Epistemic Injustice and Religious Identities

The Canada Research Chair on Epistemic Injustice and Agency and the Canada Research Chair in Applied Epistemology are inviting submissions for the upcoming workshop: 

“Epistemic Injustice and Religious Identities”

McGill University, March 6-7, 2024.

Epistemic injustice and epistemologies of ignorance are powerful tools to uncover the epistemic dimensions of oppression and domination. These tools, developed by critical race theorists and feminist scholars, have exposed many ways in which the credibility and intelligibility of social groups can be linked to social power and how dominant groups can avoid resistant knowledge and silence knowers to preserve their privilege. 

Miranda Fricker’s (2007) account of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice is now a common starting point to talk about epistemic injustice, and José Medina’s Epistemology of resistance (2013) offers an expanded, more contextualized and polyphonic account. From there, many other concepts have been developed to capture the complex and manifold epistemic wrongs that marginalized people can suffer, including testimonial quieting and smothering (Dotson 2011), willful hermeneutical ignorance (Pohlhaus 2012), hermeneutical domination (Catala 2015), agential epistemic injustice (Lackey 2020; Medina 2021), testimonial void (Carmona 2021), etc. Epistemologies of ignorance (Mills 1997; 2007; Tuana 2006; Sullivan and Tuana 2007) also have contributed to uncover the epistemic wrongs of domination and have many points of overlap with epistemic injustice. 

Yet, in this rapidly growing literature little has been said about religion and how someone can suffer epistemic wrongs on the basis of one’s religious identity. Though some work has addressed how epistemic injustice can happen in the field of philosophy of religion (De Cruz 2020a; 2020b; Panchuk 2020b), within religious education classrooms (Moyaert 2019a; 2019b; Stones and Fraser-Pearce 2021; 2022; Strhan and Shillitoe 2022), in relation with religious trauma (Panchuk 2020a), more specifically because of someone’s religious identity (Kidd 2017; Lougheed 2020; Lynch 2022; Beauchamp 2023), and also how one can ignore one’s religious privilege (Markowitz and Puchner 2018; Ferber 2012), much work remains to be done. 

This workshop is an invitation to remedy this lacuna and encourage scholars of epistemic injustice to engage with religious identity and scholars of religion to engage with epistemic injustice. It is also an opportunity to build a network of scholars interested in the topic.