Epistemic Injustice

Governing Research Practice Within Academic Knowledge Production

Rebecca Lund, Jill Blackmore, Julie Rowlands, Rebecca W. B. Lund, Jill Blackmore, Julie Rowlands, Rebecca Lund

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032880723
• eBook ISBN: 9781040184097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This book illustrates how feminist knowledge and postcolonial knowledge are marginalized in universities due to policies, organizational structures, and knowledge hierarchies that privilege metrics as measures of success and narrow views of science and research.

The changing relationship between the state and knowledge production is a critical issue for universities and governments when disinformation is creating a crisis in expertise and trust in democratic institutions. Yet academic autonomy is being undermined by processes of corporatization of the university: managerialism, marketisation, technologization and privatization. Epistemic injustice occurs when particular knowledges are privileged due to policy priorities, metrics and organizational practices as these are underpinned by unequal power relations that inform who does what research and with whom. In turn, injustice occurs when knowledge is evaluated primarily on the basis of its usefulness. The chapters in this book illustrate the epistemic implications of changing institutional and organizational conditions produced by narrow conceptions of 'knowledge' and 'good science' and relations between them. It explores these arrangements at the level of colonial and geopolitical relations, and their effects in terms of institutional processes, practices, and agency. The text shows how a lack of epistemic diversity reinforces structural and cultural racial and gender injustices arising from colonialism, patriarchy, and dominant views of science.

This volume will appeal to policy makers and researchers in higher education reform and scholars interested in changing academic practices from feminist and postcolonial perspectives. It was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Education.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Epistemic governance of diverse research practices and knowledge production: an introduction
• 1 Academic citizenship, collegiality and good university governance: a dedication to Associate Professor Julie Rowlands (1964–2021)
• 2 Epistemic governance and the colonial epistemic structure: towards epistemic humility and transformed South-North relations
• 3 The role of bibliometric research assessment in a global order of epistemic injustice: a case study of humanities research in Denmark
• 4 The implicit epistemology of metric governance. New conceptions of motivational tensions in the corporate university
• 5 Building anti-racist education through spaces of border thinking
• 6 Governing knowledge in the entrepreneurial university: a feminist account of structural, cultural and political epistemic injustice
• 7 Power, knowledge, and universities: Turkey’s dismissed ‘academics for peace’
• Index