[Philosop] Interdisciplinary Online Speaker Series on the Ethics of Argumentation: Oxana Pimenova - Conceptualizing and Modelling Rhetorical Injustice

[Stevens, Katharina]

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We are excited to announce the eighth talk in the 2026 Interdisciplinary Speaker Series on the Ethics of Argumentation! The series takes place on the first Friday of every month at 1PM ET. It hosts a variety of distinguished speakers from many areas, including philosophy, political science, communication studies, jurisprudence as well as public intellectuals.   

You will be able to see the list of abstracts for this year under: 

https://www.argnet.org/ethics-of-arg.

You will also find information about our upcoming speaker. Furthermore, you can watch past talks on our youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF50_BXQYXwcqFfLdXav5rg.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE A TALK, PLEASE EMAIL Katharin...@uleth.ca. You will be added to a mailing list that receives the zoom links for the talks each month. We will assume that those who subscribed in the last years would like to remain subscribed, but please email us if you would like to be removed from the list. 

We are looking forward to the eighth talk of our 2026 series on August 7th at 1 PM ET by Oxana Pimenova:

Conceptualizing and Modelling Rhetorical Injustice 

 

 Unlike epistemic injustice, which arises from the relationship between a speaker and their hearer (Fricker, 2007), rhetorical injustice originates from the speaker’s relationship to the institutional reasoning context in which institutional discourse occurs as reasoning exchanges among positionally unequal arguers – state-affiliated experts and others. In such an institutional discourse, a context is a structure that defines requirements (scope, boundary, information, and aggregation) mandatory to be observed by participants to gain institutional credibility for their testimonies and have those testimonies accommodated in state decisions. The first part of the presentation focuses on the theory of rhetorical injustice, introducing its components such as institutional credibility and institutional rebuttals, along with a detailed examination of a matrix of authority rules – boundary rule, scope rule, aggregation rule, and information rule – that underpin institutional rebuttals as rhetorical strategies used by state-affiliated experts. The second part of the presentation models rhetorical injustice as a regulatory-rhetorical equilibrium in the case of Indigenous consultations over the Trans Mountain project. It demonstrates how state-affiliated experts produce high-stringency institutional requirements for Indigenous evidence collection and adjudication and then use those requirements to rebut Indigenous testimonies/arguments as lacking institutional compliance and, hence, institutional credibility. I argue that in institutional discourses where power and persuasion intersect on the part of the institutional representative (state-affiliated expert), rhetoric may become an advocacy strategy that serves those most positionally advantaged, thereby reinforcing existing position-knowledge disparities and causing epistemic injustices towards positionally subordinate participants.