Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing KRISTIE DOTSON Too often, identifying practices of silencing is a seemingly impossible exercise. Here I claim that attempting to give a conceptual reading of the epistemic violence present when silencing occurs can help distinguish the different ways members of oppressed groups are silenced with respect to testimony. I offer an account of epistemic violence as the failure, owing to pernicious ignorance, of hearers to meet the vulnerabilities of speakers in linguistic exchanges. Ultimately, I illustrate that by focusing on the ways in which hearers fail to meet speaker dependency in a linguistic exchange, efforts can be made to demarcate the different types of silencing people face when attempting to testify from oppressed positions in society. Gayatri Spivak uses the term ‘‘epistemic violence’’ in her text, ‘‘Can the Sub- altern Speak?,’’ as a way of marking the silencing of marginalized groups. For Spivak, ‘‘general, nonspecialists,’’ ‘‘the illiterate peasantry,’’ ‘‘the tribals,’’ and the ‘‘lowest strata of the urban subproletariat’’ (Spivak 1998, 282–83) are pop- ulations that are routinely silenced or subjected to epistemic violence. An epistemic side of colonialism is the devastating effect of the ‘‘disappearing’’ of knowledge, where local or provincial knowledge is dismissed due to privileging alternative, often Western, epistemic practices. Spivak’s account of ‘‘subaltern classes’’ has come under fire, but her insight into the difficulties of addressing a type of violence that attempts to eliminate knowledge possessed by marginal subjects is still useful today. As she highlights, one method of executing epistemic violence is to damage a given group’s ability to speak and be heard. Because of Spivak’s work and the work of other philosophers, the reality that members of oppressed groups can be silenced by virtue of group membership is widely recognized. Much has been said about the existence of silencing, though relatively little has been done to provide an on-the-ground account of the Hypatia vol. 26, no. 2 (Spring, 2011) r by Hypatia, Inc.