The ARCL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education “Information Has Value” states that learners should “understand how and why some individuals or groups of individuals may be underrepresented or systematically marginalized within the systems that produce and disseminate information”. An important factor in understanding this concept is Epistemic injustice.
Epistemic Injustice is “wrongful treatment and unjust structures in meaning- making and knowledge producing practices, such as the following: exclusion and silencing; invisibility and inaudibility (or distorted presence or representation); having one’s meanings or contributions systematically distorted, misheard, or misrepresented; having diminished status or standing in communicative practices; unfair differentials in authority and/or epistemic agency; being unfairly distrusted; receiving no or minimal uptake; being coopted or instrumentalized; being marginal-ized as a result of dysfunctional dynamics; etc” ((Kidd, Medina, and Pohlhaus 2017).
Researchers around the globe face Epistemic injustice in the scholarly publishing process. They are often forced to use English to communicate their research (see English as the Academic Lingua Franca), dismissed by the academic community, face biases when attempting to publish in high-impact journals, more negatively affected by Author Processing Charges (APC) than their Western counterparts, and less likely to be cited by other researchers.
Many see English as the Academic Lingua Franca as logistically necessary means for efficient academic communication. However, the opposite is true as "a monolingual, ‘English-only’, shift like this in international publication neither [enhances] international communication in science nor [fosters] creativity and diversity in the scientific research of the future ... Rather, it metaphorically militates ‘unfamiliar’ social and cultural standards on its non-Anglophone users and endangers their lingua-cultural values, voice, representation, and identities...." (Alhasnawi, Uysal, and Selvi 2023). When researchers use only sources that reflect their own linguistic or geographic background, they are failing to see the whole picture of an issue. There are millions of scholars, experts and people with unique lived experiences that cannot (and should not be expected to) translate their work into English and are therefore looked over by publishers and researchers. This means that the important breakthroughs, groundbreaking theories, and diverse viewpoints of these creators are missed which is a detriment to the pursuit of knowledge.
It is a well-observed fact that women, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), and ESL scholars are cited far less than white, English-speaking, men in academia. This type of oppression silences and devalues diverse voices, prevents the open exchange of knowledge, and negatively affects the careers of marginalized scholars. Citation Justice aims to address this issue by citing authors based on identity.
Chilean publishers created the term bibliodiversidad when they founded the Editores Independientes de Chile collective in the late 1990s. It is often defined as "cultural diversity applied to the writing and publishing world" that supports "a complex, self-sustaining system of storytelling, writing, publishing, and other kinds of production of oral and written literature" and provides a "critical diversity of products (books, scripts, eBooks, apps, and oral literature) made available to readers" (Ryan 2022). When applying Bibliodiversity to scholarly publications, it is important to look not just at what bibliodiversity is, but how to achieve it (Ryan 2022). Bibliodiversity requires "diversity in services and platforms, funding mechanisms, and evaluation measures [that] will allow the scholarly communication system to accommodate the different workflows, languages, publication outputs and research topics" of a wide array of researchers (Shearer et al., 2020).
Bibilodiversity challenges Epistemic Injustice by critically challenging the dominate means of publishing in order to make meaning- making and knowledge producing practices available to traditionally marginalized groups. Often this means that these groups take control of the publishing process by creating their own journals with inclusive peer-review processes, editorial boards that represent the identities that are often excluded from such positions, progressive Open Access policies, and respect for different rhetorical approaches or languages than typically seen in traditional publishing.
Much of the conversation around Bibliodiversity focuses on what the publishing sphere can and should do to make a more inclusive, productive, and equitable environment for non-English, non-Western, researchers. Research on Citation Justice describes the unequitable situation faced by marginalized researchers and how systematic biases contribute to the situation. Scant research looks into the synthesis of the two theories, where impact of bibliodiversity measures are evaluated critically in the context of the impact or citation of such works.
There is an extreme lack in research on how to practically teach researchers to encourage bibliodiversity through citation justice practices in their own works. By finding, using, and citing bibliodiverse materials, researchers are expanding the depth of their knowledge, creating demand for (and therefore pressuring publishers to provide) more bibliodiverse research, and highlighting the importance and impact of marginalized researchers. Teaching students who will soon become researchers how to find, use, and cite bibliodiverse materials is the first step in address the unequitable publishing environment and encourage the further growth of bibliodiversity.
Bibliodiversity does not happen accidentally. Due to the systematic biases in scholarly communication, researchers often will not find bibliodiverse materials using their typical search strategies.
English as the Academic Lingua Franca affects not only how many non-English sources are published, but also the ability researcher have to find non-English sources. As shown below, database publishers index English language journals far more than non-English journals, which means that researchers will have a much harder time finding Non-English sources.
Alhasnawi, Sami, Hacer Hande Uysal, and Batuhan Selvi. 2023. “English as the Academic Lingua Franca (ELFA) for Research Publication Purposes: Voices from Iraq and Turkey.” Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 12 (2): 183–217. https://doi.org/10.1515/jelf-2023-2014.