‘Diverse’ knowers in neoliberal academia: student evaluations of teaching and accent as sites of epistemic injustice

This paper examines how epistemic injustice manifests in academia through focusing on two sites: formal student evaluations of teaching (SETs) and informal evaluations of accented speech. Drawing on Fricker’s concept of testimonial epistemic injustice and Bacevic’s concept of epistemic positioning, the paper explores how identity-based prejudices undermine the credibility of academics as knowers. Using secondary qualitative data from publications referring to Anglophone higher education contexts, the paper shows how SETs and accent-related judgments draw on gendered and racialized stereotypes to discredit those being evaluated. In particular, evaluations interpret particular bodily presentations and accented speech as showing a lack of intellectual legitimacy. In providing this analysis, the paper highlights how current EDI initiatives fail to address epistemic dimensions of inequality and discrimination.

Speakers

Marjana Johansson is a Senior Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on gender, diversity, and inequality in the workplace. Current and recent research includes examining gender inequalities in the creative sector; class and gender in elite businesswomen’s autobiographies; intersectional analyses of work in academia and counselling; and gender and knowledge production. Her work has been published in journals such as Gender, Work and Organization, Human Relations, Journal of International Business Studies, Organization, and Sociology.

Mrinalini Greedharry is a literature scholar based at Essex Business School. Her research interests are in postcolonial studies, life writing, and the politics of knowledge production. Her most recent publications include articles in the Cambridge Journal of Post-colonial Literary Inquiry and Psychoanalysis, Society, and Culture and her essay "'Unmastering reading: decolonizing ourselves, our texts, and our criticism" is forthcoming this autumn in Educational Embodiments: Life Writing the Body.