Epistemic injustice and unwellness in the classroom: Creating knowledge like we matter

Introduction

To live in expectation of continuity – to experience ‘crisis’ as a bounded event – is something few in the world enjoy. Moreover, that blissful, unthought expectation of continuity is inextricable from the pain of others.

In the dialogue between bell hooks and Ron Scapp presented in Teaching to Transgress, Scapp says, ‘If professors take seriously, respectfully, the student body, we are compelled to acknowledge that we are addressing folks who are part of history’ (1994: 139, my emphasis). I read and agreed. Then, the statement began to chafe. Not in disagreement with Scapp’s point, but rather in discomfort that it might ever be possible to understand people as outside history.

How might it feel to be outside history? Mikdashi’s characterisation describes one aspect: living in ‘blissful, unthought expectation of continuity’ (2022: n.p.), and comfortable continuity at that. Distant enough from any margin – increase in fuel or food costs, cuts in public services – that you are insulated from change. Removed from war, hunger, and the natural disasters whose consequences are anything but natural. Accepted as self-evidently and fully human. Padded against what cuts into other people. And, all too often, ignorant of their cuts.

I have, of course, never taught – never been – anywhere outside history. I have never taught anywhere beyond the workings of power. No one has. Here I reflect on what that means in one room I walked into; a classroom in a private university in Yerevan where I worked with master’s students studying on a programme dedicated to human rights and social justice. This is a place where no one expects continuity and crisis is not a ‘bounded event’. ¹ Moreover, the courses I teach imply looking hard at how we exist in history, how the injustices we live within are created. They imply examining how the world makes us unwell.

In talking about unwellness, I follow Mimi Khúc. Khúc’s pedagogy of unwellness stems from ‘the radical recognition that we are all differentially unwell. This means we are unwell in different ways at different times, in relation to differentially disabling and enabling structures’ (Khúc, n.d.: n.p.). ² Here, I take the position that epistemic injustice is one such cause of unwellness. This is explicitly neither to pathologise, nor to individualise; the risks of doing so have been laid out elsewhere (Leviste, 2024; Zembylas, 2021). Rather, it is to draw attention to the structures of unwellness. Then too, just as the classroom is a place of knowledge creation, it also becomes a space where we can challenge epistemic aspects of the construction of unwellness.

In this reflection, I thus take a partial look at one aspect of the construction of unwellness: the creation – and refusal – of knowledge. I think first about how the creation of knowledge interacts with unwellness, and what it means when that very unwellness might bring people to the classroom. Then, I talk about how we experience unwellness in the classroom. Finally, departing from this perspective, I explore some guiding stances we might use as we create knowledge together.

Before beginning, a note on the ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘others’ that populate this text. These positions are fluid and inter-related challenges that I do not want to make static, explain in bullet points of a few selected categories, or otherwise tidy away (cf. Pillow, 2003). This is not because I believe that the ‘I’ of this text does not matter to its creation; it does. I talk a little about myself and the genesis of this text towards its end. But, for now, could you – the reader – read testing out those different positions against yourself? Where and how do you (dis)identify with or refuse my ‘I’, our ‘we’, this ‘you’? To do so is to invite knowledge to affect us. This us, though, is far from monolithic – and that is the point. Staying with the tensions in these positions is, for now, my enactment of a messy uncomfortable reflexivity which seeks not to recentre myself.

Epistemic injustice and the creation of unwellness

What do we learn not to notice? We learn not to notice some suffering, such that if the suffering of those deemed strangers appears, then it does so only dimly, at the edges of our consciousness.

Part of privilege is oblivion without consequence. While not knowing what is dominantly valued has consequences, being oblivious to devalued knowledge – learning not to notice it – does not harm you. Ignorance of devalued knowledge and marginalised experience is inextricable from the pain of communities to whom that devalued knowledge belongs. Amongst those pains: that of always having to explain, contextualise, recount. And: which versions of that story are accepted, which are erased, which are retold and by whom, and where that places you.

We see this pain in critiques of knowledge creation within the academy and beyond. Take, for example, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang: ‘The subaltern can speak, but is only invited to speak her/our pain’ (2014: 226). Or bell hooks: ‘No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own’ (1990: 227). Édouard Glissant: ‘I relate it to my norm. I admit you to existence, within my system. I create you afresh’ (1997: 190). Roxane Gay, too: ‘The world expects your trauma. The world feels entitled to your trauma. The world wants you to serve it up to them’ (Ramaswamy, 2023: n.p.). And, to serve it up in a way they can understand: pain must look like pain.

