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epistemic injustice

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The Cure for Imposter Syndrome Isn’t Confidence

photograph of dog wearing costume disguise

Imposter syndrome is the gnawing sense that one isn’t good enough to be in the social position one is in. How did I get this far? I’m not even that smart. When will everyone find out that I don’t know what I’m doing? Common in graduate school and high-pressure careers, these thoughts and feelings cause numerous harms. Below, I’ll outline some of the harms of imposter syndrome and their sources, focusing on academic settings. Then I’ll turn to some thoughts about what we can do to mitigate them. While imposter syndrome can be described as a lack of confidence, I’ll suggest that the best approach on an individual level has little to do with trying to be confident.

Let’s start by identifying some of the harms caused by imposter syndrome. First, imposter syndrome causes epistemic problems — problems in how we form beliefs. These issues occur at the level of the individual and the community. The person who has imposter syndrome does not believe in their own ability to succeed in the high-pressure environment they’re in.

At the individual level, these beliefs distort our understanding of our own (and others’) work. When another person’s praise is filtered through my own insecurities, my doubts prevent me from receiving their testimony about my work accurately.

Imposter syndrome also inhibits community-building in departments, workplaces, and fields. People are much less likely to share with each other and learn from each other if each is convinced that closer scrutiny will reveal that they don’t belong. This lack of community-building is its own harm, and it also contributes to epistemic problems in the community. Simply put, the community misses out on good work from those who are too insecure to engage with others fully, reducing overall learning and progress. Finally, imposter syndrome is unpleasant and distracting. It is exhausting to think that one doesn’t really measure up to one’s position.

There are structural contributions to imposter syndrome that make it difficult to eradicate on an individual basis. Feelings of inadequacy often arise in conditions of scarcity. When there are not enough full-time jobs for all the graduates in one’s field of study, the sense that one must be at the top of the class in order to achieve one’s goals is understandable. These structural considerations intersect with considerations of justice and public identity. Did I receive this opportunity because I’m a woman? Would I have gotten in if I didn’t look good for department diversity? Do I even belong here? What is often cast as an individual psychological issue is exacerbated by larger-scale issues one cannot directly control.

A harsh climate can also amplify imposter syndrome, such as a department that rewards taking cheap shots at others, or one that encourages hierarchical thinking and discourages collaboration. Departments — and the individuals they comprise — have a duty to support an environment that is welcoming rather than isolating.

This duty is not only a moral duty of care; but, given the epistemic problems caused by imposter syndrome, it is also an extension of an academic department’s commitment to intellectual flourishing.

On an individual level, one might think that working on one’s confidence is the way out of imposter syndrome. Consider the grad student who feels they never quite deserve the praise their work receives. If they could just have greater confidence in their own abilities, they would be able to accept others’ praise as evidence of their abilities, right?

This answer is, perhaps, half right. Feeling confident in your abilities (to the extent that one can affect these feelings directly) would help reduce imposter syndrome. But confidence is not unshakeable, and it’s difficult to gain. Most of us are familiar with the trope of the person who exudes confidence to cover over deep insecurities. It doesn’t work. Burying one’s insecurities doesn’t get rid of them, because darkness is their natural habitat. The person with imposter syndrome is not well-suited to perceive their abilities accurately, and forced confidence is unlikely to succeed.

The best way out may be a counterintuitive one. I suggest that the antidote to imposter syndrome lies in cultivating the virtue of humility. Following Aristotle, we can conceive of a virtue as a character trait (or tendency to act) that lies between two extremes, both of which are vices. Humility is proper regard for oneself, avoiding both the excess of bravado (regarding oneself too highly) and the deficiency of self-doubt (regarding oneself too lowly).

Proper regard for yourself depends on a proper understanding of who you are. In a climate that pits colleagues against one another, it is easy to see yourself as an individual who needs to prove their worth, rather than as a member of a community who already belongs because of your common purpose. Likewise, it is easy to find your identity and self-worth in your professional successes, which can breed a deep insecurity and sense of precarity. Viewing yourself as a whole person (a trustworthy friend, a beloved sibling, an adventurous cook, a curious listener…) eases the anxiety surrounding your professional success.

So how does one cultivate humility? As ever, the best advice may be to practice. Surround yourself with people you can learn from, which is not difficult in most academic departments. Ask them about their work. Practice taking joy in their successes. Ask questions without regard for how they reflect on your intellect. And wrestle your sense of worth from your academic accomplishments. Consider the possibility that professional accolades needn’t be a load-bearing part of your sense of self.

Has the humble person given up the possibility of confidence? Not necessarily. Confidence is not the opposite of humility, but one of its natural results. As C.S. Lewis says in his essay “The Weight of Glory,” “Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.” When your work is satisfactory, humility allows you to be satisfied with it — both in the sense of giving you permission to feel satisfied and in the sense of clearing the way of self-doubt so as to make satisfaction in your own work possible. We cannot all be the smartest person in every room, but perhaps with practice and a shift in focus we can be content with that.

