Introduction

Our overall aim in this book is to explore what the concept of a specifically epistemic type of injustice has to offer socio-legal analysts, particularly in terms of rendering more central to discussions knowledges and experiences that may otherwise remain marginalised due to epistemic injustice. Our interest is in epistemic injustice and the spaces and places, including temporalities, in, through or across which law and legal and regulatory arrangements, and the knowledges, meanings and understandings they carry, play a co-constitutive role. Space is understood as social relations that put boundaries around, divide and connect things that are gradually imbued with meanings that provide them with stability over time. Through the accretion of meanings over time, space prefigures and shades into place. Place, then, is understood as varying permanences (and thus temporalities) of social relations within space through which people develop the meanings of law and legal and regulatory arrangements. While social relations, materiality and temporality are important across space and place, temporality appears to be even more important to the constitution of place than space. It is in relation to space, place and, especially, temporality——or simply space/place/time——that we believe this collection makes its most important contribution to analyses of space and place, and through them to epistemic injustice, at various scales. Our intuition is that the conditions for epistemic injustice may become even more durable in respect of place than space, given the centrality of temporality to the very transformation of former into the latter, thus making it harder to achieve epistemic justice.