Epistemic Injustice in Community-Based Participatory Research

This chapter focuses on the interrogation of power hierarchies and epistemic injustice within Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) collaborations among social work scholars. It also examines the discourses of knowledge production in academia and how they are implicated in preserving normative whiteness, colonial extraction, and the gatekeeping of knowledge. This analysis is grounded in the narratives of multiple positioned actors in CBPR and anchored in decolonial, sentipensante, and ethical relational frameworks to theorize epistemic justice in the context of participatory knowledge production in social work research, community health, and organizing. By moving between individual narratives, discourses, and situational analyses, this chapter reconceptualizes the responsibility of social work practitioners, scholars, and researchers in interrogating practices of epistemic injustice, embodying enactments of disruption and refusal, and co-creating counternarratives and counterspaces to contest epistemic injustice in participatory inquiry. Key implications for social work researchers integrating CBPR approaches to knowledge production are discussed.