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Tiger Woods, Non-Disclosure Agreements, and Testimonial Injustice

black and white photo of lawyer holding pen and documents

In May 2023, a federal court judge ruled that Erica Herman, ex-girlfriend of Tiger Woods, must comply with the terms of the non-disclosure agreement she signed at the onset of their relationship. Among other things, the NDA required Herman to pursue any claims against Woods through arbitration rather than in court. Doing so would protect the reputation of the golf superstar.

Herman disputed the validity of the NDA in part because of a piece of federal legislation, the Speak Out Act, which went into effect in December 2022. The Act rendered unenforceable non-disclosure agreements regarding sexual assault and abuse that were entered into before the allegation was made. In short, this means that a person cannot be compelled in advance to remain silent about any sexual assault or misconduct that might occur while involved with the party with whom they have entered into the agreement. Herman alleged that her claims against Woods included accusations of sexual harassment. The judge ruled that there was insufficient evidence for that contention.

This case is among the first to be heard since the passing of the Speak Out Act. The judge was tasked with determining whether the behavior Woods exhibited toward Herman counted as sexual abuse. Herman claimed that Woods suddenly and unexpectedly ended their relationship and kicked her out of the home they lived in together. She alleged that he used the guise of a trip to the Bahamas to get her out of the house and then abandoned her at the airport where a representative of Woods informed her that the locks had been changed and she would never see Woods again. In her arguments for the court, Herman pointed out that she was an employee of Woods when their relationship began, and he abused his position of power repeatedly in sexual ways. Her lawyers argued that Woods, “made the availability of her housing conditional on her having a sexual relationship with a co-tenant.”

This case raises moral questions about NDAs in general and NDAs that apply to sexual assault and misconduct specifically. Those who argue in favor of NDAs emphasize that they are consensual — no one has to sign an NDA if they don’t want to. Once they have signed it, the parties to the agreement are bound by the ethics of making promises. Further, advocates argue that in cases like Woods’s, rich and powerful people can have their lives and reputations destroyed by con artists and jilted lovers who are willing to lie to make some money.

Others, however, argue that NDAs are, in general, unethical unless they are narrowly tailored to protect trade secrets or intellectual property. These agreements always involve an imbalance of power, and, as a result, fully free and informed consent is not possible. Signing such an agreement is often a condition of employment and is therefore inherently coercive. Not all contracts are genuine promises — a person ought to be released by the obligations of a contract if that contract is exploitative or otherwise unjust. Such agreements prevent people from behaving fully autonomously and these restrictions do not serve any compelling interests aside from protecting the reputation of the individual or institution. There are much more important considerations than reputations.

Many non-disclosure agreements constitute instances of what Miranda Fricker has called epistemic injustice. Specifically, such agreements are instances of what Fricker calls testimonial injustice which occurs “when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word.” Humans are social creatures and being taken seriously as a knower is an important part of living a flourishing human life. When a person is exploited by an imbalance of power to sign away their ability to publicly testify to their experiences, they are removed unfairly from the community of knowers and forced to participate in conversations in private when there might be important reasons that those conversations should be public. The moral problems here go beyond potential future harms; NDAs threaten to violate human dignity. The use of power to diminish the impact or importance of a person’s testimony is to treat them as an unlikely source of knowledge and to treat them this way arbitrarily, simply by contractual stipulation, is to treat them as less of a person.

That said, there are often important consequences that hang in the balance. Consider the case of former president Donald Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump paid Daniels in exchange for her signature on a non-disclosure agreement promising not to reveal the details of their sexual relationship which occurred years earlier. Daniels later took Trump to court, claiming that the NDA was invalidated by the fact that Trump did not sign his name, but rather signed with a series of Xs so that he could retain plausible deniability about the whole affair. Regardless of the specifics of this particular contract, it is arguably a contract that never should have been taken seriously at all. If a person wants to share details about their relationship with a candidate for President of The United States, that should be information that should come to light without any legal consequences so that the voting public can make fully informed decisions when they vote. They can choose not to be influenced by such information or to treat it as unreliable if they think that is what the evidence warrants, but they shouldn’t be precluded from hearing it at all because a powerful person paid a subordinate to sign an NDA.

Movie producer and serial rapist Harvey Weinstein also used non-disclosure agreements to silence his victims. His case offers an important insight into the use of NDAs in sexual abuse cases — when restrictions are placed on who a victim can speak to about their abuse, sexual predators are allowed to use the same tactics with more and more victims and avoid getting caught. The people who broke their NDAs with Weinstein were pivotal in his ultimate conviction.

Fricker notes that in cases of epistemic injustice, harms are often caused by abuses of identity power. It is common for people to be taken less seriously as knowers when they are members of minority or historically oppressed groups. Patriarchy creates conditions of epistemic injustice for women and members of the LGBTQ community. This is of particular concern in cases of sexual abuse because the very people who are the most likely to be abused are the people who are least likely to be heard or taken seriously about that abuse. If an NDA is in place, they won’t be heard at all or will be heard only in arbitration.

