Hermeneutic injustice and troubling experiences of interactional inequality: a review

1 Introduction

Social interaction often involves troubling experiences of marginalization, discrimination, and injustice, which may disturb a person long after the incident (Cui 2014). Abusive behaviors such as sexual assaults, racial harassment, and bullying are key examples of interactions with long-acknowledged devastating psychological impacts (Duffy and Yamada 2018). Such experiences often emerge from breaches in everyday interaction rituals (Goffman 1967; Tavory and Fine 2020), described as “interactional vandalism” (Duneier and Molotch 1999) and “uncivil (in)attention” (Horgan 2020), as well as from the undermining of people’s positions of knowledge and authority (Clifton et al. 2018; Heritage 2013; Stevanovic 2018). These phenomena point to broader patterns of unequal distribution of power and recognition in interaction (Stevanovic 2023). Instead of being momentary disruptions of mutual understanding, they resist resolution through ordinary repair mechanisms (cf. Jefferson 2018). In this review paper, we refer to these phenomena as troubling experiences of interactional inequality (TEIIs).

Although TEIIs are widespread, articulating them can be challenging, as feminist scholars have noted especially in the context of gender-based discrimination (e.g., Acker 2006; Ahmed 2021). Individuals may hesitate to speak up, fearing their experiences seem too minor (Krefting 2003; Valian 1999) or that they will be dismissed as “oversensitive” or “small-minded” (Morley 1999: 2), or accused of failing to face reality (Gill et al. 2017: 1). These hesitations reflect a deeper issue: accounts of injustice are not neutral reports but socially situated actions shaped for specific audiences (Potter 1996). They not only describe events but position the speaker morally and socially – making them vulnerable to dismissal or negative judgment. Yet, such experiences need to be told – for any possibility of meaningful change.

Miranda Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007; Fricker and Jenkins 2017) offers a framework for understanding the barriers people face in accounting for TEIIs. The theory explains how structural inequalities and identity-based prejudices distort practices of sense-making, often undermining individuals in their capacity as knowers. Fricker describes two key forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice, which occurs when a speaker’s credibility is unfairly deflated due to prejudice; and hermeneutical injustice, which arises when gaps in collective interpretive resources, which in turn are shaped by unequal power relations, prevent individuals from fully understanding or articulating their social experiences. Crucially, hermeneutical injustice involves not only personal confusion but also the inability to make one’s experience culturally intelligible. A prime example of hermeneutical injustice is sexual harassment in a culture that lacks this critical concept.

While much research on storytelling and complaints has documented the interactional practices through which speakers construct tellable, credible, and affectively appropriate accounts (e.g., Drew 1998; Edwards 2005; Günthner 1997; Holt 1996; Norrick 2005; Ochs and Capps 2001; Ruusuvuori and Lindfors 2009; Van De Mieroop and Clifton 2013; Whitehead 2013), less attention has been paid to how these normative expectations may pose distinct challenges for tellers of TEIIs. Building on Fricker’s (2007) notion of hermeneutical injustice, it becomes essential to consider how the moral and interactional demands of storytelling may themselves reflect and reproduce the very interpretive gaps that constitute such injustice. TEII accounts are not distinctive because they rely on unique interactional practices, but because they are told under intensified normative constraints. When tellers navigate norms of tellability while simultaneously managing expectations of credibility, emotional restraint, and moral coherence, they are not merely managing how they are perceived by others. Rather, they are working within culturally sanctioned interpretive frameworks that may more or less adequately reflect or accommodate their lived experiences. In this sense, the struggle to present a TEII account as both reasonable and legitimate constitutes a distinctive discursive site where hermeneutical injustice materializes – not only in the absence of concepts, but in the normative pressures that shape how, and even whether, such experiences can be made culturally intelligible.

As an illustration of the normative pressures shaping the articulation of TEIIs, consider the following excerpt drawn from an interview with a woman, Kate, working in a male-dominated workplace:

In this account, Kate describes a clear instance of gendered interactional inequality – being consistently bypassed in business meetings in favour of a male colleague – only to follows it immediately with a denial that she encounters “a lot of sexism.” As Jones and Clifton (2018) observe, such contradictory positioning highlights the cultural constraints on naming and explaining gendered problems in talk.

In this review article, after detailing how we extracted relevant articles originating in conversation analytic and discursive psychological research to form our database, we examine how these studies have addressed the dynamics of accounting for TEIIs across different social groups. We focus on how this body of work has characterized (1) the conditions under which TEIIs occur; (2) the stakes involved in accounting for such experiences; (3) the narrative and discursive resources used for making them culturally intelligible; and (4) the local consequences of talking about TEIIs in different contexts. Taken together, these dimensions offer a framework for understanding how hermeneutical injustice operates in practice – how certain troubles may align with specific social positions and how individuals in these positions may face greater risks in speaking out than others. Revisiting the body of relevant research through the lens of hermeneutical injustice, we aim to bring a more critical perspective to a field often focused on the mechanics of telling, but less on their ties to broader structures of marginalization.

