Epistemic Justice for Children

Sor Juana's marginalization in male-dominated intellectual circles reveals how power structures silence certain voices from being recognized as knowers. Epistemic justice for children means recognizing that young people possess legitimate knowledge about their own experiences, their communities, and the world—knowledge that deserves credibility. This concept challenges adults' systematic dismissal of children's insights as merely 'childish' rather than authentically valuable. It requires creating spaces where children's testimony about injustice, their observations about systems, and their questions about meaning are treated as serious intellectual contributions. Applied to children's rights, epistemic justice demands that child witnesses are heard in legal proceedings, that children participate meaningfully in decisions affecting them, and that their unique perspectives on education, family, and society are solicited and genuinely considered in policy-making.