Finding your voice for the oppressed: Testimonial injustice and testimonial smothering contextualised through epistemic entrenchment, and the interruption of talking back

In my thesis, I highlight how testimonial injustice is intimately connected to testimonial smothering. To illustrate the process, I explore the concepts of the credibility economy and negative-identity-prejudicial-stereotypes as brought forth by Miranda Fricker. In exploring these concepts, I connect them to the social construction of race as well as stereotype threat and double consciousness. I highlight testimonial injustice as microaggression, gaslighting, consistent and iterative, creating the circumstances for testimonial smothering to occur. I move into identifying how privileged individuals hold onto bigoted beliefs through a concept I term epistemic entrenchment. Epistemic entrenchment has three components, epistemic bubbles, epistemic resistance, and echo chambers, all of which lie along a continuum on which one's beliefs reside. The level of entrenchment indicates expected behaviours that one engages in, to protect beliefs from new relevant information. Finally, I provide four interruptions to the process of ignorance and testimonial smothering, to enable an oppressed individual to testify. These four disruptions consist of: saying something is better than nothing; asking one to notes; mutual confession; and meeting halfway. My thesis focuses on the smothering of oppressed individuals' testimony, how the ignorance of privileged individuals is amplified by epistemic entrenchment, and finally how this process can be interrupted.