2 Methods

We combine two methodological approaches for implementing our review. First, we use methods for systematically reviewing conversation-analytic and discourse-analytic research (Parry and Land 2013; Parry et al. 2014). In line with this approach, we focus on findings from detailed inductive analyses of audio or audiovisual interactions that attend to verbal and embodied practices and their consequences in different contexts. Second, we follow scoping review procedures (Arksey and O’Malley 2005), adhering to a five-step framework: (a) defining the study purpose, (b) identifying studies, (c) screening, (d) extracting data, and (e) summarizing findings to highlight a field not previously established – in this case, TEIIs and how people account for them.

A comprehensive search of seven electronic databases and additional reference collections in October 2022 yielded 586 articles. The search terms combined keywords related to conversation analysis, social interaction, reported speech, and troubling experiences of interactional inequality. After removing duplicates and clearly irrelevant records, 484 peer-reviewed, English-language empirical articles based on audio or audiovisual data of human interaction were retained. These were screened in two phases based on predefined criteria, targeting TEIIs that both occurred and were accounted for in face-to-face interaction, and were treated as problematic by tellers and analysts (for details, see the Supplementary material). Each record was independently assessed by two authors, with disagreements resolved through discussion. Full-text screening of 109 remaining records resulted in a final set of 30 articles, which was later complemented with two additional articles following reviewer feedback, bringing the total to 32. These articles, dating from 1998 to the 2020s, represent diverse discursive research methods and cover various interactional contexts. Details on information sources and data selection processes are provided in the Supplementary material.

Not all studies that met the inclusion criteria explicitly framed their focus in terms of inequality or discrimination, but we considered them nonetheless to offer valuable insight into how people account for their troubling interactional experiences. Rather than taking hermeneutical injustice as our starting point, we aimed to synthesize general research on storytelling and complaints about troubling experiences with scholarship on inequality and injustice, to examine how difficulties in articulating TEII accounts may reflect broader societal dynamics.

The analysis, based on a collection of 32 articles, was conducted in two phases: first, familiarizing ourselves with the recurring themes and refining a coding scheme; and second, synthesizing findings across four dimensions of TEIIs: Conditions of TEIIs, Stakes of the teller, Narrative and discursive resources, and Local consequences of telling. This synthesis highlights potential inequalities in resources in accounting for TEIIs.

3 Findings

In this section, we will present the synthesis of the findings in our compilation of 32 articles. The section will be organized with reference to the four key dimensions of TEIIs described above.

4 Discussion

This review has examined research on people’s accounts for their troubling experiences of interactional inequality (TEIIs). While tellers are shown to employ diverse strategies to convey their experiences, they are also found struggling to articulate their experiences in ways that would resonate with their listeners and validate the seriousness of the issue in hand. While such struggle has already been pointed out in the feminist organization studies (e.g., Acker 2006; Ahmed 2021), conversation-analytic and discourse-analytic research can shed further light on the precise nature of these difficulties.

TEIIs are associated with various types of inequalities. First, these primary experiences themselves are distributed unevenly, disproportionately affecting those belonging to less powerful or marginalized groups. For these groups, TEIIs are often rooted in identity-related concerns, which generate systematic and repetitive negative experiences, permeating broad areas of daily life. Furthermore, in such TEIIs, various aspects of identity – such as gender and ethnicity – can intersect (see Prior 2019; Stokoe and Edwards 2007), with exposure to multiple power dynamics contributing to the accumulation of TEIIs (Parmenter et al. 2024). Second, accounting for TEIIs can be particularly complex for groups facing such compounded experiences. Although societal awareness of intersectionality has increased, integrating personal experiences into a story that underscores multiple systematic injustices is a particularly complex endeavor.

People’s stakes in talking about their experiences constitute a further dimension of potential inequalities surrounding TEIIs. As our review demonstrates, the stakes vary in relation to contexts, including the material consequences, moral and identity-related issues, and broader societal critiques. In high-stakes interactions with concrete material consequences (e.g., court), it is critical for the tellers to have enough resources to pursue their stakes, which is why extra societal support has been allocated to even out potential inequalities in this respect (Trinch and Berg-Seligson 2002). However, when it comes to the stakes concerning moral and identity-related outcomes and broader societal critique, the situation is trickier. The tellers may similarly lack resources to account for their experiences, as has been illustrated, for example, with reference to female leaders (Stevanovic et al. 2024), but no collective support is available for them. Furthermore, in these situations the teller might end up losing more than what can be gained through telling (see e.g., Harts 2019). The stakes associated with research interviews, then again, are of quite specific nature, as people may talk and reflect on their experiences without many of the social risks associated with telling in other contexts (Ahmed 2021: 18–19; Leinonen et al. 2024). While this can be empowering, the fact that TEII accounts depend on such exceptional environments underscores a structural issue that calls for societal attention.

