Analyze

In this poster, we share preliminary reflections on the ways in which hermeneutic injustice emerges and operates within educational settings and interactions. Hermeneutic injustice is a type of epistemic injustice that occurs when someone’s experiences are not well understood by themselves or by others, either due to unavailability of known concepts or due to systemic barriers that produce non-knowing (Fricker 2007). In 2021, we entered into a collaborative project to design a high school curriculum on environmental injustice and climate change for California’s K-12 students. Although the project convenors aspired to support the diversity of California’s K-12 student population through representational inclusivity across the program participant, they reproduced essentialized notions of what it means to be an “included subject”. In our first inperson meetings, activities intended to invite difference in the curriculum writing and design community were encountered by participants as an opportunity to point to the margins of that community. Who was in the room and who was not? Initial counts excluded some writers whose identity was not readily apparent by race, ethnicity, or age. Some individuals who, to their consternation, were assumed to be white, revealed themselves as people of color. The project chose the “storyline model” of curriculum design to bring coherence across the teams. The model was developed by science educators to promote student agency and active learning. Lessons start with an anchoring phenomenon, which should hook students and produce enough questions to sustain inquiry cycles that culminate in consensus making. As a result, each grade-level unit of our curriculum was intended to focus on a single environmental phenomenon, like wildfire. However, informed by Gregory Bateson’s theory of learning, we sought to foreground complexity by recursively analyzing environmental injustice through case study analysis of many hazards, injustices, and places. It took multiple meetings over several months to arrive at an articulation of environmental injustice as our central phenomenon that recognizes the compounding impacts of both climate change and toxic pollution. It also required restructuring the working relationships between the project's administrative arm, the curriculum consultants, and the writing team. The image we include is a photograph of an exercise done together with another HS team as we were tasked to clarify the aims and goals of our imagined lessons. As is evidenced in the photograph, each writing team found it difficult to articulate learning outcomes as a series of checklists, or goals, separate from skill-development that represented the dynamic need for curriculum capable of examining climate change and the environmental justice needs for California’s students.

Tebbe, Margaret, Tanio, Nadine, and Srigyan, Prerna. 2023.  "Reflections on Hermeneutical Injustice in K-12 Curriculum Development." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawaii, Nov 8-11.

The authors are Paul E. Farmer, Bruce Nizeye, Sara Stulac, and Salmaan Keshavjee. All of the authors are involved with the nonprofit organization Partners in Health in some capacity, with experience working with rural or poverty stricken areas. Paul E Farmer, the primary author of the article is a medical doctor also working for the United Nations who has published many other articles on similar topics.

The main argument is that susceptibility to certain diseases is not only determined by biology but also social conditions, leading to a disproportionate disease rate among the poor, and minority groups without access to medical services. The author shows that addressing these social conditions leads to a decrease in disease when combining treatment and prevention plans.

The argument is supported through a combination of historical information including rates of AIDS in the early 1990’s and a study done in Baltimore in an effort to reduce AIDS rates in African Americans, who were more likely to be in poverty, by addressing monetary barriers to heath care. Two more recent cases are also used to support the main argument, implementing a method created by the Partners in Health to prevent transmission and provide AIDS care in rural Haiti and rural Rwanda. Throughout the article references were made to the current medical professional’s dilemma, where they are in a position to see the social inequalities contributing to disease rates but not trained to report or change common social contributing factors. This makes the article more relatable to the reader that may have experience in the medical field which elps to support the argument.

“Pioneers of modern public health during the nineteenth century, such as Rudolph Virchow, understood that epidemic disease and dismal life expectancies were tightly linked to social conditions [55,56].” (Farmer 5)

“…large­-scale social forces—racism, gender inequality, poverty, political violence and war, and sometimes the very policies that address them—often determine who falls ill and who has access to care.” (Farmer 1)

“In an attempt to address these ethnic disparities in care, researchers and clinicians in Baltimore reported how racism and poverty— forms of structural violence, though they did not use these specific terms—were embodied [33,34] as excess mortality among African Americans without insurance.” (Farmer 2)

Data collected from a study done in Baltimore in the 1990’s, including statistics and observations is used to support the main argument. The methods used in Haiti and Rwanda as well as the results from implementing those methods are also used as examples for the claim that social conditions greatly impact disease susceptibility.

Emergency response is addressed in terms of both long term response and future emergency prevention. The method used by the PIH in both Haiti and Rwanda were implemented in response to high rates of disease in those places, showing that an emergency can occur gradually and the response may require creating a permanent system. Prevention is also discussed as a portion of emergency response, that it is important not only to deal with emergencies as they occur but also to identify the causes and change the system to prevent the same emergency in the future.

The article has primarily been referenced in later works by Paul E. Farmer who has written several other papers and articles on both the medical state of Haiti and Rwanda as well as structural violence in many capacities. The article was initially published in 2006 and has since been published in journals, books, as well as open online collections for use by the sts community.

The bibliography shows references to several papers by many of the same authors, showing it was produced as a continuation of previous ideas but showing new information learned through the PIH’s activities in Haiti and Rwanda. The bibliography also shows many references from the early to mid 1990’s showing similar thoughts to initial research done in Baltimore and other places with high rates of AIDS.

The article focused on treatment and prevention of diseases affecting communities, however I was interested in the initial causes of these epidemics in places that were originally free of disease. I read an article “The Tipping Point” published in the New York Times that explained multiple social theories as to how epidemics begin, using Baltimore as a case study.

I looked into the stated mission and some of the work done by the Partners in Health, as they are a group that responds to epidemics. It was interesting to see that they focus not on immediate emergency response but instead on creating lasting infrastructure to gradually stop epidemics, as well as educating locals on how to react to future emergencies of the same nature.

The article mentions that clinicians are not trained to see social issues as they are so commonplace in everyday life as to become invisible, I felt that was a limited mindset and read an article written by Doctors for America. The article showed that while it is true that comparatively little time is spent on social issues during a doctor’s education, clinicians dealing directly with patients clearly recognize social conditions effecting health. The article suggests that the lack of attention on those issues in the medical field is not due to ignorance but rather the lack of an existing system through which individual doctors can report their experiences and work towards a solution.