Epistemic Justice and the Credibility Gap

Sor Juana faced constant epistemic injustice—her ideas were dismissed because she was a woman, her testimony doubted because of her social position, her authority questioned despite her brilliance. Colonial systems create credibility gaps where certain people's knowledge is always already suspect. Postcolonial decolonization must interrogate who gets believed, whose evidence counts, and whose interpretations are treated as authoritative. Miranda Fricker's framework of epistemic injustice names how oppression operates through knowledge systems themselves. Sor Juana's work, recovered and validated centuries later, exemplifies how epistemic injustice renders contributions invisible. For decolonization, addressing credibility gaps means actively centering marginalized knowers, creating platforms for testimonies excluded from official records, and building alternative institutions where different epistemologies receive equal validation. Epistemic justice asks: who decides what counts as knowledge, and how do we decenter colonial authorities?