Across post-colonial and Global South scholarship, a growing body of work has shed light on how colonial legacies and global hierarchies shape knowledge production. Yet, even within these critical frameworks, voices from within the Global South, especially women from marginalized communities, are often excluded or misrecognized. Scholars such as Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, and Lila Abu-Lughod have long argued that women in the Global South are not merely subjects of oppression but thinkers whose epistemic contributions are routinely devalued. They face layered forms of marginalization within both national contexts and transnational academic spaces, with epistemic injustice emerging as one of the most pervasive mechanisms of exclusion. Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice has been particularly influential in exposing how people are wronged in their capacity as knowers, primarily through testimonial and hermeneutical deficits. In the case of marginalized women in the Global South, these injustices occur when they speak and/or begin long before that, in the very frameworks that determine who gets to speak and whose words are heard.
Iran, often cited as a paradigmatic case of postcolonial resistance, presents a particularly complex terrain for thinking through epistemic injustice within the Global South. While much scholarship has focused on Iran’s geopolitical resistance to Western imperialism and the rich intellectual traditions of Persian culture, less attention has been paid to the internal structures of domination that shape knowledge production and silence dissenting voices. As an Azerbaijani Turk woman scholar from Iran, I often find myself situated at a complex intersection of silences: silenced in the Iranian academic sphere because of my ethnoracial background, and marginalized within Western academic institutions that champion diversity yet remain profoundly shaped by epistemic hierarchies. My experiences reflect structures of misrecognition that many marginalized women of Color encounter as they attempt to bring forth their communities’ voices in scholarly spaces built on dominant paradigms.
Iran is the most diverse multi-ethnic country in the Middle East, with more than 50% of its population belonging to non-Persian ethnic groups. However, the country has long been portrayed in the West, as well as in many academic discourses, as a homogeneously Persian nation. I belong to an ethnoracial minority group that comprises nearly 25% of Iran’s population, the Azerbaijani Turks; however, they remain marginalized both politically and epistemically. In dominant Persian-centered narratives, the Azerbaijani Turk language, history, and identity are often erased, reduced, or deemed peripheral to what it means to be “Iranian.” This erasure does not stop at national borders. It follows us into diaspora communities, academic circles, and even the so-called post-colonial and Global South scholarship, where Iran is too often portrayed as a singular post-colonial subject resisting Euro-American imperialism. This resistance is typically told through a Persian lens, and the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural plurality of Iran, its internal diversity, is often overlooked.
When I write or speak about Azerbaijani Turk social identity in Iran, I am often met with polite confusion, subtle defensiveness, or thinly veiled condescension. The unspoken assumption is that this issue is either already acknowledged or not significant enough to be included in the academic discourse, particularly given the geopolitical spotlight often placed elsewhere in discussions about Iran. This dismissal deepens when I discuss Azerbaijani Turk women. Questions like “Are you sure this is relevant/expansive to theory and not just a regional study?” or “Isn’t feminism in Iran already radical enough?” frequently arise. The underlying message is clear: there exists a hierarchy of voices, and ours, those of marginalized ethnoracial minority women, is too particular, too local, too disruptive. This framing mirrors how academic gatekeeping often privileges knowledge that appears “universal,” which, in practice, usually means knowledge rooted in Euro-American experiences and norms. Work from the margins is dismissed because it challenges what is recognized as “legitimate” theory. In both Iranian and diaspora spaces, these reactions reflect a discomfort with intersectional analysis, as ethnoracial difference, especially when it concerns Azerbaijani Turk women, is treated as a disruptive complication rather than a critical dimension of feminist discourse.
The U.S. academia claims to ask women of Color scholars to speak about “their experiences” and “their communities,” but only within frameworks it deems valid. These frameworks rarely engage with our regional epistemologies or the internal struggles we face, such as resistance to cultural homogenization and Persianization within Iran. Knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences about Iran is primarily shaped by romanticized narratives of ancient Persia, often intertwined with Greek mythology, or dominated by modern topics such as the 1979 Iranian Revolution and Iran’s geopolitical tensions with the United States. Struggles that fall outside of these narratives, especially those centered on ethnoracial minorities, are either ignored or treated as peripheral, forcing scholars like myself to justify and explain the very relevance of our work constantly.
Compounding this erasure is the dominance of Persian-origin Iranian scholars in U.S. academia, many of whom deny, dismiss, or rationalize the marginalization and lived experiences of ethnoracial marginalization in the country. This dynamic is further compounded when I submit my work to Western academic journals. My writing is often reviewed by Persian scholars, many of whom are deeply embedded in the very epistemic structures I am critiquing, structures rooted in Persian exceptionalism and nationalist historiographies. At the same time, it is often evaluated by Western scholars who, even when critical, remain tethered to philosophical traditions that romanticize ancient Persia through Hegelian or Greco-Roman lenses. It feels akin to asking white feminists during the civil rights era to evaluate the writings of Black women, an exercise in misrecognition. The result is epistemic injustice and also a perpetuation of the very exclusions that decolonial and feminist scholarship claims to resist.