(It seems, still, that we have a narrow imagination of what pain looks like. How many times have we heard: but they didn’t look sad, it's strange that they laughed as they told that terrible story, I saw them out with friends, they’re OK, they look fine. In which rigid forms, behaviours, and words do we accept and approve pain? We still need to learn one of the simple-not simple lessons of Michael Rosen’s Sad Book (2005): a drawing of Rosen, smiling broadly, teeth showing, eyebrows lifted, the lines below beginning, ‘This is me being sad’).

But, in showing this pain to others, what are we saying? Or, what do we risk being understood as saying? That we matter (only) because we hurt? That we hurt, and therefore that we are (Tuck and Yang, 2014: 228)? Greenidge (2023: n.p.) says it well: ‘Artists [and, I would add, anyone creating knowledge] from marginalised identities have to ask themselves who their audience is; are they creating for the mainstream, an incessant plea to be recognized as fully human?’ Those are my italics, because this is what I believe it comes down to: the unequal recognition of humanity, the pressure to prove humanity – and, often, the demand to do so by proving that it hurts.

And it does, indeed, hurt – whatever that looks like. The feeling of a lack of recognition, of others’ oppressive refusal to know – this hurts. This is one of the reasons for unwellness in a classroom which cannot be anything other than part of history. This hurt is not just war, not just loss (as much as the word ‘just’ can ever live in those sentences), it is others’ resounding denial of the pain of war and loss. It is others’ ignorance of pain. It is the denial of deliberate killing, oppression, and erasure. Moreover, this hurt is in fact what brings many people I know into the classroom. A reason for seeking out classes about social justice is their experience of pain.

Why do I avoid further contextualisation here? Which wars? What loss? Because, in this form of contextualising, I reproduce what hurts. First, it hurts that contextualisation is necessary; that we must imagine that the reader does not know. Second, it hurts that contextualising happens through speaking pain. Below, we will return to the question of how we might contextualise otherwise as part of creating knowledge like we matter. But here, let us acknowledge that contextualisation is neither evenly demanded, nor equally used, and that this too contributes to unwellness.

Looking further into this, we can point to two further abuses of contextualisation. The first is where contextualisation is considered necessary to prove humanity. Alyan (2023, emphasis in original) points to this trouble as she speaks about the reaction to Salt Houses, her novel about a Palestinian family:

People kept commenting on how human the story was. You’ve humanized the conflict. This is a human story. / Of course, literature and the arts play a crucial role in providing context – expanding our empathy, granting us glimpses into other worlds. But every time I was told I’d humanized the Palestinians, I would have to suppress the question it invoked: What had they been before?

As Alyan remarks, the issue is not context in itself. Rather, the problem is demonstrated by the reception of that context. Indeed, what had they been before? Whose humanity has, time and again, to be proved? By whose humanity do we remain obstinately surprised?

The second abuse of contextualisation lies in how it is used to bind knowledge tightly to a particular time and place, and excuse it as of no impact for the reader. Castro Torres and Alburez-Gutierrez (2022: 1) have shown that ‘articles studying the global North are systematically less likely to mention the name of the country they study in their title compared to articles on the global South’. They identify this as ‘constitut[ing], potentially, an unwarranted claim on universality’. So, context may be used to border off knowledge claims, to distance, to mark knowledge as local, particular, and, somehow, unable to travel. Here is a telling exchange as Camilo Jaramillo interviews Gloria Susana Esquivel about the publication of the English translation of her book, Animals at the End of the World (2021: n.p.):

Jaramillo: Do you have any anxiety about how you could be read and interpreted in the United States?

The move to context seems to displace questions about other themes. It moves from the human experience (childhood, maternity, psychology) to the particular (Colombia and its violence in the 1990s). I am not saying that context does not make a difference, but rather looking at what context might do. ³ In asking for context, what conversations are stopped or diverted? Is context weaponised to reassure ourselves that this is not about us, but about some demarcated others? This is context as a wall, blocking self-examination, telling us information beyond this point is not about us, that the explanation for whatever phenomenon is otherness itself.