Woods and his representatives are concerned about harm to his reputation if Herman’s case against him were to be heard in open court rather than resolved in arbitration. Crucial to their argument seem to be claims about fairness. What they don’t seem to recognize is the privileged position that Woods is in — the unique position to use expensive legal wrangling to force silence to begin with. In this way, Woods can behave in whatever way he would like and then effectively purchase silence from women. What others might take to be fair is the opportunity to dispute allegations in court.

The Speak Out Act is a step in the right direction, but this case highlights existing systemic problems with the court system when it comes to these kinds of matters. Some people have a very narrow view of what counts as sexual abuse or harassment, and in this case the judge appears to be one of them. This situation makes clear the need for further discussion about the nature of sexual misconduct – a discussion which requires conditions of free and open expression.

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Privilege and Credibility: On the Muddled Message of ‘Barbarian’

photograph of stone basement floor at bottom of stairs

Although I avoid mentioning its largest twists, this column contains spoilers for some of “Barbarian”’s plot. Most recommend seeing the movie blind, so consider watching first before reading.

Barbarian may have been the biggest surprise horror hit of 2022. Against a budget of $4.5 million, the film earned over $45 million at the box office. The film marks writer and director Zach Cregger’s solo debut. He is known previously for his work with sketch comedy group the Whitest Kids U Know and for co-writing, co-directing, and starring in Miss March, a critical and commercial failure.  Barbarian also received high praise from critics. However, audience reactions seem more polarized. Out of 1022 ratings on Google, the film has an average score of 3.4 out of 5, with a majority of reviews at either 5 or 1 stars.

Horror often involves a split between what the film is ostensibly about and what it is metaphorically about. The monsters or killers we see on our scenes may be indirect ways of getting us to think about horrors in our actual world.

This is common with classics in the genre. The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a film literally about a family of cannibals in rural Texas killing a group of lost teenagers, is described by director Tobey Hooper as “being about meat” and is listed by PETA as an example of animal rights cinema. Night of the Living Dead, regarded as the first film to depict zombies as we now know them, is now viewed as offering commentary on race in the United States, even though this was not intended by director George A. Romero. Contemporary horror offers have no shortage of metaphorical content. One of my favorite horror films of recent years, Hereditary, tells a story about a family dealing with a devil worshiping cult. But its themes deal with mental illness, generational trauma, and other horrors we may inherit from our families. The Witch literally depicts a family in the colonial New England wilderness turning against one each other and dying one by one due to the influence of a witch. Yet it seems to tell a larger story about religiosity, isolation, paranoia, and community.

So, what is Barbarian literally about? The film opens with a young woman, Tess, arriving in town for a job interview at a house she had booked through AirBnB. However, she finds the house occupied. This other guest, Keith, has apparently also booked a stay. The house, residing in an abandoned Detroit neighborhood, hides some dangerous and horrific secrets. As the film progresses, Tess unearths these secrets.

But what is Barbarian really about? One theme emerges from the get-go. Tess is reluctant to enter the house after finding Keith there. When she enters to use the bathroom, she asks Keith if he could bring up proof of his reservation. Keith responds sarcastically, stating that she must want him to prove he’s not just a squatter. Later, Keith, trying to be hospitable, offers Tess something to drink while she searches for hotels. She turns down his offer, but he prepares her tea in the kitchen. Tess does not touch the tea.

Tess’ default posture towards men throughout the film is defensive. Her immediate reaction in a new situation is to imagine ways in which her environment or the people within it may threaten her, and how she can best defend herself against these threats. Her behavior reflects the reality faced by women.

The phrase “rape culture” was coined by feminists to describe a society where rape and sexual violence are somewhat normalized. There are many signs of rape culture, which include women having to live in fear of, and take defensive measures against, sexual violence. Men, for instance, may think nothing of walking to their car in an unlit parking lot after a late night at work. But, for women, this situation calls for an almost ritualistic check-list of defensive measures – scan for the exits and spots where someone may be hiding, have your keys in your hand, maybe in a hammer grip, stay on the phone with a friend or loved one so someone knows your whereabouts, or maybe even pre-dial 911 and press call if a stranger approaches you.

This reality is reflected in the differences in behavior of Barbarian’s male and female characters. When Tess first uncovers one of the house’s secrets, she quips “Nope!” and walks away, only returning after carefully and cleverly reducing the potential threat. However, when Tess describes this secret of the house to Keith, he is incredulous, failing to see why she would be disturbed. He later trots headlong into danger. The owner of the house, another male character, is incredibly excited to find its secrets – it’s free real estate! – and gleefully proceeds to measure the square footage of the area despite passing numerous warning signs along the way. Throughout the movie men ultimately fail to notice potential threats, and this leads to their downfall. But in doing so, they continually put Tess in harm’s way.

