Socio-Legal Studies on Epistemic Injustice and Spaces and Places

This edited collection illuminates what the concept of a specifically epistemic type of injustice has to offer socio-legal analysts. The epistemic aspects of injustice comprise more than knowledges, meaning and understanding, to include the supporting material and discursive (infra)structures for their production and dissemination arising in space/place/time. This book focuses on legal and regulatory arrangements, and the forms of knowledge and meaning they carry and with which they interact, in order to bring to light their spatial and place-relatedness or boundedness, which includes their temporal dimensions at various scales.

These highly innovative studies of epistemic injustice encompass the responsibilisation of patients in the North of England and Northern Ireland, housing, the systemic operations of law, the construction of digital spaces by algorithms, hospital discharges, case law affecting Indigenous communities in Kenya, the experience of mining disaster in Brazil, and the perspectives of rare diseases patients in Austria during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The book contributes towards law and geography, in particular through the emphasis on temporality as part of space and place. By highlighting the importance of author positionality and reflexivity, and pausing so as to bolster the development of humility and sensitivity for more fully informed studies on epistemic injustice and its ameliorations, the book also advances methodology for future studies.