Epistemic Justice and the Authority of Experience

Sor Juana insisted on the validity of her intellectual contributions despite her exclusion from formal university training, asserting that genuine knowledge and wisdom could be attained through rigorous self-education and observation. This represents an early claim to epistemic justice: the right to be recognized as a knower and the legitimacy of one's interpretive authority. In contemporary contexts, people experiencing poverty are systematically denied epistemic authority—their understanding of their own circumstances is overridden by expert discourse, policy language, and institutional interpretation. This concept empowers individuals to reclaim their lived experience as valid knowledge: understanding poverty from the inside, recognizing patterns invisible to external observers, and claiming authority over interpretation of their own reality. Epistemic justice involves validating alternative ways of knowing—experiential, narrative, embodied—alongside academic and professional expertise. By asserting the authority of their own experience, individuals experiencing poverty resist being objects of study and become knowers and interpreters in their own right.