Complicit Knowers: Epistemic Injustice and the Doctoral Researcher

This paper develops the argument that the contemporary university is not merely a site at which epistemic injustice occurs but an institution actively engaged in its production through the everyday administrative artefacts of doctoral education. Drawing on Fricker's (2007) distinction between testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, Medina's (2013) account of active ignorance, and Santos's (2007, 2014) concept of the abyssal line, the paper examines three institutional sites – research requirements, institutional strategy, and ethical review – as mechanisms by which particular epistemologies are reproduced as universal standards. It argues that doctoral researchers occupy a position of structured complicity: trained in the standards by which the system reproduces itself, they are also those soon authorised to maintain it. The paper closes not with a programme of reform but with a question concerning the limits of awareness as a corrective to participation. It is offered as a reflexive provocation to doctoral and early-career researchers and to those who shape their formation.