Knowledge control as a form of social control. From hermeneutical injustice to epistemology of resistance

The existence of otherness as a social category is the result of a specific configuration of power relations. One way to maintain this configuration and exert control over subjectivities defined as "others" is to exclude them from participation in the production of knowledge, depriving them of the resources to understand themselves and the world and the words to describe their social experience. In this sense, the epistemic injustice, produced by exclusion from the system of knowledge production, constitutes a powerful instrument to control power relations and to maintain the subordination of minorised subjectivities. At the same time, the production of analysis by oppressed subjectivities constitutes a form of resistance to the control of the knowledge production and to the control of subjectivities themselves; since this production has a liberating function from oppressive systems and is able to reveal the implicit power dynamics within the production of knowledge.