Barbarian also deals with issues of epistemic injustice. This occurs when someone wrongs another for failing to consider her as a potential source of knowledge. In one scene, after escaping from the horror in the basement, Tess is finally able to call the police. After they arrive, the officers are dismissive and incredulous towards her – she is dirty, haggard, excited, admits to not living in the area, lacks any proof of her identity, and lacks any way to prove that she ought to be in the house she is asking them to enter. They refuse to examine the house, prepare to leave, and accuse Tess of being high or drunk when she becomes angry.

This failure of the police officers to trust Tess may be seen as an instance of what Miranda Fricker calls “testimonial injustice.” Epistemic injustices of this sort occur when, due to biases, one fails to accept the testimony of others as credible.

The officers, seeing Tess’s physical condition and her location in a bad neighborhood, assume that she should not be believed. While drug use or mental instability would explain her condition, her testimony being accurate has equal explanatory power. Hence, by assuming the worst and not taking her testimony seriously, the officers treat Tess unjustly by refusing to recognize her as a credible bearer of knowledge.

Tess herself arguably commits testimonial injustice, though her conduct seem much more defensible. After a job interview where her prospective employer strongly cautions her against staying in that neighborhood, she returns to the rental home. As leaving her car to enter the house, a man apparently experiencing homelessness runs toward her screaming that she needs to leave. Tess, in a panic, narrowly manages to enter the house before he reaches the porch and locks the door. The man then proceeds to repeatedly bang his fists on the door, still shouting, before eventually departing.

This stranger was right – had Tess gotten in her car and left at that point, the story would have ended with her remaining unscathed. But she seems justified in viewing a strange man running towards her shouting as a threat, rather than as someone seeking to help her. It’s the fact that she lives in a world which compels her to act defensively to avoid threats which leads her to dismiss him.

This demonstrates why, ultimately, the message of Barbarian is muddled. At times, it seems to criticize its characters – Tess, the police – for failing to trust strangers.  In some of these interactions – finding Keith at the house, the homeless man shouting – skepticism is justified. Yet had Tess trusted these men, despite the red flags, she would have avoided danger.

One might be forgiven for thinking the message of the film has to do with being more trusting of others. However, in every scene where a woman trusts a strange man, they either fail her or actively seek to harm her. So, it becomes unclear what ultimate lesson Barbarian means to impart.

Perhaps Cregger’s point was to simply demonstrate some societal problems – that women must view men as threats, and that we may do others an injustice when we assume they are not credible. If that was Cregger’s goal, then he succeeded in a stylish, original, and technically impressive way. But if the goal was to say something deeper or more profound, then it is wholly unclear what that something was.

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Hybrid Workplaces and Epistemic Injustice

photograph of blurred motion in the office

The pandemic has, among other things, been a massive experiment in the nature of work. The percentage of people who worked from home either part- or full-time jumped massively over the past year, not by design but by necessity. We are, however, nearing a time in which people may be able to return to working conditions that existed pre-pandemic, and there have thus been a lot of questions about what work will look like going forward. Recent studies have indicated that while many people want to continue working from home at least some of the time, many also miss face-to-face interactions with coworkers, not to mention having a reason to get out of the house every once in a while. Businesses may also have financial incentives to have their employees working from home more often in the future: having already invested in the infrastructure needed to have people work from home over the past year, businesses could save money by not having to pay for the space for all their employees to work in-person at once. Instead of having everyone return to the office, many businesses are thus contemplating a “hybrid” model, with employees splitting their time between the office and home.

While a hybrid workplace may sound like the best of both worlds, some have expressed concerns with such an arrangement. Here’s a big one: those who are able to go into the office more frequently will be more visible, and thus may be presented with more opportunities for advancement than those who spend most of their working hours at home. There are many reasons why one might want or need to work from home more frequently, but one significant reason is that one has obligations to care for children or other family members. This may result in greater gender inequalities in the workplace, as women who take on childcare responsibilities will especially be at a disadvantage in comparison to single men who are able to put in a full workweek in the office.

Hybrid workplaces thus risk creating injustices, in which some employees will be unfairly disadvantaged, even if it is not the explicit intention of the employer. While these potential disadvantages have been portrayed in terms of opportunities for advancement, here I want to discuss another potential form of disadvantage which could result in injustices of a different sort, namely epistemic injustices.

Epistemic injustices are ones that affect people in terms of their capacities as knowers. For instance, if you know something but are unfairly treated as if you don’t, or are not taken as seriously as you should be, then you may be experiencing an epistemic injustice. Or, you might be prevented from gaining or sharing knowledge, not because you don’t have anything interesting to contribute, but because you’re unfairly being left out of the conversation. While anyone can experience epistemic injustice, marginalized groups that are negatively stereotyped and underrepresented in positions of power are especially prone to be treated as lacking knowledge when they possess it, and to be left out of opportunities to gain knowledge and share the knowledge they possess.

