MANCEPT Workshop - Epistemic Injustice and Backlash

MANCEPT Workshop - Epistemic Injustice and Backlash: Call for Abstracts   Recent years have been characterized by significant backlash to progressive social movements and social changes such as the #MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the increased visibility of trans people in public life. Dimensions to this backlash include the electoral – i.e., the rise of far-right political parties; the legal – legislation, executive orders and judicial decisions e.g. overturning rights to abortion and gender-affirming healthcare, banning affirmative action and DEI initiatives, and excluding trans people from participation in sport; and the necropolitical – e.g. the misogynistic murder of Renée Good and the rising tide of anti-trans violence. A further important dimension to this backlash is the epistemic – e.g. the widespread repudiation of the testimonies of Christine Blasey Ford and Amber Heard, the ridiculing of slogans such as ‘defund the police’, and the growing dissemination of myths and disinformation concerning trans people. This dimension to the backlash has recently begun to receive philosophical attention, with aspects of it being theorized variously as 'hermeneutical backlash' (George & Goguen 2021), 'hermeneutical sabotage' (Edgoose 2024), and 'hermeneutical disarmament' (Morgan 2025) – all phenomena thought either to constitute or to result in epistemic injustices. It has also been argued that previously proposed strategies for preventing epistemic injustices are frequently ineffective when confronted by backlash, prompting a search for other strategies which might be pursued more effectively towards this end (Clanchy forthcoming). Much work on epistemic injustice and backlash remains to be done, however – especially in light of the epistemic injustice literature’s ‘methodological commitment to the primacy of the nonideal’ (Medina 2013: 11). The aim of this workshop is to provide a space for the development of such work.

We invite submissions of abstracts of up to 500 words to a MANCEPT workshop on this topic. Abstracts should be submitted by May 1st and should be sent to [email protected]
Questions that papers may address include, but are not limited to:
•How is the epistemic dimension related to other dimensions of backlash?
•To what kinds of epistemic injustice does backlash give rise? What strategies can be most effectively pursued to prevent epistemic injustices in times of backlash? What kinds of epistemic agency can be exercised by members of targeted groups (Pohlhaus 2020)?
•Does 'epistemic injustice' (Fricker 2007) in fact provide an adequate framework for thinking about these issues? What about these issues might this framework miss or distort but the frameworks provided by e.g. 'epistemic oppression' (Dotson 2014) or 'epistemologies of ignorance' (Mills 2007) capture?
•How should previous work on epistemic injustice and e.g. the #MeToo movement (e.g. Jackson 2018) or the Black Lives Matter movement (e.g. Anderson 2017) be developed or rethought in light of the current backlash?
•What practical lessons can be drawn for the present moment from a study of the epistemic dimension of previous backlashes (e.g. Faludi 1991)?
•Who bears responsibility, in both backward- and forward-looking senses (Young 2011), for the epistemic dimension of backlash?
•How can thinking about epistemic injustice and backlash inform methodological debates concerning the relative merits of ideal and nonideal theory?   The panel will take place in-person at the University of Manchester, between September 2nd and September 4th 2026. Further details about the MANCEPT workshops can be
found here: MANCEPT Workshops 2026 - Research Explorer The University of Manchester   Han Edgoose and Nick Clanchy (organisers)