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Why does global knowledge still flow along unequal, often invisible hierarchies, and what happens when those on the margins speak back?
This book invites you to examine how academic power is constructed, maintained, and contested across cultures, languages, and geopolitical spaces. You meet scholars who reveal the hidden mechanisms of epistemic injustice and propose concrete ways to reshape the global knowledge order. Bringing together diverse perspectives from across the world, the volume offers fresh tools to rethink expertise, confront entrenched biases, and imagine a more inclusive, dialogical, and truly global science. It encourages you to question what counts as knowledge, and who gets to decide.
Contributors are: Rene Brauer, Mirek Dymitrow, Martin Gren, Elżbieta Grzelak-Kostulska, Hans Eyong, Nora Hagström, Shelley Kotze, Valentin Mihaylov, Tomáš Imrich Profant, and Nazem Tahvilzadeh.
Valentin Mihaylov is Associate Professor in the Institute of Social and Economic Geography and Spatial Organisation at the University of Silesia, Poland. His research focuses on theory of human geography, political and cultural geography, urban studies, global issues, and intercultural dialogue. He recently published Our Utopian Futures: Imagining a Sustainable, Dialogical, and Inclusive World (2026).
Mirek Dymitrow is Associate Professor of Geography at Linnaeus University, Sweden. His research focuses on the geography of knowledge, within the intersections of science, politics, and everyday life. He has extensive international research experience. His recent book is Anatomy of a 21st-Century Sustainability Project: The Untold Stories.
List of Figures and Tables
Notes on Contributors
1 Introduction: Epistemic Over-Concentration in a World of Growing Diversity – Can Equitable Dialogue(s) Counteract the Current State of Affairs?
Valentin Mihaylov and Mirek Dymitrow
Part 1
Hidden and Overt Forces of Epistemic Hegemony
2 Universities, Impact and Epistemic Injustice: Unveiling the Hidden Geographies of Research Evaluation Systems
Rene Brauer and Mirek Dymitrow
3 Public Good, Private Gain: How Parks and Academia Play the Same Game
Shelley Kotze
4 A Prescription of Values: How Textbooks Impose Paternalistic Ideals
Nora Hagström
Part 2 Contesting and Re-evaluating Unjust Asymmetries in the Knowledge Order
5 Justify Your Geographical Choice! Methodological Racism in the Social Sciences?
Tomáš Imrich Profant
6 The Paradox of Self-peripheralization: How Marginalized Scholars Reproduce Academic Hegemony
Valentin Mihaylov and Mirek Dymitrow
7 What Does It Mean to Be an Expert? An Intergenerational Perspective on Expertise and the Epistemic Quality of Polish Science
Elżbieta Grzelak-Kostulska
Part 3 Institutional Injustice Orders and Their Alternative Epistemologies
8 The Modern Epistemic Order, the Earth, and the Planetary
Martin Gren
9 Lost in the Jungle? ‘Exorcism’ and ‘Exotism’ in Academic Investigations on Marginalized Urbanities
Nazem Tahvilzadeh
10 International Integration of African Markets: the New Paradigm for Unfairness and Stagnation
Hans Eyong
11 Peer Review from Hell: on Epistemic Injustice, Institutional Power, and the Pitfalls of Transdisciplinary Collaboration
Mirek Dymitrow and Rene Brauer4
12 Conclusion: from Epistemic Asymmetry to Epistemic Transformation – Lessons Learned – What Next?
Mirek Dymitrow and Valentin Mihaylov
Index