Fran Fairbairn

This article does three things. First, it asks a new question about transformative education, namely ‘what is the role of power and trust in the decision of whether to transform one’s meaning scheme in the face of new information or whether to simply reject the new information?’ Secondly, it develops a five-stage model which elaborates on the role of this decision in transformative learning. Finally, it uses grounded-theory and the five-stage model to argue that power and trust play an important role in facilitating transformative learning.

I argue that epistemic injustice manifests not only in the content of our concepts, but in the spaces between them. Others have shown that epistemic injustice arises in the form of “testimonial injustice,” where an agent is harmed because her credibility is undervalued, and “hermeneutical injustice,” where an agent is harmed because some community lacks the conceptual resources that would allow her to render her experience intelligible. I think that epistemic injustice also arises as a result of prejudiced and harmful defects in the inferential architecture of both scientific practice and everyday thinking. Drawing on lessons from the philosophy of science, I argue that the inferential architecture of our epistemic practices can be prejudiced and wrongful, leading to a variety of epistemic injustice that I am calling “inferential injustice.” This type of injustice is fully structural; it inheres in our epistemic practices themselves rather than as a direct result of an individual’s action. For this reason, cases of inferential injustice are importantly different from extant cases of epistemic injustice and are especially hard to track. We need a better understanding of inferential injustice so that we can avoid and ameliorate cases such as the ones I present here.

In this paper, I argue that epistemic injustice can result from transformative learning. Transformative learning causes a radical change in the structure of a student’s personal epistemic resources to bring them in line with the structure of a discipline’s shared epistemic resources. When those shared epistemic resources are biased, this transformation prevents students from retaining aspects of their personal epistemic resources which it is strongly in their interests (as well as in the interests of the broader epistemic community) to retain. In these cases, transformative learning causes epistemic injustice in the form of inferential injustice.