Temporality in epistemic justice

Abstract

Democracy requires some sort of exchange of knowledge between holders of different knowledge positions. The concept of epistemic justice brings the ability to know and the right to be recognized as a knowledgeable person under a scheme of justice. It problematizes social conditions that potentially compromise the ability to share knowledge and effectuate change, and the possibility of being recognized as a knowing subject and being granted access to equitable means of producing knowledge. This paper engages with temporal aspects of epistemic justice: the role time plays in people’s possibilities to create knowledge and the way they create knowledge, the role time plays in valuation and circulation of knowledges, and the way hegemonic forms of time potentially make some knowledges circulate more freely than others. Since conceptions of time intertwine forms of knowledge, hierarchies and speakabilities of times form an immediate correlate of hierarchies of knowledge. By extension, such hierarchies feed into epistemic justice. Thus, democracy’s duty to emancipate suppressed voices requires emancipating the times from which those suppressed voices speak.