Breaking the Silence of the Classroom: The Struggle Against Epistemic Injustice in the Public University
Whose knowledge is it that we study in university faculties? Who decides which authors are “legitimate” and which ways of knowing remain on the margins or in oblivion? How do we build participatory classrooms rooted in equity and social justice within the university?
When we think of the university through the lens of the hegemonic imaginary, we tend to define it as a realm of objective, neutral, and plural knowledge. However, the reality of curricula, classrooms, and prevailing epistemologies often reveals a landscape where certain dominant voices are prioritized while the richness of knowledge emerging from the margins, social movements, dissidents, and situated experiences is silenced.
Within the framework of the project “Challenging the Polycrisis from the University”—jointly driven by the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), Economists Without Borders (Economistas sin Fronteras), and the UCM 2030 Observatory, with support from AECID—we set out to investigate how university students experience and feel this hierarchy of knowledge, and, most importantly, how they resist it through participatory methodologies in higher education classrooms.