Here, in one case, context is read as humanising. In the other, context is read as specifying. If the former seems to be a universalising claim and the latter a limiting one, we might see these two uses of contextualisation as pushing in opposing directions. However, I understand them as tightly linked. Humanity, where it is so contingent on proof, is a distant humanity – one without implications for the person who demands that proof. It is Ahmed’s dimly-lit ‘suffering of those deemed strangers’ (2017: 32). It is precisely when humanity is perceived in this way that context may become a wall. Knowledge about such strangers does not travel beyond that wall to move you.

So far, then, how have we seen the creation of unwellness? In ignorance and in demands for contextualisation. In the rigidity of these demands, in what they let pass, in what they block. In the continued ignorance of others, which demands the re-telling of pain and objectifies detail as contingent proof of humanity. In the instrumentalisation of contextualisation to hold tighter to the denial of common-ground and mutual humanity. In the situation of knowledge about you as peripheral. And all this overlaid and interwoven with tragedy – unignorable and yet ignored. When we live this and, even, are driven to the classroom by such epistemic injustice, what does that mean for this space?

Unwellness in our classroom

… in October 2003, one of those boats sank. [...] That paper ship was full of people with the same nose as me, the same mouth as me, the same elbows as me. The day we learnt the news, all of us in the Somali diaspora didn’t know what to do with our bodies.

I open this section with a quotation from Scego which has stuck with me since I read it some 6 years ago. ‘[A]ll of us in the Somali diaspora didn’t know what to do with our bodies’. Our bodies – same noses, same mouths, same elbows – stiffen; we become living monuments to the not living. Our bodies are connected to those we have lost, to our sensation of unreal, borrowed continuity. Above, I also start with the quotation from Shire because, reading it together with some students, these lines made us not know what to do with our bodies. ‘A gun bigger than his body’. We felt sick in our stomachs, we took a break.

I do not want to create new rules for how we might live unwellness, but to note that being unwell may be intensely physical – in ways which sometimes do not leave us space for thought, for learning. It might be dangerous for some of us to look too closely, but already – as we look down, breathe, pause – others are producing, writing about our-your pain. Unwellness might make us not know what to do with ourselves, uncomfortable in our bodies, confused and sickened by once-familiar space. We have changed; the space has not. How can we re-enter it? Maybe also: we have changed; our bodies have not. How do we re-enter them?

As I have said, coming to the classroom was, for some students, part of re-inhabiting the world; they were brought here in an effort to understand and change their worlds. At the same time, this world does not have the privilege of continuity. Alyssa Hadley Dunn has so usefully written about Days After Pedagogy (DAP) (2021, 2023); while ‘days after’ references how teachers might engage with students after a particular moment of trauma, Dunn stresses that it ‘only works if you’ve been teaching for justice on days before and days during’ (2021 cited in 2023: 2). Indeed, we do have Days After, but we seem to mainly have Days Within. While we have been learning together, we have been changed again and again by new events, even as we have walked into the same classroom. In that classroom, we think through sources of pain which are past and continuing, which echo and repeat, which constantly challenge.

Being in the classroom often means being within a space of unwellness. This unwellness is tied to how we are part of history, how we understand ‘[our] own formation’ – and how we understand knowledge creation about that formation. Why, students asked, did they feel like the international reaction to the war in Ukraine was so different to the wars in Armenia? Why, students who came from Lebanon and Syria asked, are Russian migrants to Yerevan treated differently to them? And, everyone asked, how can we study in this uncertainty? How can we study when we know what is happening in our country, our countries, our homes right now?

In the fifth week of the semester, we had a student-led session. The only instruction was that they should reflect what we had covered in the first 4 weeks. Otherwise, the session was theirs to use as they liked. In the fifth week of the semester, Azerbaijan launched heavy artillery attacks on Armenia. In 2 days of fighting, around 300 soldiers, Azeri and Armenian, were killed. The media had again reported ‘clashes’ which had ‘erupted’ – safer not to name any actor at all. The media had again said that these attacks happened in ‘border regions’ – issues on the periphery of the already peripheral. Students had again noted this in our conversations in the unwell classroom.

