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This paper examines the socio-political affordances of metrics in research evaluation and the consequences of epistemic injustice in research practices and recorded knowledge.

First, the use of metrics is examined as a mechanism that promotes competition and social acceleration. Second, it is argued that the use of metrics in a competitive research culture reproduces systemic inequalities and leads to epistemic injustice. The conceptual analysis draws on works of Hartmut Rosa and Miranda Fricker, amongst others.

The use of metrics is largely driven by competition such as university rankings and league tables. Not only that metrics are not designed to enrich academic and research culture, they also suppress the visibility and credibility of works by minorities. As such, metrics perpetuate epistemic injustice in knowledge practices; at the same time, the reliability of metrics for bibliometric and scientometric studies is put into question.

As metrics leverage who can speak and who will be heard, epistemic injustice is reflected in recorded knowledge and what we consider to be information.

This paper contributes to the discussion of metrics beyond bibliometric studies and research evaluation. It argues that metrics-induced competition is antithetical to equality and diversity in research practices.

Current legislative, policy and cultural efforts to censor and illegalize classroom discussions and curricular representations of LGBTQ+ people reflect longstanding challenges in English education. In an effort to explore what curricular inclusion can (not) accomplish – especially what and how current struggles over inclusion, censorship, illegalization and ultimately representation in English education might (not) contribute to queer and trans liberation – the purpose of this article is to feature the experiences of queer and trans youth as knowers in classroom lessons with LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum.

Drawing from a yearlong literacy ethnography at a Midwestern high school in which the author explored youth and adults reading, writing and talking about sexual and gender diversity, in this article the author focuses on one literacy learning context at the high school, a co-taught sophomore humanities that combined English language arts and social studies.

Engaging theories of epistemic (in) justice, the findings of this article highlight the experiences of queer and trans youth – especially two queer youth of Color, Camden and Imani – as knowers in the context of an LGBTQ+-inclusive classroom curriculum. The author describes epistemic harms with respect to distortions of credibility and homonormative assimilationist requirements and reflects on alternative possibilities that youth gestured toward through their small resistances.

By centering the experiences of LGBTQ+ youth, this article contributes to research about LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum in English teaching. Previous research, when empirical rather than conceptual, has tended to focus on the perspectives of teachers.

The purpose of this paper is to interrogate and develop the conceptualisation of discriminatory abuse in safeguarding adults policy and practice beyond the current interpersonal definition. The paper draws on Safeguarding Adults Reviews (SARs) that refer to discriminatory abuse or safeguarding practice with adults who have care and support needs and protected characteristics.

A search of the national network repository of SARs identified 27 published reviews for inclusion. The contents were thematically analysed to understand how discrimination was experienced in these cases. Fricker’s “Epistemic Injustice” theory was adopted as a conceptual framework, informing the analysis of findings.

Evidence from SARs provides a challenge to the interpersonal emphasis on language and behaviour in national policy. Although the reviews acknowledge that interpersonal abuse occurs, a close reading spotlights practitioner and institutional bias, and inattention to social, structural and contextual factors. The silence on these matters in policy provides a narrow frame for interpreting such abuse. This suggests significant potential for epistemic injustice and signals a need to acknowledge these social, structural and contextual factors in safeguarding practice.

Discriminatory abuse is an under-researched and under-utilised category of abuse in safeguarding adults practice. The paper adopts Fricker’s theory of “Epistemic Injustice” to highlight the silencing potential of current policy approaches to discriminatory abuse to suggest a more inclusive and structural framing for safeguarding practice with those targeted due to their protected characteristics.

In Virginia, former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder accused the state’s library agency of racism for “its slow pace in processing and publicly presenting records from his tenure as the nation’s first elected Black governor” (Associated Press, 2020). The State Librarian responded that this was just a lapse in protocols and framed it as a budget issue and staff turnover. However, “Library of Virginia has been processing papers from his gubernatorial successors before finishing work on his” (Associated Press, 2020). Recently, the Alabama State Department of Archives and History acknowledged their participation in systemic racism, epistemicide, and their history of privileging White voices over those of Alabama African-Americans.

Epistemicide is the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a way of knowing (Patin, Sebastian, Yeon, & Bertolini, 2020). Conceptualization and analytic application of epistemicide has an established tradition in a number of social science fields, but information scientists have only recently acknowledged epistemicide (Oliphant, 2021; Patin et al., 2020; Patin, Sebastian, Yeon, Bertolini, & Grimm, 2021). Building from our recent identification of the existence of epistemicide within the IS field (Patin et al., 2020), this work challenges the information field to become an epistemologically just space working to correct the systemic silencing of certain ways of knowing.

This chapter examines the four types of epistemic injustices—testimonial, hermeneutical, participatory, and curricular—occurring within libraries and archives and argues for a path forward to address these injustices within our programs, services, and curricula. It looks to digital humanities and to reevaluations of professional standards and LIS education to stop epistemicide and its harms. This chapter demonstrates how to affirm the power and experience of Black lives and highlight their experiences through the careful acquisition, collection, documentation, and publishing of relevant historical materials. Addressing epistemicide is critical for information professionals because we task ourselves with handling knowledge from every field. There has to be a reckoning before the paradigm can truly shift; if there is no acknowledgment of injustice, there is no room for justice.

