Jenny Kurrath
Leibniz-Universität-Hannover
Whose feelings count, and whose words matter? Theories of epistemic injustice have shown how power shapes credibility, intelligibility, and epistemic authority. Yet these theories often understate how epistemic injury persists after the initial moment of disbelief or misrecognition. Testimonial and hermeneutical injustices do not merely exclude subjects from epistemic practices; they can also reshape how subjects relate to their own speech, perception, and authority.
I argue that epistemic injustice should be understood as a self-reinforcing affective-epistemic process. Experiences of being disbelieved, misread, or deprived of adequate interpretive resources generate affective dispositions such as shame, doubt, distrust, anger, and frustration that reorganize epistemic agency. Internally, repeated disregard becomes self-undermining: subjects anticipate disbelief, distrust perceptions, experience their words as inadequate, and withdraw from epistemic spaces. Externally, affective responses are judged: anger, hesitation, or distrust are reinterpreted as irrationality, weakness, or unprofessionalism. In this way, the very responses produced by epistemic injustice are recoded as further reasons to question the subject’s credibility, intelligibility, or authority.
I call this dynamic the affective reproduction of epistemic injustice. Its significance is that affective injustice does not merely accompany epistemic injustice; it helps secure its repetition. Affect is not a secondary consequence of epistemic harm, but part of the process through which such harm becomes durable. Epistemic injustice produces the emotional conditions under which future speech becomes easier to dismiss, misunderstand, or discredit. To ask whose knowledge counts, then, is also to ask whose emotions are permitted to carry epistemic weight.
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SOPhiA 2026 