Epistemic injustice is a broad category of injustice relating to knowledge. It can involve people from marginalised or oppressed groups being excluded, silenced, misrepresented, or not taken seriously — in conversations, education, or professional settings — because of their membership to that group.

In academic contexts, this kind of injustice can distort entire fields of study. Orla Carlin, a scholar at the University of Leeds, explores how this plays out in relation to class.

She argues that the literature on epistemic injustice doesn’t adequately account for epistemic injustice that occurs in virtue of class. One reason, she suggests, is the underrepresentation of working-class voices in academia. Her research asks why this underrepresentation exists and points to deeper, systemic forms of epistemic injustice that affect working class people more broadly, perpetuating a vicious circle in which working class people find it more difficult to enter fields which are dominated by middle class voices, and thereby to shape those fields.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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