CARCERAL INJUSTICE AND THE RIGHT TO BE KNOWN

We live in a world riddled with carceral injustice, from coerced false confessions and wrongful convictions to decades in solitary confinement and unsafe living conditions in prisons. Bringing together scholars, advocates, survivors of carceral injustice, and their communities, this workshop examines our obligations to make epistemic reparations for the distinctively epistemic wrongs involved in such injustices, where epistemic reparations can be understood as “intentionally reparative actions in the form of epistemic goods given to those epistemically wronged by parties who acknowledge these wrongs and whose reparative actions are intended to redress them” (Lackey 2022, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association).  

Examples of  distinctively epistemic wrongs from carceral injustice are the vilification of people who are wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit, or the reduction of a person’s identity and life-story to the crime for which they were convicted. In addition to other forms of reparations, such as monetary ones, those who suffer gross violations and injustices that result in invisibility, vilification and demonization, or systematic distortion may also be owed epistemic reparations – they have, in other words “the epistemic right to be known.” 

Engaging with the evolving scholarship on epistemic reparations and on the right to be known, this workshop will focus on how such a right is to be exercised, how it can be incorporated in transformative justice models and in policy proposals, and how it can be put into practice.

We will be foregrounding the voices of those who are system-impacted in this project, so abstracts from those who are or have been incarcerated, or who have survived the incarceration of loved ones, are encouraged.

We invite papers for 20-30 minute presentations. 

This event is a part of the Epistemic Reparations Global Working Group supported by the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University.

Topic areas

• Social and Political Epistemology
• Epistemic Injustice 
• Philosophy of Law
• Applied Ethics
• Philosophy of Incarceration and Punishment 
• Reparations and Transitional Justice 

Please email abstracts to: [email protected]

Abstracts length: max 500 words

Submission deadline: December 10 2024 

Notification of acceptance: December 31 2024

Conference dates: March 14-16 2025