Workshop
Epistemic Trust, Epistemic Justice
S109, 22 October, 09:00-11:00Workshop
Epistemic Trust, Epistemic Justice, and the Transformation of Higher Education
Introduction & Context
Universities still produce, validate, and transmit knowledge, yet their authority is increasingly contested: by marginalized communities treated as objects rather than subjects of knowledge; by students who experience academic spaces as inaccessible; and by technologies, especially AI systems, that redistribute access to explanation, translation, writing, and research support. We address this crisis through epistemic trust: the conditions under which individuals and communities recognize a person, institution, method, or technology as a trustworthy source of knowledge.
Theoretical Foundations & Objectives
Our starting point is Miranda Fricker’s theorization of epistemic injustice, which remains crucial for analyzing how universities reproduce inequality while claiming neutrality. Such injustices appear in admissions, classrooms, research design, language policy, assessment, publishing, and community engagement. They are not merely failures of inclusion, but failures in the organization of knowledge. Focusing on epistemic trust moves the workshop from diagnosis to transformation. We argue that epistemic trust bridges theory and practice. It connects epistemic justice with research on pedagogy, participation, design thinking, translation, and institutional transformation. Epistemic justice requires recognizing marginalized people as credible witnesses, but also redistributing research design, interpretation, and knowledge ownership. The workshop contributes to debates on openness, diversity, equity, academic innovation, cooperative learning, and social transformation. How can universities reform their epistemic infrastructures? How can universities become trustworthy to those they have marginalized, while teaching students to evaluate trust critically?
Core Themes & Questions
The central claim is that higher education cannot address epistemic injustice only by adding diverse voices to existing structures. It must examine how trust, credibility, interpretation, and authority are produced. Who is trusted, whose knowledge counts, who is deemed legitimate, and how can institutions become accountable? Epistemic trust offers an interdisciplinary framework for philosophers, educators, psychologists, AI researchers, migration scholars, designers, and community practitioners to ask how classrooms can be safe without complacency; how universities can collaborate without extracting knowledge; how AI can support access without standardization; and how institutions can become worthy of trust. The workshop will examine these questions by moving from the social and institutional conditions under which marginalized communities are recognized as legitimate producers of knowledge to the technological transformation of collective linguistic inheritance through generative AI. This progression raises a common question: under what conditions can the voices of individuals and communities be represented, transmitted, and interpreted without being dispossessed of their epistemic authority?
Epistemic Trust and Vulnerable Populations
First, epistemic trust and vulnerable populations. In psychological and educational literature, epistemic trust refers to the capacity to treat communicated knowledge as relevant, reliable, and meaningful. It is linked to learning, vulnerability, mentalization, and belonging. We will examine how shame, trauma, migration, racialization, poverty, linguistic exclusion, and mistrust shape access to higher education. Drawing on mentalization-based and psychoanalytic perspectives, we will consider cases in which epistemic mistrust is not a deficit, but a rational response to histories of humiliation, exclusion, or extraction. The aim is to understand trust not as something marginalized groups lack, but as something institutions must earn.
Interactive Technologies, AI, and Epistemic Trust
Second, interactive technologies, AI, and epistemic trust in education. New interactive technologies, including AI systems, translation tools, learning platforms, collaborative environments, and research-support interfaces, increasingly mediate access to knowledge in higher education. They can support explanation, translation, writing, participation, and research for students and communities excluded by dominant academic languages and formats. Yet they can also reinforce epistemic injustice through automation bias, misinformation, linguistic homogenization, inaccessible interfaces, representational harm, data extraction, and unequal access. From an interactive systems design perspective, the issue is how these tools shape trust, credibility, agency, and interpretation: who is perceived as knowledgeable, what is treated as credible, and how users are invited to question information. The philosophical question of whether algorithmically generated language can constitute a genuine form of sharing leads to a further epistemological question: how do generative AI systems transform the attribution of credibility, the recognition of knowledge, and the reproduction of epistemic injustice? Students must learn to design technologies with attention not only to usability and efficiency, but also to epistemic responsibility, participation, accessibility, and social consequences. How can interactive technologies support epistemic access without replacing human judgment, community authority, local knowledge, or critical reflection?
Workshop Scope and Analytical Focus
Beginning with the marginalization of Roma communities in Bulgaria, the workshop examines the conditions under which institutions recognize historically excluded forms of knowledge. It then considers how generative AI transforms collective linguistic inheritance, raising questions about the relationship among statistical commonality, singularity, and epistemic authority. Finally, it explores the implications of generative AI for either reproducing or transforming epistemic injustice. Together, these perspectives establish a vital dialogue among lived social experience, philosophical inquiry, and technological critique.
Agenda
- 9:00-9:05 General Introduction
- 9:05-9:30 Prof. Galina Markova, NBU, “Epistemic Justice: The Case of Roma Communities in Bulgaria”
- 9:30-9:55 Prof. Arnaud Regnauld, UP8, “The Ghosts of LLMs’ Inoperative Community”
- 9:55-10:20 Prof. Angelo Vaninni, UP8, “Generative AI and Epistemic Injustice”
- 10:20-11:00 Open discussion on "Epistemic Trust, Epistemic Justice, and the Transformation of Higher Education" leading to concrete proposals and hypotheses
Facilitators
