Epistemic Injustice and Collective Wrongdoing: Introduction to Special Issue

ABSTRACT

In this introduction to the special issue ‘Epistemic Injustice and Collective Wrongdoing,’ we show how the eight contributions examine the collective dimensions of epistemic injustice. First, we contextualize the articles within theories of epistemic injustice. Second, we provide an overview of the eight articles by highlighting three central topics addressed by them: i) the effects of epistemic injustice and collective wrongdoing, ii) the underlying epistemic structures in collective wrongdoing, unjust relations and unjust societies, and iii) the remedies and strategies of resistance to epistemic injustice. We close by pointing to connections and issues that may motivate further research.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic injustice
• hermeneutical injustice
• testimonial injustice
• collective wrongdoing
• collective accountability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melanie Altanian

Melanie Altanian is recipient of a one-year IRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCD School of Philosophy (2020/2021) and member of the Horizon 2020 project ‘Policy, Expertise and Trust in Action’ (PERITIA). She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Bern, where she graduated with a dissertation on the epistemic injustice of genocide denialism. Besides working on her book manuscript, she has published articles on the topic in English and German for edited volumes with Brill and Springer.

Nadja El Kassar

Nadja El Kassar is Visiting Professor at Freie Universität Berlin in the academic year 2020/2021 and Lecturer at ETH Zurich. In August 2020, she completed her habilitation on the epistemology of ignorance at ETH Zurich. She received her PhD from the University of Potsdam. She has published articles on ignorance and intellectual self-trust and a monograph Towards a Theory of Epistemically Significant Perception (DeGruyter 2015). Her current work focuses on the question of how one should deal with ignorance and issues in social epistemology.