ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a genealogy of the concept of epistemic injustice by tracing its origins in feminist and other liberatory epistemological attention to the relations between power, knowledge, and difference. Feminist attention to affect played an important role in giving liberatory attention to a crucial aspect of experience that traditional epistemic frameworks have excluded from the epistemic domain. Some have turned to what Alison Jaggar called outlaw emotions as an epistemic resource for what Vivian May called the double struggle. Liberatory epistemological attention to the interrelated issues of who knows and what is known gave rise to a virtual explosion of concerns about epistemic silencing and violence. The theme of 'systematic silencing' is central to postcolonial epistemological perspectives. Systematic silencing not only happens through means that render some groups of people less than fully human. It can happen even to those who are members of so-called "privileged" groups by practices that violate their credibility in certain domains.
