CONCEPT
Epistemic Exclusion
The systematic silencing of certain knowledge forms — not through censorship but through institutional design that recognizes only expert, quantitative evidence as legitimate input to governance.
Epistemic exclusion is the structural mechanism through which governance institutions exclude the knowledge of affected communities — not deliberately or maliciously, but through evidentiary standards and procedural rules that recognize only certain forms of knowledge as legitimate. When a regulatory framework requires quantitative evidence, it has already determined that experiential knowledge will not influence decisions. When a policy process privileges expert testimony, it has already excluded the knowledge of people who possess expertise-through-living but not expertise-through-credentials. The exclusion is invisible from inside the institution, which experiences itself as open to all relevant evidence — the institution simply defines relevance in ways that exclude what it cannot process. Jasanoff's career-long project has been to make this exclusion visible and to design institutional alternatives capable of incorporating diverse knowledge without collapsing into relativism.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Jasanoff documented epistemic exclusion across regulatory domains. In environmental governance, the experiential knowledge of communities living near pollution sources — 'the water tastes different, the children are sick more often'