Testimonial Injustice, Testimonial Violence, and Practical Constraints on Speech

Work on testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007) and testimonial violence (Dotson 2011) shows that marginalised epistemic agents are unjustly undermined as testifiers when dominant agents fail or refuse to hear, understand, or believe their testimony. This work has been pathbreaking. But I argue that it restricts our focus to one way in which epistemic injustice and oppression target marginalised testimony, while overlooking another that is equally or more significant in shaping everyday practices. This has distorted our understanding of how epistemic injustices shape testimony. Often, when marginalised agents are unjustly undermined as testifiers, it is not because their testimony would not be understood or believed. Rather, it is that unjust divisions or uses of power dissuade them from speaking or cow them into silence. They withhold testimony because speaking comes with unjust costs. This paper turns attention away from epistemic constraints on uptake, and towards these unjust social, and political, and other practical constraints on marginalised testimony. I theorise an epistemic injustice called testimonial withdrawal, which occurs when a would-be speaker chooses to remain silent because they know or reasonably expect that speaking carries practical risks stemming from systems of injustice targeting the speaker or the content of their testimony.