were surprised that she did not require to see medical records or other evidence to corroborate what they were saying. And also, when she presented her work at conferences, audiences often questioned whether research participants did tell her the truth. This emerges clearly in the context of issues about insight. Mental health patients are often experiencing a catch-22. For patients, it is not just a question of recognising that they are ill but to comply with the clinicians’ view of their condition. So, if patients realise that they are ill and they should be going to hospital, then for the clinician they are not seriously ill and they shouldn’t be hospitalised. If they do not realise that they are ill and they don’t think they should go to hospital, then for the clinician they are seriously ill, and they should be hospitalised—and their report is not to be relied on anyway. Insight and capacity are often used interchangeably, and compliance is used to determine both insight and capacity. Deciding whether someone has capacity on the basis of whether they have insight, is a clear misapplication of the law, and also a case of silencing and testimonial harm as capacity is denied pre-emptively without being tested.

Magdalena Eitenberger (University of Vienna) discussed epistemic injustice in the area of chronic illness. Magdalena introduced the concept of “patho-curative epistemic injustice” to apply to diabetes and hepatitis C. This concept is drawn from the concept of patho-centric epistemic injustice developed by Havi Carel and Ian Kidd. The idea is that some people experience a credibility deficit due to their illness and hard facts are prioritised over lived experience reports. The new concept is supposed to concentrate on “curedness” and how in some cases of chronic illness an understanding in terms of being cured or fixed is not available. Biomedical models offer a reduced and simplistic conception of disease and health where problem-fixing is central. But more holistic therapeutic solutions are ignored. This also results in patients not being able to talk about their experiences over and beyond the idea that a person’s body can be either fixed or damaged. What “cured” means is not how the person feels (whether they feel healthy) but what their glucose levels are. Lived experience is not considered relevant and this impacts healthcare policy and welfare too. The role of the person as someone who manages their health trajectory is also undermined if the person is given the (technological) resources to monitor their health.

Next, Swati Gola (University of Exeter) addressed epistemic injustice in the India’s traditional healthcare system. Indian system of medicine is very heterogeneous system, some indigenous and some introduced from abroad. There are a lot of folk traditions at the margins (such as healers) which have been sidelined as unscientific after the British occupation. How should we understand indigenous health traditions in the light of colonialism? Is there any epistemic injustice against those traditions? Swati analysed the current situation in India, suggesting that knowledge colonialism is still a big problem, due to the dominance of the biomedical models and the power of the medical professions as seen through the lens of Western medicine. A case was made for epistemic justice to be essential to the decolonisation of knowledge and the decolonisation of the self via issues of hermeneutical injustice.