Testimonial quieting and smothering

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Kirstie Dotson (2011), drawing on Gayatri Spivak (1998), considers how under-represented social groups experience epistemic violence as a form of testimonial silencing. In other words, a person from an under-represented social group is silenced because they are judged to lack credibility as a knower of knowledge. Central to the concept of silencing caused by epistemic violence is the extent to which an audience communicatively reciprocates with a speaker. Dotson points out that judgements about the credibility of what a speaker is saying will be made owing to social identity characteristics. People from under-represented social groups are more likely to experience forms of silencing than others because of pervasive stereotypes representing them as producers of less than trustworthy knowledge. Dotson maintains that the extent to which pernicious ignorance can be deemed harmful is dependent on the communicative context people situated in. In her work, Dotson uses examples of how Black females are silenced owing to epistemic violence. She identifies two forms of testimonial: testimonial quieting and testimonial smothering. Speakers can experience testimonial quieting when audiences judge what they say to be untrustworthy or lacking epistemic credibility. Testimonial smothering is a form of coerced silencing whereby the speaker feels there is little point in sharing what they have to say as it is unlikely it will be received as credible. In certain situations, a speaker may find it unsafe share their testimony, leading them to smother their testimony. For example, in a room full of experienced and confident academics, a less-experienced academic from an under-represented social group may not feel it safe to share their knowledge for fear of being perceived as ill-informed. She maintains that proving the presence of silencing owing to epistemic violence is challenging, particularly as the burden to do so often falls on the speaker. She urges that to understand silence as a form of epistemic violence more needs to be done to understand “socio-epistemic circumstances of silencing” as opposed to focusing on the victim of the practice (2011, p251). In other words, we need to consider whose knowledge is most privileged in social spaces where interactions occur and how this is likely to affect the extent to which a speaker’s testimony will be accepted as epistemically credible.