Epistemic justice among youth: from cyberspace to policymaking

Justice is one of the most important issues in Iranian society. The main issue of the present study is epistemic justice and the gap between its definitions in everyday life and policy making domains. For that matter, we purposefully selected the pages of young users on social media networks of Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Telegram and then conducted their virtual ethnographic, thematic and semiotic analyses. Thereafter, policymaking texts were thematically analyzed, as well. While the findings of cyberspace confirmed the existence of hermeneutical (epistemic) injustice; we saw two types of otherization in space where the first is elitist and the second is based on reading of the dominant discourse of being the criterion that people are trying to confront with. The consequences of these otherizations include the contrast between official rulings and opinions of the people, the polarization of the society, being voiceless and probelmatization of difference. Epistemic justice at both national and transnational levels that are connected to each other manifested itself in the data. A review of relevant policy documents confirms the lack of opportunities for youth participation in macro decision-making, inattention to different lifestyles, otherization, pathological attitudes and policing and judicialization of issues. It seems that by eliminating the shortcomings of existing programs and operationalizing them, taking advantage of the academic capacity of universities and moving from abyssal thinking through radical plurality and de-linking, we can see the elimination of epistemic injustice, especially among the youth.