In the sixth week of the semester, we reflected on the student-led session. How had they found it? At first, responses were slow, undetailed, laboured – a superficial positivity with ringing silences. It was good to work as a team, to revise certain topics, to choose our own way to look at one or another theme. I left the students to talk in small groups about it before coming back together. Then one person said, ‘The timing had an effect. I couldn’t concentrate on the topic, work out how to get information’. From the other side of the room: ‘I was going to say the same thing!’ And then the conversation ran. Everyone had something to say. Some who didn’t nodded, followed – and then emailed in the following days to talk to me on the page.

(This interaction also demonstrates the work of silences. Following Chicana feminists, we must ‘look for what is said by those silences, and [...] seek agency in silence’ (Davalos cited in Morales et al., 2023: 4); we ‘[start] to listen for what silences h[o]ld within them’ (Chavez Levya cited in Morales et al., 2023: 5). Everyone in the group had and has a right to their initial silence, and a right to their second silence. Let’s look at the second silence: ‘The timing had an effect’. This phrase carries silences, refused naming, refused spelling out what we all must know. ‘The timing had an effect’, a phrase with its own silences, was enough to give voice. It gave us a way to enter discussion in community. The silence did not have to be spelt out; our community lies in the fact that we could all read it).

I am not going to share our conversations. But here is what you may know: learning about rights and justice is painful when you feel that justice does not exist and rights are being violated. Studying can be too heavy. It can be a distraction, an escape. It can give hope that you will be able to create change. It can make you hopeless – particularly as it complicates known problems and reveals new ones. You might want to talk about war – or you might want to stop talking about it, for once. You might want to not think about it – or you might want to think about it, to feel that you are doing something too. You might be scared for the future and reliving the past. You might want to talk to realise that you are not alone. When no one speaks, you think maybe you are the only one feeling like this. Even if it is just a check-in, an acknowledgement, that helps you to study. You are sick of people not knowing, and also sick of having to tell them. And then you feel you must tell them: we must create knowledge against our violent erasure.

Responding to unwellness: creating knowledge like we matter

Why write love poetry in a burning world? / To train myself, in the midst of a burning world / to offer poems of love to a burning world.

How can we create knowledge like we matter? Above we saw a tumult of perspectives; different people want different things and live an unwellness which is itself differentiated. Recognising this guides us away from set rules and towards touchstones of care, always relational and contextualised. These touchstones are founded on the recognition that how we are (not) talked about is part of our unwellness. We accept that, within the classroom, we have an opportunity to respond to that. This means considering how we work, as well as what we create. To do so, here are some of our touchstones.

As we learn ‘from people we are in relationship to’ (Hannegan-Martinez, 2023: 2), we might think about our ‘we’. This ‘we’ is nested, layered, and uneven. One of its smaller forms is our classroom group: we consciously aim to create knowledge in line with our solidarity, our togetherness as a classroom community. Doing so requires a wider look at ourselves, including the parts of our ‘we’ which do not overlap. We are all part of communities and carry identities which go beyond the classroom. We bring to the classroom different experiences and knowledge. The basis of solidarity is recognising and engaging with this difference. We are not the same; claiming so replicates the unwellness created by oppression – be that in knowledge creation or elsewhere – by making structural oppression itself invisible. Invisible, but, crucially, still present; if you do not feel cuts, this does not mean they are not there. Putting ourselves into relationship with our community members means accepting that we bear epistemic responsibility to them (Medina, 2013).

So, we might think about how we come to know our ‘we’. To whom do we listen, and whom do we demand to teach? As we think about listening, we sometimes think of the discomfort of the listener. Lester C. Olson writes that, in listening, ‘at risk are not only a sense of self, place and society, but also knowledge of one’s own complicity with oppression’ (1998, cited in Hesse-Biber, 2012: 216). I do not disagree. However, we have to focus on the person to whom we listen, and what we ask them to tell. Rather than demanding education, others’ labour, contextualisation through the telling of pain, might we question why we (still) do not know? Recognising that this work is always in process and never complete, we owe the work of addressing our own active ignorance. This itself is part of our ethical epistemic responsibility – and one for which we should neither seek, nor accept praise.

(Aside from no negative consequences for not knowing, another sign of privilege is the social reward for a little knowledge of what we are not expected to know. For example, a white native English speaker, my words of Armenian often elicit disproportionate praise).

In listening, we might consider how we use the context we hear. Not to prove humanity or to hold people at distance, but rather ‘to embrace a position of existential vulnerability: to open oneself to the possibility of being radically reshaped by one’s intellectual encounters’ (Srinivasan, 2021: n.p.). This is not discrete information about a distant other, but knowledge which touches and may reshape you.