We can see, then, how hybrid workplaces may contribute to a disparity not only in terms of opportunities for advancement, but also in terms of epistemic opportunities. These are not necessarily unrelated phenomena: for instance, if those who are able to put in more hours in the office are more likely to be promoted, then they will also have more opportunities to gain and share knowledge pertinent to the workplace. There may also be more subtle ways in which those working from home can be left out of the conversation. For instance, one can still be in communication with their fellow employees from home (via virtual meetings, chats, etc.), they will miss out on the more organic interactions that occur when people are working face-to-face. It tends to be easier to just walk over to a coworker if you have a question then to schedule a Zoom call, a convenience that can result in some people being asked for their input much more frequently than others.

Of course, those working in hybrid environments do not need to have any malicious intent to contribute to epistemic injustices. Again, consider a situation in which you and a colleague are able to go back to the office on a full-time basis. You are likely to acquire a lot more information from that colleague who you are able to have quick and easy conversations with than the person working from home whose schedule you need to work around. You might not necessarily think that one of your colleagues is necessarily better than the other, but it’s just easier to talk to the person who’s right over there. What ends up happening, however, is that those who need to work from home more often are gradually going to be left out of the conversation, which will prevent them from being able to contribute in the same way as those working in the office.

These problems are not necessarily insurmountable. Writing in Wired, Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab, writes that, “Unquestionably sticking to systems and processes that made an office-based model successful will doom any remote model to fail,” and mentions a number of measures that his company has taken to attempt to help remote workers communicate with one another, including “coffee chats” and “all-remote talent shows.” While I cannot in good conscience condone remote talent shows, it is clear that if businesses are going to have concerns of epistemic justice in mind, then making sure that there are more opportunities for there to be open lines of communication, including the possibility for informal conversations with remote workers, will be crucial.

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The Black Wall Street Massacre, Contributory Injustice, and HBO’s Watchmen

black and white aerial photograph of Tulsa Race Riot

On October 20th, the latest adaptation of Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore’s ground-breaking 1987 graphic novel Watchmen premiered on HBO; its opening scene featured the Tulsa Race Massacre, potentially “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history,” where thousands of buildings were burned and hundreds of black Oklahomans murdered in the Spring of 1921. Also known as the Black Wall Street Massacre, it was sparked when tensions escalated after a local black shoeshiner was accused of accosting a white elevator operator; because there was talk of an impending lynching, the black community protested, leading to an exchange of gunfire.

For many HBO viewers, the most surprising thing about the scene was not its graphic violence, but the later realization that the Massacre was, indeed, a historical event – an especially bloody episode in American history which, by and large, goes undiscussed in American schools.

Consider now the message that President Donald Trump, embroiled within an impeachment inquiry about multiple cases of corruption and misconduct, tweeted on October 22nd:

“So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here – a lynching. But we will WIN!”

Immediately, Trump was criticized for comparing the constitutionally-outlined impeachment process to the lawless brutality of lynching, a form of domestic terrorism almost exclusively used to reinforce racist oppression throughout the country by torturing and murdering black men. For anyone to draw (or defend) such an analogy requires, at best, an embarrassing level of ignorance or insensitivity about the actual history of racial abuse in the United States.

In different ways, both of these cases evidence what Ta-Nehisi Coates has called “patriotism à la carte” – a selective awareness of our national history that highlights certain favorable elements (or, at least, elements favorable to a particular subset of Americans) while quietly ignoring others. To Coates, such an approach to history is dishonest and, when it prevents some groups of Americans from being able to fully understand and engage with their current social situation, oppressive. Rather than cherry-pick the stories which we collectively magnify into cultural icons, Coates argues that an honest treatment of history will include multiple perspectives – even, and especially, if some perspectives emphasize that the U.S.A. (and its heroes) has not always been heroic for everyone: “If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.”

Furthermore, both the general ignorance about Black Wall Street and the specific ignorance about the cruelty of lynching demonstrate various forms of what Kristie Dotson, professor of philosophy at Michigan State University, has dubbed “third-order epistemic injustice” or, more simply, “contributory injustice.” In general, epistemic injustice relates to the ethical implications of how society mistreats knowledge claims from various parties. If a woman accuses a man of sexual assault, but her testimony is, as a matter of principle, treated with skepticism, then she may be the victim of first-order epistemic injustice, often called “testimonial injustice,” because her testimony is unjustly discredited. Cases of second-order injustice – also known as hermeneutical injustice – result when a person is not only unable to communicate their experiences, but is prevented from even privately conceptualizing their own experiences, such as in the case of harassment or assault victims prior to the coinage of terms like “sexual harassment,” “date rape,” or “marital rape.”

