This paper investigates Epistemic Injustice (Miranda Fricker 2007) as an institutional phenomenon in Feminist Knowledge production. Drawing on an Institutional Ethnography (Dorothy Smith 2005) of the Finnish gender and feminist research community, the paper explicates the material and relational conditions of contemporary feminist knowledge production and shows how these shape who gains access to defining the objects of Gender Studies. It furthermore, and connected, involves unpacking whose identity position is ascribed value and legitimacy. Through this the paper aims to explicate epistemic hierarchies within feminist knowledge production.
Epistemic Injustice, as coined by Miranda Fricker (2007) has a testemonial and a hermeneutical dimension to it. Testemonial injustice refers to situations in which the experience of a particular person, intendedly or unintentedly, is not acknowledged or included due to their designated gender, class, race, sexuality or other identity position. Hermeneutical injustice refers to people lacking the ability to acknowledge or make sense of certain experiences as being unfair or harmful, because certain concepts are not available to them to denaturalize and problematize practices. In the context of academic and activist knowledge production epistemic injustice would refer to certain people’s experiences not being acknowledged or heard, and the theories, methodologies and concepts that would contribute to opening them up, and perhaps bring about change, are not considered legitimate, valuable or respectable. Testemonial as well as hermeneutical injustice may be systemic or incidental, but they do result in the hierarchization of people and epistemic commitments, impacts community building and solidarity, and ultimately participate in the (re)production of social inequity.

REBECCA LUND is an Academy of Finland post-doctoral fellow in Gender Studies at Tampere University in Finland. Her research focuses on the social organisation of academic work and knowledge production more broadly. Her current work is centred on epistemic injustice in feminist knowledge production and more particularly uses institutional ethnography to explicate relations of class, race and gender in the ascription if epistemic status. She is editor-in-chief of NORA: Nordic Journal for Gender and Feminist Research; Coordinator for the Thematic Working Group on Institutional Ethnography at the International Sociological Association.

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