Addressing Epistemic Injustice: Perspectives from Health Law and Bioethics

Project Commenced: 2023-09-08

Project Completion Date: 2024-12-06

Project PI/s

Professor Mark L Flear

Other staff or partners

Professor Tamara K Harvey (City, University of London)

Project Description

Those working in health law and bioethics share many common interests and questions with those that animate work on epistemic injustice, that is, a ‘wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower’, to follow Fricker’s conception (2007, p. 1. Emphasis added), which hitherto has tended to come from philosophy. These questions include those that frame a recent collection on the concept (Kidd and others, 2019, p. 1). Who has voice and who does not? Do voices interact with equal agency and power? What are the conditions of communication? For example, what terms, meanings and understandings predominate, and how do these come into being? How are people’s experiences and lives understood by them and others? What are the implications of not being understood, particularly for the person so subject? How might any resulting injustice be remedied? Law and bioethics tend to overlap in the health domain, and there is already fruitful interaction between them (for an overview, see Jackson, 2022; Farrell and Dove, 2023; Harrington, 2016). However, epistemic injustice is little discussed in this literature, despite the ways in which epistemic injustice in the health context may mean patients are unable to secure the right treatment and consequently be harmed (Flear, 2019). The scholars included in this book all centre health in their work. Moreover, they are either lawyers and socio-legal scholars who also engage with bioethics, or bioethicists or philosophers who also engage to varying extents with law or socio-legal studies. This book focuses on epistemic injustice in interactions between professionals and patients from particular communities of groups in health settings, in specific jurisdictions. Through this focus, the book aims to significantly enrich dialogue between literatures on epistemic injustice and health law and bioethics, and in turn across cognate disciplines, fields and debates. The editor and contributors believe the collection as a whole could help to inform – and even help to transform – policy and practice in health settings, by preventing or at least minimising epistemic injustice, and the forms of harm it may engender.