When we do choose to share our stories, we might reflect on how we tell them. We have guidance here. I cited Roxane Gay above, and she continues: ‘it’s important to recognise that you can write about trauma without cannibalising yourself. You are in control of your own story’ (Ramaswamy, 2023: n.p.). I also cited Greenidge (2023: n.p.), who reminds us in the same piece of ‘the thrill of creating for one another’. In creating stories for each another, we speak with an intimacy which allows us to know and be understood without laborious contextualisation. We may speak with silences. We might refuse to speak some parts, and control what knowledge is shared beyond the group. In the classroom, our stories are primarily about and for us, told with care and without objectification.

To do that, we might think about how our stories understand unwellness. Rather than reifying victimisation or naturalising inequality (Leviste, 2024), we have an eye for its structural creation. Faced with pain, we do not press on our bruises, but point to the constructed values and systems that bruise us. Here, I follow Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s call to ‘differentiat[e] between power – which deserves a denuding, indeed petrifying scrutiny – and people’ and refuses to commodify ‘stories of pain and humiliation’ (2014: 223). Where we focus on denuding structural power, we instead take a first step in understanding – and challenging – the production of inequality. What we learn may indeed, as students have noted, be painful. However, our learning also gives us the tools to understand and perhaps take agency over that pain.

Above, I wrote that physical unwellness might not leave space for learning. However, I do not believe it is a contradiction to say that – with time, support, solidarity, and emphasise on power and structure – we might also learn ‘by self-observation, […] by looking[, and] by feeling’ (Brand cited in Sharpe, 2016: 138). Saidiya Hartman reminds us that the ‘autobiographical example […] is not a personal story that folds onto itself; […] it’s really about trying to look at historical and social process and one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes’ (Saunders, 2008: 5). This is body knowledge (Gaxiola Serrano, 2023), formed by inter-generational experience – including unwellness as it does joy.

Carrying these touchstones is difficult. Our classroom remains a contested space, one of unwellness and, often, failures in our solidarity. This does not mean that our classroom cannot simultaneously be a place of joy and community. This does not contradict our common goal: to create knowledge in a way which values us, to be reshaped by our knowledge of each other. Doing so means finding the touchstones which might matter for us (maybe not those I have written above). Finally, creating knowledge together guided by these stones is not a panacea, but addresses an aspect of our unwellness. It does so by providing a space of care which is tied, finally, to hope. Bringing together the words of Farris and Dokumaci, in learning we aim – for ourselves and our wider communities – to understand how, amidst our burning worlds, livable lives can be dreamt and brought into being. These touchstones are, then, ways of living both in and beyond the classroom.

Afterword

I wrote this essay prior to a short-term visiting position abroad. It stemmed from imagining how I might present on teaching and learning within social justice courses I convene in Yerevan. I began imagining how I might have to contextualise for that audience – understanding that it is this constant contextualisation, the weight of others’ lack of awareness, which is a key discourse of injustice within my classroom. Finally, I wrote this essay, instead.

Indeed, I wrote this essay, although this is not my lived trauma. It is pain in solidarity – which is pain, but not my own. Am I the one writing, while others struggle to breathe? Is this essay itself an incidence of epistemic violence? Hadley Dunn has also noted that while there ‘are no shortage of events for which a Days After Pedagogy is necessary, yet there is a shortage of research on just what that pedagogy might look like’ (Dunn, 2021 cited in Dunn, 2023: 4). Why is there this shortage?

It is not because there is no knowledge. This knowledge takes other forms: in corridor conversations, in offers to listen outside the classroom, in phone numbers shared to be there for someone, in the myriad different ways in which teachers and students support each other. Where I work, I am one of the newest Department members. I am British, not Armenian, and I moved to Yerevan only in 2021. I moved into a space shaped by and still living the 2020 War – but I was not here during those days. Many have lived these Days Within far longer than me – and will do so far longer, and more intimately, than I will. It is not my intention to speak for them. It is also not my intention to presume to tell anyone how to teach.

Rather, I propose this essay as a snapshot of my experience. It aims to convey the guiding stances and felt experience I have in my teaching. More than that, it aims to be itself a portrait of and act against the epistemic injustice experienced by the students with whom I work. To my dear students, in our difference and in our solidarity, I hope I have listened well.