Epistemic Injustice for International Students in the US Higher Education

• In Event: Division by Epistemic Oppression, Reparation through Restorative Pedagogies

Proposal

Contexts
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained, “If you apply for a student visa…but to participate in movements that vandalize universities…and cause chaos, we're not giving you that visa.” (Halpert, 2025) Rubio offers a distinctive perspective on the role of international students in US higher education. International students are considered not only as conditional participants but also as the knowledge carriers and receivers without the agency to participate in the knowledge production system (Stein and Andreotti, 2016). Therefore, this paper will explore the experiences of epistemic injustice for international students in US higher education and pluralistic epistemological pedagogies as decolonial praxis.
Methodologies
This paper derives from collaborative qualitative work among 10 international doctoral students with participant observations and semi-structured interviews.
Theoretical framework
This paper will use both Fricker’s (2007) testimonial and hermeneutical injustice and Dotson’s (2012a, 2012b) contributory injustice. Through these three lenses of epistemic injustice, it is crucial to understand international student experiences not in the deficit, passive, or inferior positions, but in an agentic, heterogeneous, and pluralistic epistemological knower.
Pilot Findings
Testimonial injustice
One Korean international student shared that she felt stupid or less intelligent when she spoke in English. This shows a testimonial injustice with the assumption that international students’ learning capacity is equal to their English proficiency (Zheng and Qiu, 2024). Therefore, for international students whose English is a second language to be assumed as less credible knowers in the knowledge production system in the US higher education classroom.
Hermeneutical injustice
Racism towards international students is not only rooted in the coloniality of power (Stein and Andreotti, 2016) but also rooted in the hermeneutical injustice. Many Asian international students who first came to the US are ignorant about the violent history of people of color (Eng and Han, 2019). US universities that fail to educate international students about US colonial history as an act of settler’s amnesia (Stein, 2022). As a result, when they encounter discriminatory experiences, they have few resources to analyze their experiences.
Contributory injustice
The key distinction of contributory injustice is the willful refusal of the existence of other forms of knowledge. International students in US universities are studying from a Eurocentric, American-centered, white male gaze (Stein, 2022). In this singular hegemonic way of knowing, international students’ other ways of knowing are considered invalid. For example, English as a medium of instruction is usually standardized in the internationalization of higher education. Therefore, refusing international students to use other languages to participate in the US classroom is a form of contributory injustice.
Pluralistic epistemological pedagogies as decolonial praxis
As the field of critical internationalization has grown, many decolonial scholars have provided alternative theories and pedagogies to understand international student experiences. Various critical scholars developed self-reflexive pedagogy of self-epistemological situatedness (Hayes, Lomer, and Taha, 2024), intercultural communication with an epistemic-just lens (Huang, 2022), and translanguaging as “a new epistemological paradigm” (Zheng and Qiu, 2024, p. 101).

Author

• Qianzi Cong, University of Minnesota