Epistemic Justice and Witness Credibility

Sor Juana's fight for intellectual recognition was fundamentally a fight for epistemic justice—the right to be heard as a knower and truth-teller. In anti-corruption work, this translates to a critical insight: corrupt systems work partly by rendering certain witnesses incredible. Whistleblowers from marginalized backgrounds, workers, or dissidents may have crucial evidence but face systematic dismissal. Sor Juana's tradition insists we must interrogate who we believe and why, recognizing that credibility is often distributed unequally along lines of power. Fighting corruption requires building institutions and cultures that credit testimony from those traditionally excluded—workers reporting labor violations, indigenous communities exposing environmental crimes, women survivors of institutional abuse. This concept challenges the bias toward believing official narratives while discounting lived experience. By practicing epistemic justice, we recover knowledge about corruption that powerful actors work hard to suppress, creating accountability systems genuinely informed by ground truth rather than sanctioned interpretations.