Epistemic Justice and Silenced Climate Voices

Sor Juana's exclusion from intellectual institutions despite her brilliance exemplifies epistemic injustice—the systematic denial of certain people's knowledge and credibility. This concept illuminates climate injustice: women farmers warning of soil degradation, indigenous peoples documenting species loss, climate refugees describing lived impacts, and Global South voices explaining how wealthy nations' consumption drives their suffering are often dismissed or ignored. Epistemic justice requires actively correcting these silences—centering indigenous climate knowledge systems, elevating women's environmental leadership, and prioritizing testimony from those on frontlines of climate impacts. It means recognizing that people experience ecological truth differently based on their position: a fisher sees ocean change differently than a landlocked policy analyst. Justice requires valuing that embodied, positioned knowledge. Sor Juana's struggle for recognition as a knower parallels contemporary struggles of marginalized communities fighting to be heard on climate. Addressing epistemic injustice means institutional reforms: funding research led by indigenous communities, amplifying women in climate science, and designing governance that treats affected communities as authoritative voices, not merely subjects of expert study.