Whose Knowledge Counts
Fricker (2007) describes something called epistemic injustice, the harm done when prejudice causes someone’s testimony to be dismissed, or when a conceptual gap prevents someone from being able to articulate their own experience in terms others will take seriously.
I think about this constantly in financial literacy work, because it names something I watched happen for years without having the vocabulary for it. A resident who has navigated eviction, benefits systems, predatory lending, and emergency assistance applications for years holds genuinely sophisticated financial knowledge. It’s just not the kind of knowledge a standardized financial literacy test is built to measure or recognize. So the test says she scored poorly, and the field concludes she’s financially illiterate, when what actually happened is that her expertise wasn’t the kind the test was designed to see.
That’s epistemic injustice in a very concrete form. It’s not just an unfair test score. It’s a person’s real, hard-won expertise being treated as though it doesn’t exist, because it doesn’t match the format institutions expect knowledge to arrive in.
This is part of why our program treats residents as having existing financial knowledge to work from, not a deficit to fill. It changes the entire posture of the curriculum, from correcting what someone doesn’t know toward building on competencies they’ve already developed under conditions most of us have never had to survive.
Where else have you seen real expertise go unrecognized simply because it didn’t arrive in the format an institution expected?
Author: Sandra Roussel
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