Contributory, or third-order, epistemic injustice comes about as a matter of what Dotson calls “situated ignorance” which prevents the voices of marginalized groups from contributing to the wider cultural conversation. By “maintaining and utilizing structurally prejudiced hermeneutical resources,” perpetrators of contributory injustice define what “counts” as “real” history; the fact that audience members of HBO’s Watchmen were surprised to learn about the violent mistreatment of the actual residents of Greenwood, Oklahoma may well stem from the systemic “à la carte” approach to America’s racial history that Coates decried. Importantly, those guilty of maintaining dominant perspectives may not consciously realize that they are silencing marginalized groups, but – whether such actions are intentional or not – such silencing remains and, therefore, remains a problem.

And when Donald Trump or others try to dilute the severity of America’s racist past by comparing professional accountability (and potential prosecution for legitimate crimes) to the painful history of the illegal and immoral lynching of innocent people, this also evidences Dotson’s concern to highlight the role that social power plays in maintaining the process of contributory injustice. As she points out, hermeneutical injustice entails that both a speaker and an audience are unable to understand the thing in question; in a case of contributory injustice, the marginalized group can fully conceptualize their own experience, but differential social positions prevent the confused people in power from attending to the less-powerful perspective – it is a lopsided confusion propped up by the ignorance of the powerful.

Interest in philosophical considerations of epistemic injustice, and the wider field of “social epistemology” as a whole, is growing; it remains to be seen just how long it might take for its insights to substantively contribute to the broader public conversation.

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The Djap Wurrung Trees, Hermeneutical Injustice, and Australia’s First Nations People

photograph of road construction beginning with trees in distance

As I write this, a tense standoff between authorities and the traditional owners of a sacred Aboriginal women’s site is coming to a head in the state of Victoria, in southeastern Australia. The state government is preparing to bulldoze an area containing more than 260 large eucalyptus trees, some of which are as old as 800 years, that belong to an area sacred to the women of the Djap Wurrung nation: the Indigenous people and traditional owners of this area in western Victoria.

The proposed destruction of the site, to make way for an extension of a stretch of highway that links the two state capitals Melbourne and Adelaide, has led to a protracted battle between traditional owners and authorities, and some of the protesters have been there for over a year. Tent embassy spokeswoman Amanda Mohamet said: “We are the traditional custodians of this part of country, and we have a cultural obligation to be here.” The government insists it has sought and gained permission from traditional owners, but the protesters reject this, arguing that authorities have instead confected a ‘manufactured consent’.

The official reason for this extension is safety; authorities argue that this is necessary after 11 deaths since the beginning of 2013 on the stretch of road due to be upgraded. Protesters have now issued a red alert as fencing and machinery are being moved in. This situation is deeply distressing to the Djap Wurrung people, to the wider Indigenous community and to all Australians who stand in solidarity with them. It must be understood as a continuation and entrenchment of dispossession and colonial violence done to Australia’s First Nations people at the hands of British and European settlers. The history of the colonization, or invasion, of Australia is a history of violence to Aboriginal people and theft of the land to which their physical, ancestral, and spiritual lives are inseparably connected.

When the British colonizers arrived in Australia, a little over two hundred years ago, they encountered a land that had been peopled by its original occupants for over 60,000 years. Just pause for a moment on that number – on that length, and depth of time. The settlers encountered an ancient and complex culture formed from hundreds of different Nations, speaking hundreds of different languages; all with rich and deep religious, totemic, cultural, and ancestral connections to the land – to ‘country’. But, in another way, the settlers did not ‘encounter’ that culture at all. They saw Aboriginal people but they did not ‘see’ them. As Nayuka Gorrie writes of the Djap Wurrung efforts to save their sacred ground:

“The inability to see these sites as worthy of being protected or that they are significant is fundamentally racist. It is white selectivity that deems sacred trees unworthy of protection. This white selectivity spans across all elements of our life.”

This situation highlights an especially deep and entrenched kind of epistemic, hermeneutical injustice. The term ‘epistemic’ refers to knowledge, and the term ‘hermeneutic’ refers to interpretation. Miranda Fricker coined the term ‘epistemic injustice‘ and her original work recognized hermeneutical injustice as one type of epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice occurs when a person or group of people are wronged specifically in their capacity as knower(s); when they are disadvantaged by being prevented from sharing or accessing knowledge.

Epistemic injustice affects those who are sidelined by others in positions of greater social power – when members of non-dominant groups are prevented from participating in meaning making of ‘shared concepts’. Those experiencing epistemic injustice may not be believed, may not be understood, or their knowledge and experience may be discounted or ignored.

Hermeneutical injustice occurs when an individual or group encounters a blind spot in how their experiences or concepts are understood. This can happen in situations where the individual or group is relegated to a position of relative social powerlessness, from which their experience is not recognized by, or reflected in, the collective conceptual vocabulary of the dominant social group.

