Legislating Epistemic Injustice: How “Anti-DEI” Laws Suppress Knowledge, Exacerbate Inequity, and Shift Institutional Possibility

• In Event: 21052 - Targeting Schools, Policing Students, and Protecting Insurgent Knowledges

Abstract

Elite higher education institutions have spent the last two decades both investing in and loudly celebrating their efforts to improve metrics of diversity and conditions of inclusion on their campuses. While the popular nomenclature “diversity, equity, and inclusion” suggests that equity was a goal of these programs and practices, the more common outcome was the increased representation (diversity) of people with minoritized identities within positions of power (inclusion). Universities do foster equity, however, via the work of faculty and students whose scholarship on racism and other social inequities illuminates the targeted and structural nature of oppression and generate strategies to build more liberatory futures.

This work, and these futures are under attack through “anti-DEI” legislation, which pay lip service to principles of academic freedom through exemptions for research and classroom instruction, but whose presence, passage, and implementation represent efforts to suppress the work of scholars and students who study and provide the intellectual grounding for equitable futures. This suppression invalidates alternative knowledge(s) and ways of being (i.e., epistemes and ontologies). Drawing from frameworks of epistemic injustice, which mark harm done to a thinker in their capacity as a knower, this critical ethnographic case study reveals Texas’s SB 17 to be a legislative restriction on what is permissible to do on campus, with implications for what those within the university can think, and for the material and emotional lives of people within the university community. We find university actors struggling with the challenge of worldmaking when there are legal barriers to the work they do creating the worlds that they want to live in. While this bodes poorly for higher education, it may result in more generative and transformative modes of study.

Authors

• Eliza Epstein, The University of Texas at Austin

• Liliana M. Garces, University of Texas at Austin

• Jacqueline Pedota, University of Texas-Austin