Feminist epistemic justice: reimagining knowledge and power in EU politics

This introduction develops feminist epistemic justice as a framework for analysing the European Union (EU) as an epistemic order, one that does not simply regulate political life but actively constitutes the terms on which knowledge becomes legible, determines whose experience counts as evidence, and renders certain forms of harm structurally invisible. Defined here as the critical and constructive project of transforming the structural, colonial, and intersectional conditions through which knowledge is produced and mobilized in ways that systematically exclude marginalized subjects from political life, feminist epistemic justice offers analytical tools that existing approaches to EU governance have not yet provided. Drawing on 11 original empirical studies of EU politics spanning climate governance, migration, corporate accountability, civil society funding, disability policy, higher education, and gender governance, the framework identifies three constitutive and inseparable dimensions: : a diagnostic dimension that asks how institutional architecture renders certain forms of knowledge invisible; a decolonial and intersectional dimension that insists epistemic hierarchies cannot be understood without engaging the colonial histories and intersecting systems of oppression through which they were constituted; and a constructive dimension that attends to the epistemic resistance through which marginalized communities build alternative ways of knowing. Although developed through the EU case, the framework applicable to any institutional setting where knowledge production and political exclusion intersect., and where decisions about whose knowledge counts shape whose lives are governed and whose struggles are recognised and supported.