Epistemic Justice and Epistemic Authority in Information Production, Moderation, and Distribution

Behind many of the questions I investigate, there is one larger issue that impacts everything, from how we design research to who has the right information at the right time: who has authority over information itself. My research is deeply based in the principles of epistemic justice, the simple but powerful concept that people should have authority over their own life experiences, especially in cases where their experiences are being used for research and decision-making that impacts their lives and communities. Good research on specific groups and nuanced circumstances requires us to invest those that have actual lived experience with the proper epistemic authority – they have to remain in control of their knowledge, and we, as researchers, have to put aside the notion that our expertise somehow automatically makes us “better than” or “more knowledgeable than” the people that have lived it. Sometimes this means more work directly with communities – often, it means putting community members themselves in the driver’s seat. My member-research orientation builds support for epistemic justice into my baseline research practices – I often act as a member-researcher myself, and my mentoring practice is centered on training community members to become research leaders in their own right, either as independent actors or as formal researchers. Increasingly, I write about epistemic justice itself, and how it can be better supported within Computer Science.

Publications

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Organizing and Agenda-Setting Work