Title: Zetetic Exclusion: Don’t You Worry Your Pretty Little Head About It

Abstract: Inquiry is a core part of daily life. However, inquiring environments—the spaces where we put forth questions, seek out answers, and look to others for advice, guidance, and support—can be sites of hostility, distrust, and outright injustice.This talk considers the dynamics of inquiry under conditions of oppression. Scholarship on epistemic injustice has drawn important attention to how prejudice can prevent one from being appropriately recognized as a credible source of knowledge. However, discussions of epistemic injustice have tended to overlook inquiry and the influence of prejudice in shaping the conditions under which knowledge is acquired in the first place. We will examine cases of zetetic exclusion: situations where only select members of society have meaningful access to investigate and to learn about important subjects. This gate-keeping of knowledge and information, I argue, constitutes a distinctive form of zetetic injustice that is not easily captured by standard accounts of epistemic injustice. Reflecting on these cases helps to reveal important dimensions of epistemic injustice, especially how one’s capacity to learn, and to pursue knowledge and other epistemic good, may be undermined due to prejudice and asymmetric relations of power.