Alina Ahmed

This paper reconfigures epistemic reparations through a decolonial lens. Shifting away from reparations as restoring the victim’s epistemic standing to contribute to a “common pool of knowledge,” we focus on epistemic sovereignty. In so doing, we explore the epistemic violence of coloniality identifying two resulting epistemic harms: epistemic jurisdiction-harm and epistemic capability-harm. To address these harms, we propose an intervention consisting of three reparative moves: (1) the decolonizing of testimonial spaces, (2) the right to not be known, and (3) an expanded notion of the right to return. We conclude by hinting at our broader project of going beyond reparations and toward reclamation.

This paper explores environmental protection policies and initiatives, such as conservation, through the lens of an orientalist epistemic injustice. This is a form of epistemic injustice that occurs when the orientalizing of space and access to sovereign systems of knowledge causes the assigning of an unjust deflated or elevated level of credibility to a knower. Under this framework of orientalist epistemic injustice, the author criticizes the credibility excess assigned to Western subjects that perform conservation efforts in third-world countries and the related credibility deficit assigned to indigenous and local knowledge and conservation practices.

_Nauman Faizi’s _God, Science, and the Self (2021)_ is a powerful and philosophically robust exploration of Muhammad Iqbal’s masterpiece _Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam_. In this book, Faizi’s reading of Iqbal takes an analytic approach. He argues that Iqbal uses two distinct epistemic tendencies, which he terms “Representational” and “Pragmatic.” In tracing these tendencies, Faizi posits that Iqbal’s pragmatic tendency serves as a correction for his representational tendency, that the presence of both tendencies causes confusions in Iqbal’s work, and that these are understandable and expected markers of Iqbal writing within epistemological conflict. Faizi’s analytical approach helps explicate Iqbal’s arguments but appears to be in tension with _Reconstruction’s_ non-analytical methodology. _.