Know Better Combatting Epistemicide by Addressing the Ethics of Neutrality in LIS

This paper examines four types of epistemic injustices (Fricker 2007): testimonial, hermeneutical, participatory, and curricular that occur within library and information science (LIS), and argues for an ethical shift to address these injustices within our programs, services, and curricula. To do this, we want to use epistemicide as a concept to actively interrogate neutrality, and call it out for the social construction that it is. By having a shared language, and a shared ethical intuition that explicitly addresses the harms from assumed neutrality, it also becomes possible to recognize testimonial, hermeneutical, participatory, and curricular injustice. The accumulation of injustices is what we refer to as epistemicide. We argue for an acknowledgement of neutrality, and the history of its conception within the LIS field, to better provide alternative ways of knowing and resisting legacy forms of colonization and epistemicide.