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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.

Operations of transnational companies are affecting marginalized communities across the globe. As Kaswan had highlighted through examples of Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in India, as well as pollution associated with oil companies in Latin America, the implications of distributive environmental justice in such contexts are apparent yet difficult to address. Across international boundaries law enforcement becomes increasingly difficult, which is at the heart of the problem of my research topic. 

“The “right” scale will depend upon the nature of the harm being analyzed and purpose for which information is being gathered.” (Kaswan, p 29)

“Numerous studies, at a multiplicity of scales, analyze the distribution of a wide variety of land uses, as well as risk: what exposures, with what consequences, do people experience?” (Kaswan, p 33). 

This text builds on concepts of equality, bases for deviating from the core idea of equality, and the multiple contexts that define and shape distributive justice. Kaswan additionally advances the distributive environmental justice by outlining the different contexts, including historical land use patterns, government regulations, infrastructure, and enforcement and the implications that each of these dimensions have on contributing to distributive injustice. 

The main narrative of this text builds on foundational ideas on equality and extrapolates it further to establish how distributive environmental justice, its ideas and articulations, as well as its operationalization, has taken shape throughout the years. To outline these points, Kaswan outlines different cases of environmental disaster, and subsequent government responses, to showcase how government institutions have both upheld and endeavored to address distributive environmental inequality in the past decades.

Byron Good, Ph.D., is a professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School. His primary area of research is mental illness and how social perceptions evolves around these issues, in terms of both treatment and social acceptance. Dr. Good has several works on these issues, including several that explore the perspective of bio-medicine in non-western medical knowledge, the cultural meaning of mental illness, and patient narrative during illness. His publications including several papers, books, and edited volumes; he is regarded as a major contributor to the field of psychological anthropology. 

The article primarily asserts that how a patient narrates or describes their medical history is deeply rooted in their native culture. As such, physicians must be aware of how an individual's medical experiences can be altered based on this. In turn, physicians must recognize the importance of story-telling and anecdotes when receiving information directly from patients. Narratives project the patient's experience and events through their perspective, granting professionals a glimpse into their thought processes and action patterns.

The author, Byron J. Good, is a Harvard professor in the department of global health and social medicine. He is the director of the International Mental Health Training Program, and has significant experience with field research that has led to many publications.

The article’s main argument is that the narration of an illness is founded in the emotional connection it has to the sufferers life, the place from which they view the illness which includes individual and cultural aspects. Furthermore any lack of factual accuracy is an indicator of the social and cultural environment in which the illness presents itself and is revealing as to how it will be perceived and treated.

The main argument is supported primarily through interviews with many individuals living in Ankara, through which they describe the first presentation of their seizures and in many cases the steps they tool to attempt a cure. Along with the interviews, statistics of the individuals interviewed and their diagnoses is used to provide a reference point to better understand their stories. Finally the article includes an analysis of narratives in a more general sense that can be applied to the narrative of an illness.