The Price of Being Unrecognized: Epistemic Exclusion and the Burden of Speaking as an Azerbaijani Turk Woman in Academia

"Yet, even within these critical frameworks, voices from within the Global South, especially women from marginalized communities, are often excluded or misrecognized. Scholars such as Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, and Lila Abu-Lughod have long argued that women in the Global South are not merely subjects of oppression but thinkers whose epistemic contributions are routinely devalued. They face layered forms of marginalization within both national contexts and transnational academic spaces, with epistemic injustice emerging as one of the most pervasive mechanisms of exclusion."

"Miranda Fricker's work on epistemic injustice has been particularly influential in exposing how people are wronged in their capacity as knowers, primarily through testimonial and hermeneutical deficits. In the case of marginalized women in the Global South, these injustices occur when they speak and/or begin long before that, in the very frameworks that determine who gets to speak and whose words are heard."

Colonial legacies and global hierarchies shape what counts as knowledge and who is authorized to produce it. Women from marginalized communities within the Global South are frequently excluded and misrecognized, with their epistemic contributions devalued despite being active thinkers. Epistemic injustice operates through testimonial silencing and hermeneutical gaps that predate speech by shaping frameworks of intelligibility. Iran exemplifies complex internal structures of domination that obscure dissent and limit epistemic agency. Azerbaijani Turk women and other ethnoracial minorities face layered silences in national academia and marginalization within Western institutions that reproduce hierarchical recognition.

Read at Apaonline