Author: Beth Godbee

Beth Godbee is Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University. She studies how collaborative writing talk (and the relationship-building, writing, revision, and rethinking involved in that talk) can bring about more equitable relations for writers and members of their social networks.

In her 2013 memoir PHD to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life, Elaine Richardson writes of school English: “It looks you in the face and tells you, you don’t even know what you know” (200). In doing so, Richardson names the harms of diminishing one’s ways of knowing, experiencing, and explaining the world. For this blog post, I’d like to zoom in on two key terms that also help to explain these harms and suggest a way for countering them: (1) epistemic injustice, or harm done to a person’s capacity as a knower, and (2) epistemic rights, or the right…

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