Failures and possibilities of epistemic justice, with some implications for higher education

ABSTRACT

This papers draws on the compelling example of a political movement in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s to explore both how epistemic justice conditions of possibility and of failure play out in practice. It provides a springboard to understand how and why failures of epistemic justice matter tremendously for democratic and inclusive lives and how the historical example can point us in the direction of higher education as a space for Amartya Sen’s redressable injustices if underpinned by Miranda’s Fricker’s core capability of epistemic contribution being available pedagogically to all. The paper engages with ideas, practices and actions fostered by Black Consciousness against apartheid as both a hermeneutical and a testimonial injustice in South Africa, with both having a relational structure of giving and receiving, as Fricker argues and as Jose Medina elaborates by extending the structure to include the communicative and participatory. The paper then shows the importance of these conceptual frames to transformative higher education practices and how such practices might contribute to more epistemic justice in higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• inequality
• social exclusion in education
• pedagogy
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments which helped sharpen the argument and improve the paper. My thanks also to Monica McLean for first drawing Fricker's epistemic contribution idea to my attention.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On BC, see Biko (1978), Gerhart (1978), Hull (2017), More (2017), among others.

2. BCM encouraged democratic forms of organization in which the potential of every person was recognized. New cadres were developed and continued to function in the face of banning and arrests of key figures. New structures were established, such as the Zimele Trust Fund to assist political prisoners when they were released from Robben Island and banished to remote towns or villages, and the Zanempilo clinic in the Eastern Cape. The latter exemplified what BC stood for – affordable high quality medical care and health education, and the treatment of people with dignity and respect. Both are exemplars of imaginative organizational effectiveness under extraordinarily challenging circumstances. Notwithstanding their local nature, they pointed to radically different political processes and to making alternative epistemic realities.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation [Grant number 86540]

Notes on contributors

Melanie Walker

Melanie Walker is South African Research Chair in Higher Education & Human Development and senior research professor at the University of the Free State, South Africa. She is a fellow of ASSAF and the HDCA and honorary professor at the University of Nottingham. She conducts research on higher education and social justice and supports the capacity building of early career researchers, the majority of whom come from Africa.