Conference Agenda

In our academic contexts, several languages coexist in the same social space, dominated our so-called national languages, which must be mastered in terms of lexicon, syntax and pronunciation. This institutes a system of exclusion that leaves little or no space for the voices of the inaudible, the invisible, the faceless, to use Butler's critique of Levinas' universalism. That “subject that is not a subject (...) neither dead nor alive, neither fully constituted as a subject nor deconstituted in death.” (Precarious Life, 2004, 98). Such asymmetries of social position affect the formation of subjects, and this must be taken into account in the academic world as a place of knowledge production, or rather of knowledge par excellence, and where the mechanisms of domination and invisibilization at work in the way we approach linguistic differences must be interrupted, or at least questioned. This leads me to invoke the concept of coloniality developed by, among others, Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, which seeks to show how the relations of domination that organized social relations during the colonial period, i.e. ensured the maintenance of racialized power structures, persist after the decolonization process of the 50s and 60s. What interests us here is the way in which this concept also raises the question of epistemic justice, insofar as the definition of so-called legitimate knowledge passes through an eminently Eurocentric filter. Indeed, coloniality defines the boundaries of what can be said, or even thought, in the dominant language and thus make sense, radical otherness remaining unassimilable.

In this paper, I will aim to explore the relationships between scenes of care and the production of epistemic injustices, starting from the meaning that care and scientific knowledge assume in different cultures and focusing on the situational nature of knowledge. Thus, first, this investigation aims to define the perimeter of care practices, not limited to healthcare, but extended to the ethics of care, assuming that care is a relational practice and dynamic: in doing so, some common traits of the experience of care-receiving are pointed out; second, this research aims to detect and list some forms of epistemic injustices in care contexts, with a focus on both healthcare and social care, noting that epistemic injustices can be exerted by both parties in a relation; third, this research underscores that there are forms of care that besides not solving epistemic injustices, they contribute to enforce them. Finally, I propose the idea of epistemic care as an attempt to address the risks of producing epistemic injustices in care contexts.

I will draw on Miranda Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice, and more specifically on the notion of 'hermeneutic injustice', which Fricker uses to describe the situation of an individual who cannot account for his or her own experience of the world, to analyse the symbolic violence imposed on people in situations of forced migration when they try to claim the right to be welcomed and protected, the right to asylum, in the administrative language imposed by the 'host country' (De l’hospitalité, 1997). This condition obliges us as clinical therapists to give voice to the language of the other and to make the encounter between languages and their untranslatables (Cassin, Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, 2004) a refuge, not a prison. In a way, the clinical work of supporting people in exile becomes at the same time a place of social engagement that makes it possible to do justice to another language with the support of another voice. As Jean-Luc Nancy points out in Juste impossible. Petite conférence sur le juste et l’injuste (2007), the idea of justice cannot be constructed without recognising the principles of equality and difference, and without thinking that justice still has to be done and sought, 'because justice is more often what is lacking and injustice what prevails, and people have a clearer vision of what is lacking in human relations than of the right way to organise them' (Ricœur, « Le juste entre le légal et le bon », Lectures I. Autour du politique, 1991, p.177).