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Abstract
This paper examines four types of epistemic injustices (Fricker 2007): testimonial, hermeneutical, participatory, and curricular that occur within library and information science (LIS), and argues for an ethical shift to address these injustices within our programs, services, and curricula. To do this, we want to use epistemicide as a concept to actively interrogate neutrality, and call it out for the social construction that it is. By having a shared language, and a shared ethical intuition that explicitly addresses the harms from assumed neutrality, it also becomes possible to recognize testimonial, hermeneutical, participatory, and curricular injustice. The accumulation of injustices is what we refer to as epistemicide. We argue for an acknowledgement of neutrality, and the history of its conception within the LIS field, to better provide alternative ways of knowing and resisting legacy forms of colonization and epistemicide.
Introduction
What does it mean to know better? Pedagogically, it is often assumed that someone in the room must know best. After all, why teach if you do not have some sort of wisdom or important knowledge to pass along? And certainly in the current "infodemic" (Zadrozny, 2020) of misinformation and disinformation, that disinformation scholars like Donovan, Starbird, and Wardle have identified online as part of a current "information crisis," expert knowledge is still just as important as it ever has been. This is not a call to allow any opinion to trump that of peer reviewed experts in a given field. However, deciding who gets to be the expert, and what the expert sources get to be, should be a transparent part of the learning experience, and not simply a patriarchal version of "because I said so." And yet in our previous work in epistemicide outlining the concept of beneficent gatekeeping, a heightened form of that is often exactly what occurs.
Epistemicide is the devaluing, silencing, killing, or annihilation of a knowledge system or a way of knowing (Patin et al., 2020). The conceptualization and analytic application of epistemicide has been established in a number of social science fields while information scientists have only recently acknowledged epistemicide (Patin et al., 2020; Oliphant, 2021; Patin et al., 2021). Building from our recent identification of the existence of epistemicide within the IS field (Patin et al.,...