Description
Stories shape not only how we understand the world-but also how we live in it. The way a narrative sketches the contours of a person's character or presents the unfolding of events can have monumental consequences for those it represents. Yet across historical periods and global spaces, entire peoples, cultures, and communities, as well as the individuals within them, have been robbed of their stories through erasure, vilification, and distortion. At the heart of this book lies the question: if people are unknown in deep and unjust ways because their stories have been stolen, don't they have the right to be known? Drawing on a framework from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights-which affirms the “right to know” for victims of gross violations or injustices-this book makes a novel and urgent case for its counterpart: the right to be known. Both rights, it is argued, can be understood within a framework of epistemic reparations. The ultimate goal is to illuminate not only the normative demands these reparations generate, but also some of the concrete steps that can be taken to fulfill them, so that each of us might get to work right now in the process of addressing the epistemic wrongs faced by those relegated to the margins of the unknown.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Epistemic Reparations and the Right to Be Known 1.1 The Right to Know and the Right to Be Known 1.2 Not Being Known 1.3 Epistemic Reparations 1.4 Epistemic Reparations: Absences and Deficiencies 1.5 Conclusion2. Stories That Wrong and Stories That Repair 2.1 Storytelling and the Criminal Legal System 2.2 Counterstories 2.3 Misknowing 2.4 Flat Stories and Round Stories 2.5 The Right to Be Known Versus the Right to Be Forgotten 2.6 Unsympathetic Perpetrators 2.7 Biases, Perspectives, and Flat Stories 2.8 Conclusion3. Talking, Listening, and Learning 3.1 Epistemic Disadvantages of Firsthand Knowledge 3.2 Perspective Taking Versus Perspective Sharing 3.3 Talking, Coconstructed Narratives, and Epistemic Generation 3.4 Epistemic Respect, Inclusion, and Proximate Sources 3.5 Deference, Learning, and Restorative Justice 3.6 Conclusion4. Knowing Someone 4.1 Bearing Witness 4.2 Restoring Status 4.3 Epistemic Reparations for the Deceased 4.4 Causal Accounts of Knowing Someone 4.5 Conclusion5. Duties to Know Someone 5.1 Perfect and Imperfect Epistemic Duties 5.2 Perfect and Imperfect Epistemic Duties to Know 5.3 Duties and the Epistemic 5.4 Epistemic Reparations Versus Epistemic Repair 5.5 ConclusionConclusionReferencesIndex