It is critical for those who are engaged in the work of resisting the movement of academically restrictive policy to understand that it is a deliberate act on the part of conservatives to outlaw critical race theory (CRT) specifically, because it is a theoretical mechanism for discrediting the rhetorical foundations of their policy movement. The knee-jerk institutional courses of action to now defund initiatives and curriculum related equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) represent what has always been a deeply rooted investment in white supremacy on the part of the institutions (Baldwin, 2021; Patel, 2021; Squire, 2021).

The author explores and defines the CRT tenets of interest convergence (Bell, 1980) and whiteness as property (Harris, 1993) in relation to EI (Fricker, 2007; Dotson, 2011) as frameworks for examining three EGOs in the region where these policies have become most dominant. All three are critical tools of analysis for understanding the stake the White conservative political elite have in EGOs, and the magnitude of EI these policies represent, and stand endorse in their rhetoric. Definitions of EI often rely on the work of Amanda Fricker’s (2013) text on the subject, but this paper is invested in the expansions of this theorization for speaking to the nature of the injustice that EGOs represent as a matter of historical trend, with grave implications for futures marked by continued oppression. Whiteness as property and interest convergence are points for explicating the dialectic and material aspects of issues of race and equity in this country; namely, how knowledge processes inherent to higher education sound even more alarms as EGOs become commonplace for college campuses.

To support the arguments laid out, the author provides a historical review of the settler-colonial foundations of higher education as an american institution. This is meant to provide contour to the image of postsecondary education that exists today. In accordance with this paper’s allegiance to CRT, many of the texts would be considered revisionist history (Delgado and Stefancic, 2023), which stray from dominant narratives of american comfort and speak more accurately to the experiences of minoritized populations. The author then applies the same analysis to the sociopolitical contexts of EGOs, and to policy language itself. Each section is closed with an explanation of its connection to tenets of CRT and EI so as to provide a thread to follow into the subsequent discussion section.

In the first presentation of the early writings of this work, the author was lucky enough to be in community with Barbara Applebaum at the annual meeting for the American Educational Studies Association and engage in discourse surrounding EI and CRT applications to EGOs. In conversations surrounding the will in the willful ignorance that is exemplified in the movement of EGOs, the author had shared with Dr Applebaum the early thinking on how that will was the same force that brought together converging interests, which have continually forecasted interest divergence. This is commonly referred to as “political backlash.” The author had said something along the lines of: “if we follow the interest convergence, we can get in front of the subsequent political moves to turn the clocks on what was once celebrates progress.” This conversation planted the seed for what is the thesis of this paper. Interest convergence and divergence happen at the will of white populations because of the american truth of whiteness as property. In the context of higher education, this means that because educational pursuit has largely been white property, it has served as an arena for white populations to converge and diverge their interests with those of the minoritized. For example, the policies that drained federal funding for higher education in the 1970s were passed on the tails of a Civil Rights Movement that shook the very foundation of this country and expanded access to postsecondary education for racially minoritized groups (Berret, 2015).

Ensuring that this social construction is a matter of status quo has largely been the work of postsecondary institutions, and EGOs represent the most recent attempt at epistemically imposed inferiority. Explicit attention to the fact of higher education’s complicity and overall investment in the socialization of oppression is necessary to engage in transformative practice that resists anachronism. If higher education researchers and practitioners do not recognize the stake in both the presence and resistance to EGOs, there would likely be acts of resistance that will belie an act of interest convergence – and later divergence – on the part of the state.

Historically minoritized students are routinely silenced in classroom settings. This study aims to explore whether open annotations encourage students with historically minoritized gender/racial/ethnic identities to share knowledge and ideas. In addition, this study explores how the intersectionality of student identities relates to their experiences of open annotation and assess gendered and racialized achievement of student learning objectives.

This study uses mixed methods to examine the use of an open annotation tool (Perusall) to foster the redistribution of epistemic authority and more equitable interactions in science, technology, engineering, and math and humanities courses at the intersection of environmental and social justice issues. The study design draws on illustrative case study methods to assist others in seeing the potential and considerations in using a similar pedagogical approach.

An open annotation tool like Perusall can foster more equitable interactions for historically minoritized students. Women reported that open annotations deepened knowledge and engagement with the source and their peers. Women of color, in particular, acknowledged the benefits of social annotations as a tool that redistributes epistemic authority. Conversely, men were more likely to comment on dissatisfaction with grading.

This study suggests the value of open annotation as an effective and accessible method to foster inclusive classrooms. Through examining epistemic authority in social annotations, this study provides a novel approach to addressing the disengagement of historically minoritized students.

Can one ‘reclaim’ the future? How can a future, that, by its very definition, has not yet occurred, be reclaimed? The concept is associated with the Sankofa bird, a ‘mythical bird through which individuals, groups and, communities are reminded to look back in order to reposition themselves to more strategically move forward’ (Assie-Lumumba, 2016, p. 10). I have settled on ‘reclaiming the future’ as an appropriate metaphor for this chapter which will tell a story – or stories – of paths along which I have meandered, looked back, repositioned myself several times and, hopefully, continued to move forward in ‘being’ a higher education practitioner and in ‘being’ a human ‘being’. Such meanderings will recall encounters with different philosophies – in particular how they mediate learning and teaching – different knowledges and different people and contexts. It will privilege – but not unquestioningly – the value of critical reflexivity in research and in teaching, revisiting many of the questions that have arisen and continue to arise for me through engaging in these academic practices. It thus addresses the book’s core themes of being, interculturality and – possibly – new knowledge systems.