The uneven distribution of resources to account for TEIIs is linked to Fricker’s (2007) concept of hermeneutical injustice. As Fricker explains:

“unequal power relations can skew shared hermeneutical resources so that the powerful can easily understand their experiences, while those in weaker positions may encounter certain social situations as if through a glass darkly, without the concepts to render them intelligible” (p. 148).

According to Fricker (2007), this hermeneutical marginalization extends beyond the content of speech to the manner of expression. For instance, speakers who use emotional styles of expression may encounter a hermeneutical gap, as Western societies have a long history of culturally valuing masculine “rationality” over emotional expression (De Beauvoir 1953). As shown in various studies reviewed in this paper, many TEII accounts are imbued with intense verbal or prosodic expressions of emotion, exclamations, and extreme case formulations (e.g., Christodoulidou 2010; Prior 2019), which may partially explain the ineffectiveness of TEII accounts.

Responding to TEII accounts is also a challenging endeavor. As pointed out by Konakahara (2017), engaging with a story about someone’s blame can threaten both the teller’s and the recipient’s face. The recipient’s face is threatened, for instance, when a teller claims having experienced discrimination by people that belong to the same group as the recipient (Varjonen et al. 2016). Responses to TEIIs may also be constrained by legal norms (D’hondt et al. 2022; Trinch and Berg-Seligson 2002) or professional requirements for neutrality (Pino and Mortari 2014; Ruusuvuori and Lindfors 2009; Stokoe and Edwards 2007), which may prevent affiliative responses. Most crucially, however, the recipients must discern the tellers’ goals and understand whether to provide affiliation or engage in action, or both. Some complaints only call for affiliation, as shown, for example, in the study of hair salon interaction (e.g., Heinrichsmeier 2021a, 2021b). In a hair salon, it would indeed be highly inappropriate for the professional to take action against the client’s family members for their minor annoyances. But then again, when an employer complains about their co-workers’ inappropriate behaviors to a supervisor who holds the power to prevent further inappropriate behavior, mere affiliation may be unsatisfactory as a response (e.g., Olakivi et al. 2024; Stevanovic et al. 2024). However, recipients may also use the ambiguity of TEII accounts to strategically avoid responding as expected, evading action by offering affiliation or circumventing affiliation by focusing solely on problem-solving.

As noted earlier in relation to the stakes of research interviews, TEII accounts can also be empowering in that they identify certain experiences as typical for members of a specific identity category. Such interactions can bring societal recognition to problems, support the teller’s agency, and encourage collective action. TEII accounts offer an emancipatory remedy by allowing individuals to conceptualize their experiences and give a name to the harm they have encountered. The concept of “microaggression” illustrates a case in point. While attributing blame in ambiguous situations is difficult (Wilkes and Speer 2021), the concept of “microaggression” encompasses this ambiguity, casting it as the defining feature of the problem. Thus, rather than diminishing the problem’s severity, labeling a behavior as an instantiation of microaggression emphasizes the problem’s unique and severe nature precisely due to its intangible nature. In this way, new concepts have the power to change the world.

In and through this review article, we also seek to “change the world.” To this end, we have introduced the notion of “hermeneutical injustice” as a framework to highlight the potential for social and societal critique within the bodies of conversation analytic and discursive psychological research, which may not explicitly achieve this on their own. In so doing, we align with the agenda of Fricker (2007: 172), who has promoted a “background social ‘theory’ that is informed by the possibility of hermeneutical injustice” as a way of encouraging skepticism in initial credibility judgments when someone’s account does not immediately make sense. Ultimately, this could help to even out inequalities. There is also a need for a deeper understanding of how new concepts emerge from accounts of interactional trouble and how their usage can empower individuals – and what researchers could do to promote emancipation and empowerment for marginalized groups.

This review has certain limitations. Although the included studies span a broad range of settings – from informal conversations to institutional encounters – this diversity also introduces complexity. The interactional norms and stakes of telling differ across contexts, which may limit the comparability of some findings. While our synthesis highlights recurring discursive challenges, these cannot be assumed to manifest in identical ways across all environments. Furthermore, despite our systematic search strategy, the reviewed literature is largely rooted in Western, particularly European, contexts. This reflects broader trends in conversation analytic and discursive psychological research but also signals a clear gap. Broader discourse analytic work – such as studies in social work – did not appear in our final sample, nor did our search strategy include book-length publications. Which tend to be less visible in standard database searches. Their absence might have influenced our findings. Since the affiliative recognition of TEII accounts is culturally shaped, future research is needed to examine them in underrepresented cultural settings. Such work would help assess whether the forms of interactional inequality and hermeneutical injustice identified here are generalizable or context-specific. It would also allow to consider whose experiences remain underrepresented in the current body of research – that is, whose voices are less likely to be heard not only in interaction, but also in the research literature itself.