ABSTRACT
This chapter elucidates how trust and distrust operate in dysfunctions that are at the heart of epistemic injustices. Epistemic injustices are committed when individuals or groups are wronged as knowers, that is, when they are mistreated in their status, capacity and participation in meaning-making and knowledge-producing practices. Struggles for improving ways of trusting and distrusting have to be fought on different fronts and in different ways, including efforts at the personal, interpersonal and institutional levels. The phenomenon of epistemic injustice acquires different qualities in the thin and thick cases, and repairing the problem takes different shapes: repairing a breach of trust in formal relations is quite different from repairing a trust-betrayal in a thick, intimate relation. Fighting hermeneutical injustice involves fighting the erosion of hermeneutical trust, which often means being proactive in instilling hermeneutical trust in the expressive and interpretative capacities of disadvantaged groups.