Hermeneutical injustice is preceded by hermeneutical marginalization. Non-dominant groups are hermeneutically marginalized when they aren’t able to participate fully in the process of meaning making, so that the dominant group’s shared concepts fail to recognize the experiences of those marginalized groups. This happens when those in power are allowed to define the experience or control the conceptual apparatus. Conceptual gaps then open up in the social fabric, where a marginalized group can’t communicate to the dominant group, and where their experience, ways of understanding it and attempts to communicate it, are not acknowledged. The process whereby a group is hermeneutically marginalized is a spiral in which their communication is frustrated as a result of their marginalization, and then the frustrated communication further entrenches their marginalization.

Many levels of epistemic injustice are, in a multitude of ways, central to the experience of Australia’s First Nations people and hermeneutical marginalization is one of the central features of the colonial mindset; hermeneutical injustice is present at the very roots of colonial attitudes to Aboriginal people’s experiences – historically and contemporarily.

Aboriginal people’s deep cultural knowledge of the land did not register in the European consciousness. That is no mere accident of cultural difference. It has to be understood, historically, as embedded in the intentions with which the European settlers arrived on the continent. They came to take ownership of the land, to acquire and use it for the purpose of their own prosperity, and that intention mediated all their interactions with Aboriginal people.

When the first settlers arrived they saw a vast country ripe for the taking. Their determination to own and exploit the land blinded them to the truth about the Aboriginal people’s relation to the land. The settlers refused to acknowledge, refused even to see, the deep and ancient knowledge structures of the Indigenous cultures. They had no register in which Aboriginal knowledge of the land could be understood.

Consider for instance the type of knowledge known as the Songline, or dreaming track. Songlines are complex maps that record creation stories and histories that navigate vast terrain and map story onto country. They are recorded in songs, stories, ceremonial dance, and artworks. They take in landscape, its features, things people need to know (like where to find water or other local plant or hunting knowledge), as well as history and ancestry, things related to ceremony and other sacred knowledge. This knowledge is not ‘about’ the landscape, it is embedded in it, it is inseparable from it – and so destruction of country is destruction of knowledge. It is a kind of epistemic violence, which is related to, leads to, and sustains actual physical violence.

Fricker discussed the ‘virtue of hermeneutical justice’ whereby sensitivity to the gap in hermeneutical resources might be cultivated to prevent hermeneutical injustices. In Australia that means listening to Aboriginal people’s account of their experience, and learning from them what they know about the vast landscape of the continent.

Indigenous author Bruce Pascoe, in his recent book Dark Emu, has seriously challenged the view, upon which Australian history is based, that the first Australians lived a simple hunter-gatherer lifestyle. His research uses records from the settlers such as letters and diaries reveals a much more complicated Aboriginal economy based on land care, manipulation of landscape by building of dams and wells, planting, irrigating, harvesting, and food storage.

Many of the documents from which this picture of Aboriginal knowledge emerges also reveal the hermeneutical marginalization that Australian history rests on, because the settler accounts are epistemically blind to Aboriginal knowledge about the land, and therefore to the nature and depth of their cultural relationship to it. Many of these documents reveal details of Aboriginal land use while at the same time, perversely, dismissing or underplaying it.

So we could see, in the fight to save the Djap Wurrung trees in western Victoria, an opportunity for redress, and to promote epistemic justice, rather than a clash of interests between traditional owners and road safety concerns.

As Djap Wurrung man Nayuka Gorrie points out,

“The official line given by the Major Roads Project Authority is safety. This framing can be understood as a way to undermine land defenders and position us as against the interests of the rest of the population.”

To treat the issue as though the claims of safety were in some way ‘equivalent’ to, and therefore can be balanced against, sacred relation to country is a form of epistemic injustice through equivocation. The ‘road safety’ defense is a form of hermeneutical marginalization in the way it uses well-healed concepts (like “safety”) that are unmistakably tied to the goals and interests of the dominant group. These concepts effectively erase the very different language of Aboriginal people in their attempts to convey their physical, cultural, and spiritual connection to country. As Sissy Austin explains:

“This is a landscape that forms the basis of Djab Wurrung identity – from the roots of the trees that are more than 800 years old, the rolling hills, the kangaroos, eagles and black cockatoos, to the stories of the stars, the moon and the sun. You cannot have one element of country without the other.”

Before European settlement Aboriginal Australians were astronomers, they had complex maps of the stars represented in constellations which they recorded in rock paintings. They had highly developed systems of agriculture, oral literary traditions, and fine art – yet the settlers’ concepts of ‘civilization’ did not recognize them as civilized. That hermeneutical marginalization and the injustice it perpetuates continues as authorities ignore the pleas of the Djap Wurrung for the preservation of their sacred country.

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Could Gender-Blind Casting Limit Epistemic Injustice?

Photograph of Edwin Austin Abbey's painting of a scene from Shakespeare's King Lear

Following on the heels of her 2018 Tony award for her role in the revival of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, Glenda Jackson is set to reprise her portrayal of the title role in King Lear when it comes to Broadway next season. Lear’s extreme emotional range has led many to consider the role to be one of Shakespeare’s most difficult characters to portray, but Jackson’s embodiment of the mad king in Deborah Warner’s 2016 production at London’s Old Vic was hailed by audiences and critics alike as an artistic and cultural success. Undoubtedly, Jackson’s talent will once again have an opportunity to shine in New York, but this example of gender-blind casting (Jackson did not play “Queen” Lear) offers an interesting suggestion for addressing a problem within the world of entertainment — one that Miranda Fricker called “hermeneutical marginalization.”

