Abstract

This essay elucidates the recent shift from social epistemology to political epistemology, focusing specifically on the shift in the literature of epistemic injustice from an ethics of knowing to a politics of knowing. I give an analysis of how normative issues concerning epistemic oppression and marginalization need to go beyond the epistemic normativity inscribed in interpersonal dynamics and engage with the normative side of epistemic group dynamics and with the epistemic life of institutions and structures of public discourse. Drawing from recent discussions of the epistemic virtues and vices of groups and institutions, the essay pays particular attention to epistemic injustices within carceral institutions and the responsibility of institutions and publics to eradicate these injustices. Focusing on recent discussions in the literature on epistemic injustice, in the first section I elucidate some aspects of the shift from an ethics of knowing to a politics of knowing to highlight the role of institutions and group dynamics in epistemic practices and their dysfunctions. In section 2, I discuss how to normatively assess epistemic agency and epistemic responsibility at the institutional and collective level. In section 3, I address how institutional and collective epistemic injustices should be resisted through what I call epistemic advocacy and epistemic activism.