Epistemic injustice through transformative learning.

This article examines how transformative learning—a process that radically restructures a student's personal epistemic resources to align with a discipline's shared epistemic resources—can inadvertently cause epistemic injustice, specifically inferential injustice. Inferential injustice occurs when biased inference webs, which govern how knowledge is processed and hypotheses are evaluated, embed prejudiced assumptions that wrong individuals by obscuring experiences they have a strong interest in understanding. The paper illustrates this with examples such as gender bias in medical diagnosis and the racial biases in mid-20th-century IQ research, showing how educational practices can impose harmful epistemic structures on students. It cautions educators to be aware of their influence in shaping students' inference webs and the potential for perpetuating unjust epistemic harms through transformative learning.