In our paper in the Special Issue of Teaching in Higher Education - Critical Perspectives on Teaching in the Multilingual University - we use theories of epistemic (in)justice to understand the epistemic outcomes of English-Medium Instruction (EMI) in a South Korean Higher Education (HE) context.

The paper arose from extended thinking relating to the first author’s (Dylan G. Williams) PhD thesis (supervised by Juup Stelma, the second author). This thesis focused on South Korean Higher Education students’ perceptions of their EMI experiences. A theory of ‘Situated Linguistic Capital Theory’ emerged from this thesis to conceptualize the students’ perceptions of trust in a linguistic code in different situations of their EMI experiences. In a manner, the thesis provided an ‘ecologically situated’ interpretation of Bourdieu’s (1991) linguistic capital.

During the writing of the Teaching in Higher Education paper, and as our thinking matured further, we began to reflect on the epistemic outcomes of students’ EMI experiences in terms of social justice. This brought us to Miranda Fricker’s (2007) notion of ‘epistemic injustice’. In our paper, while we do use Fricker’s theoretical framework as a starting point, we ultimately depart from her theory in significant ways. Fricker defines epistemic injustice as ‘a kind of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower‘ (2007, 20, original emphasis). To help conceptualise epistemic injustice, Fricker uses the terms testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice affects individuals belonging to groups with less identity power. It is situated, involves dehumanization, and results in clear follow-on harms for individuals. Hermeneutical injustice describes how a group may lack their own epistemic framework, and thus how they may, without much awareness, rely on the epistemic resources imposed or made available by more privileged groups. Early in our writing, this seemed to describe the EMI situations in the South Korean HE context we investigated. South Korean HE instructors and students, as knowers of the Korean language, were compelled to rely on the epistemic resources of the English language and the English-speaking academic world. However, through our reflection and writing, and helped by the Teaching in Higher Education review process, we came to understand there were significant differences between the situations Fricker investigated and our focus on EMI situations.

For one, Fricker’s unit of analysis is the power and identity of individuals and groups. By contrast, our unit of analysis is language, or specifically the English and the Korean languages. Our analysis indicated that patterns of how students trust the English and Korean language in EMI situations may constrain learning, and that this results in undesirable epistemic outcomes, including: a) how students are prevented from negotiating understanding of HE subject content using their L1, and b) the wider epistemic implications of the hegemony of the English language as the language that provides access to HE subject content. Moreover, the EMI situations we described were not clearly unjust. The dehumanization and follow-on harms for individuals that Fricker described were not present, or certainly not present to the same extent, in our EMI context.

Our further engagement with the literature around epistemic justice led us to Anderson’s (2012) work on ‘structural’ epistemic injustice and Soler’s (2021) work on ‘linguistic’ epistemic injustice. From this emerged a conceptualization of the epistemic outcomes of EMI as rooted in the powerful structural position of the English language in both South Korean and International academic settings, and a better understanding of how structural phenomenon affected EMI situations in our South Korean HE setting. This structural explanation also includes a situated element. The EMI situations we investigated, while not unjust in the manner of Fricker’s testimonial injustice, nevertheless embody a form of linguistic social stratification, and this prompted us to describe the EMI situations we investigated as instances of ‘situated linguistic injustice’.

We believe that our extension of epistemic (in)justice to EMI, and a multilingual HE setting, contributes not only to the field of Higher Education. We hope, also, that we have contributed to the debate about how epistemic (in)justice may be understood in the field of Applied Linguistics. Our work on this paper exemplifies both the temptation and challenge of using an existing framework, in our case Fricker’s epistemic injustice, which is developed in a very different setting and for different purposes. Our paper highlights the need to go beyond (simple) adoption and/or adaptation of existing theory. We hope, then, that our theoretical work constitutes not only a new contribution, but also a critical respect for Fricker’s original theory.

Dylan G. Williams and Juup Stelma