Epistemic Violence and the Exclusion of Subaltern Voices from the Academy

Abstract

When scholars of colour articulate ideas about knowledge and power, their words are often quoted poetically and celebrated for their experiential wisdom. Yet, these same insights are rarely engaged as rigorous theory in the humanities and social sciences. Instead, white scholars frequently translate these ideas into what is deemed “accessible” academic language, building careers on ideas originally developed by scholars of colour. This process constitutes epistemic theft, a form of structural extraction embedded in academic knowledge production and dissemination (Manuel & Derrickson, 2015).