It is epistemic injustice because the knowledge I produce, rooted in the lived experiences, histories, and resistance of a marginalized ethnoracial community, is either dismissed as too particular or forced to conform to dominant theoretical paradigms that erase its critical edge. My voice is not evaluated on its epistemic terms, but rather judged against standards that were never designed to recognize knowledge from the margins. This denial of credibility, coupled with the structural silencing of alternative epistemologies, reflects what Miranda Fricker identifies as two distinct forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial and hermeneutical.
First, testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker is given less credibility due to their “imagined social identity,” such as race, gender, or ethnicity. As Fricker notes, this form of injustice arises when someone is “wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower.” My scholarly contributions are often subject to credibility deficits not because of their quality or rigor, but because of my social identity as an Azerbaijani Turk woman critiquing Persian hegemony, as this social identity does not align with dominant academic expectations or assumptions of authority. Second, hermeneutical injustice arises when there is a gap in the shared conceptual resources needed to make sense of one’s experiences. Because the dominant academic frameworks are primarily built by and for dominant groups, they often lack the language, theories, or epistemic tools necessary to understand the experiences of marginal communities like mine. As a result, not only is my voice rendered unintelligible within those frameworks, but the very possibility of articulating my social reality is obstructed.
The absence of concepts that name or legitimize the ethnoracialization and exclusion experienced by Azerbaijani Turks in Iran results in more than just marginalization, and it produces a sustained form of epistemic distortion. Both dominant Iranian and Western academic communities often lack the conceptual frameworks to understand, let alone engage with, the specificities of our exclusion. This is beyond a hermeneutical gap in Fricker’s sense, where the resources to articulate an experience are missing entirely. As Kristie Dotson and Gaile Pohlhaus argue, marginalized communities frequently possess the hermeneutical resources necessary to make sense of their oppression, and these resources are systematically dismissed or ignored by dominantly situated knowers, as this marginalization is not passive but an active, agential form of epistemic exclusion; it is a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of our knowledge. Dotson defines contributory injustice as the injustice committed when dominant epistemic agents refuse to integrate the resources developed by marginalized communities into the broader epistemic pool, thereby denying them the capacity to contribute meaningfully to shared knowledge.
This willful hermeneutical ignorance operates differently from Fricker’s standard hermeneutical injustice in crucial ways. For instance, when I present research on Azerbaijani women’s linguistic marginalization, Persian scholars don’t lack the conceptual tools to understand language-based discrimination; Iran’s own constitution acknowledges linguistic diversity. Instead, they actively choose to reframe my analysis as “divisive” or “anti-national unity,” deploying concepts (national cohesion, modernization, secular progress) to delegitimize my epistemological framework. Similarly, in Western academia, our lived experiences and conceptualizations are dismissed as too “local” or insufficiently theoretical to merit inclusion, even when they challenge the very boundaries of dominant epistemologies.
In both contexts, Azerbaijani Turks, especially women, are silenced, mocked, or deemed irrelevant not because they lack explanatory power, but because they disrupt dominant narratives. The hermeneutical resources exist in both Iranian and Western academic frameworks; they are strategically ignored. This reveals not a gap in shared understanding but a refusal to engage with alternative interpretive frameworks that would challenge both Persian hegemony and Western theoretical dominance. Where Fricker’s hermeneutical injustice suggests mutual conceptual poverty, willful hermeneutical ignorance reveals asymmetrical epistemic power, dominant groups possess but refuse to deploy the interpretive tools that would validate marginalized experiences. The result is a twofold injustice operating across these contexts: first, the epistemic agency of marginalized knowers is compromised, and second, dominant epistemic communities sustain their hegemony by disqualifying alternative ways of knowing. Whether enacted by Persian nationalist intellectuals or Western theorists, this selective epistemic recognition transforms the very structure of knowledge production into a tool of racialized exclusion, rendering our insights illegible not due to lack of clarity but because they are not permitted entry into the dominant epistemic canon.
Reviewers have advised me to “focus on the universal aspects” of women’s experience in Iran, suggesting that emphasizing ethnicity “might alienate readers,” or that bringing in race and domestic coloniality “complicates the argument unnecessarily.” But the complication is the argument. Domestic coloniality is key to understanding how power consolidates within postcolonial nations, where dominant groups impose their culture and worldview on subordinated populations. Decolonial work must challenge both Western imperialism and the domestic hierarchies within the country.
The resistance to this analysis, particularly from Persian scholars in diaspora, exposes how power consolidates through language, ethnicity, and class even within marginalized communities. To speak as an Azerbaijani Turk woman in academia is to carry the dual burden of invisibility and hypervisibility: always explaining one’s history, justifying one’s community’s suffering, and translating one’s truths into terms legible to dominant paradigms. The price of being unrecognized is the erosion of the right to theorize and be heard on one’s own terms.
Nevertheless, we, marginalized women, persist. We theorize in suppressed languages, build epistemic archives rooted in resistance, and demand recognition. Our decolonial praxis thus exposes how liberation requires dismantling both external imperial domination and internal ethnic hierarchies. Our scholarship pushes against national, disciplinary, and conceptual borders, insisting that local struggles against erasure are globally significant.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Elisabeth Paquette or the Associate Editor Shadi “Soph” Heidarifar.
Sevil Suleymani
Sevil Suleymani is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northern Kentucky University, specializing in globalization with a focus on gender, race, and nationalism in the Middle East.
