Mrs Irene Jao1
1Queensland Bioethics Centre, Australian Catholic University, Brisbane, Australia.
Biography:
Irene Jao is a third-year bioethics doctoral student at Australian Catholic University. She has a background in nursing and counselling psychology and holds a master’s degree in Community Health and Development. She has previously held various positions in international research institutions and has been involved in coordinating and leading hospital- and community-based single-site and multi-site international collaborative studies. Irene is passionate about understanding and addressing the ethical complexities of healthcare practice and research involving new technology in low- and middle-income settings. Her research interests are in global health; decolonisation; empirical ethics; qualitative research methodologies, including consultative-deliberative methods; and community/public engagement.
Abstract:
There is increasing concern for epistemic injustice in global health ethics and the bioethics field overall, as part of the decolonisation agenda. Of concern is the issue of underrepresentation of voices from low- to middle-income settings in knowledge generation. As a result, marginalized groups in the global South are unable to participate fully in knowledge production, distribution and use; leaving them epistemically disadvantaged. These epistemic inequities need rectifying to ensure inclusivity in global health ethics discourses. This can only be achieved when epistemological injustices that have led to these exclusions are interrogated broadly. There is therefore a need to understand how epistemic injustice exists in global health ethics, to help provide understanding on how it can be addressed. Yet so far, epistemic injustice in global health ethics is an area of limited empirical and conceptual exploration. Ongoing empirical work exploring what types of epistemic injustice exist in global health ethics will be reported elsewhere. Authors have fronted several conceptualisations for addressing epistemic injustice in global health ethics and bioethics, but some of this existing work has not drawn on theories of injustice in relation to knowledge. Such theories highlight numerous concepts that suggest how epistemic injustice should be addressed that would be pertinent to consider in the global health ethics context. This conceptual paper seeks to fill this gap by particularly applying some philosophical theory and unpacking authors’ suggestions for addressing epistemic injustice, discussing them within a global health ethics framework. The paper is divided into two sections; the first section draws attention to existing conceptualisations of epistemic injustice, where we identify concepts that authors have suggested as solutions to epistemic injustice. In the second section we discuss implications of these solutions in the global health ethics framework. We conclude by discussing the costs and benefits of the various options.