Epistemic injustice and medicine

Prof Miranda Fricker (Sheffield) and Prof Boudewijn de Bruin (Groningen) have won a research grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to fund two philosophy PhD students at Sheffield and Groningen to work on epistemic (in)justice and its detrimental effects in two professional fields: finance and healthcare.

The healthcare branch of the project grows partly out of issues discussed in Miranda’s Medical Humanities Public Lecture last year ‘Epistemic Justice and the Medical Expert’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duNAXfOAvK0 concerning the ways in which certain unwitting biases can affect the credibility that patients receive, and their ability to communicate their experiences.

The project involves empirical work based primarily in Groningen on how to develop a professional virtue of epistemic justice that would mitigate the influence of such biases, and philosophical-pedagogical work based in Sheffield and CUNY Graduate Center, where Miranda will be based from September, with a view to designing a short training course for medical students to help them avoid unwittingly doing epistemic injustices to patients. This latter aspect of the project will be led by Dr Elianna Fetterolf, who is the Postdoctoral Fellow on the project.

https://www.shef.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/profiles/fricker

http://www.philos.rug.nl/~debruin/

http://torch.ox.ac.uk/elianna-fetterolf