In her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Fricker outlined various ways that an individual might be wronged when they face a disadvantage to accessing or sharing knowledge that others can access freely. Some kinds of epistemic injustice are preceded by what Fricker called hermeneutical marginalization, which are particularly evident in the case of marginalized groups, whose reports of mistreatment, for example, might be ignored or minimized by audiences with greater social power. This concept, as explained by Dr. Emily McWilliams on the Examining Ethics podcast, is what happens “when members of non-dominant groups don’t get to fully participate in the process of meaning-making as we develop our shared pool of concepts through which we communicate.”

Many examples of attempts towards this sort of marginalization can be found in wide-spread responses to recent productions of shows like Hamilton, comic books like Thor and Spider-Man, and movies like Star Wars, Ocean’s Eight and the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters. When John Boyega was named as a primary cast member of the then-unreleased Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens in 2015, white supremacists called for a boycott of the franchise on the grounds that it should be “kept white.” Donald Glover endured similarly racist criticisms after he was proposed as a possible choice to take over the role of Spider-Man in 2012, as has the cast of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s award-winning Broadway show Hamilton for its re-envisioning of the American founders. When Marvel Comics recast the character of Jane Foster as the new Thor in 2014, detractors criticized the move as “politically correct bullsh**,” a complaint also suffered by the rebooted Oceans Eight and Ghostbusters projects. The upcoming season of the BBC’s Doctor Who that will premiere later this year with Jodie Whittaker at the helm of the T.A.R.D.I.S. faced the same criticism. In particular, the 2016 Ghostbusters film withstood an organized campaign of sexist attacks that was specifically designed to damage the movie’s profitability, even before the film was actually released. In each case, the attempt to remove these criticized women and people of color from the meaning-making process of big-budget storytelling means that they have been likewise victimized by Fricker’s hermeneutical marginalization.

And while endeavors like the Time’s Up campaign and the #MeToo movement have offered opportunities to spread awareness and aid to victims of such marginalization, it seems unlikely that gender-bending reboots hold much promise for changing the landscape of American culture — in fact, as Alexandra Petri has argued, they may actually contribute to the problem of “the male experience being taken as a proxy for the human experience.” Instead of intentional gender-bending, perhaps Glenda Jackson’s gender-blind casting may offer an opportunity to provoke a more widespread “mooreeffoc” moment in the minds of an audience.

Coined by Charles Dickens as reported in his biography by G.K. Chesterton, “mooreeffoc” refers to the sign on the windowed door of a coffee room, read backwards from the inside, to indicate the sudden re-appreciation of something previously taken for granted. Much like how someone might at first be confused, then suddenly pleased to realize that they now understand something obvious in a new light (as when realizing that you can, in fact, read an at-first-confusing sign), the mooreeffoc moment comes uncontrollably when one recovers a “freshness of vision” (to quote J.R.R. Tolkien’s description of the effect) about something previously considered trite.

This is what is needed for representation in Hollywood and beyond: not simply more diverse roles and casts (although that is certainly crucial), but the proper appreciation of those casts on the part of the public at large. Though Fricker promoted a “virtue of hermeneutical justice” wherein sensitivity to “some sort of gap in the collective hermeneutical resources” might function to offset or even prevent the harms done by hermeneutical injustices like marginalization, gender-bending casting decisions do not seem to serve such a purpose. Unfortunately, dominant groups — members of which would do well to reconsider their marginalizing attitudes and actions – will likely continue to raise questions (however unfounded) of political intentions and suspicious concerns over subversive messaging surrounding these roles. Indeed, gender-bending productions may currently be too charged to promote reflective considerations that could precipitate a mooreeffoc.

Yet gender-blind casting might bypass such accusations entirely with its firm foundation on simple actorial merit. Although many may not realize it, gender or race-blind casting has led to some of the more memorable roles in cinematic history, such as Morgan Freeman’s portrayal of Red in The Shawshank Redemption and Sigourney Weaver’s depiction of Ellen Ripley in the Alien franchise. Certainly, if diverse representation is to truly become more common in Western entertainment, then even resistant audiences must come to have a freshness of vision about the possibilities for the depiction of fictional characters (and, by extension, individuals in general). Particularly in light of research that indicates the empathy-promoting power of literature and immersive storytelling, proving to suspicious members of dominant social groups that members of marginalized groups perform perfectly well in the same roles might offer the very wedge needed to provoke a mooreeffoc moment. If gender-blind-casting could bring about this effect even if only for a time — therefore offering an alternative pathway to promote a more equitable entertainment industry — then it seems like it would be worth considering more frequently.