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Recognising and addressing wealth privilege in policymaking through an analysis of epistemic practice and agency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2023

Sarah Kerr Open the ORCID record for Sarah Kerr [Opens in a new window]
Sarah Kerr*
Affiliation:
UCL Institute of Education, London, United Kingdom
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The author makes the case that wealth inequality ramifies in the communicative practices of policymaking in ways which produce specific forms of epistemic injustice. Relative epistemic authority between richer and poorer knowers is established by limiting some speakers to being sources of information, and elevating others to the epistemically more sophisticated role of inquirer. In its systemic form, this differentiation has the effect of re-producing and maintaining ‘tracker prejudices’ (Fricker, 2007) and ‘tracker privileges’ (Medina, 2011) which then ramify in relational and distributive inequality (Fricker, 2016). The article suggests that in a context in which the inclusion of ‘lived experience’ has come to be seen as an intrinsic good in policy discourse (Smith-Merry, 2020), the lived experience we need to amplify isn’t that of the poor, it is that of the rich. Only in centring rich voices in social policymaking can we reveal and challenge the operation of wealth privilege and advance reparatory forms of epistemic practice.1

Keywords

epistemic injusticehermeneuticaltestimonialwealthexpertcredibility
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Social Policy , First View , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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