Epistemic Justice Across Cultural Boundaries

Sor Juana navigated a colonial intellectual landscape where Spanish, Indigenous, and African knowledge traditions held radically different institutional status. Her work illuminates epistemic justice—the fair treatment of people as knowers—particularly across cultures with unequal power. In contemporary political identity contexts, epistemic justice means actively listening to how different cultural communities understand justice, rights, and legitimacy, rather than imposing a single framework. This requires examining whose knowledge counts in policy-making, education, and political discourse. When political identity is genuinely multicultural, epistemic justice demands that Indigenous philosophies, oral traditions, and non-Western intellectual frameworks receive equal consideration in solving collective problems. Sor Juana's recovery of her own intellectual genealogy—drawing on classical, Indigenous, and contemporary sources—models how cultures can assert political identity through knowledge production and interpretation rather than through violence or domination alone.