ABSTRACT
In this essay, Tim Black and Danielle Spratt share experience drawn from their team-taught course on Austen, specifically focusing on the results they have achieved from pairing an Austen novel with relevant readings from moral and epistemological philosophy. The essay explores in particular a specific concept (‘testimonial injustice’) that provided a welcome and liberating key to considering the nuances of Austen’s writing about systemic oppression and was drawn from Miranda Fricker’s work on ‘epistemic injustice’, or the idea that people can be wronged ‘specifically in their capacity as a knower’. They argue that teachers of Austen can productively pair Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park alongside Fricker’s category of testimonial injustice to provide a useful pedagogical framework that both historicises sociopolitical issues of the early nineteenth century and contextualises them as of a piece with ongoing matters of racism, sexism, ableism, and heteronormativity that seek to repress or silence voices from marginalised groups in our own twenty-first century moment.
