An Acción Approach to Affirmative Action: Hispanic-Serving Institutions as Spaces for Fostering Epistemic Justice

Abstract

In this article, readers are asked to suspend conventional notions of affirmative action as a policy that ensures equitable admissions practices to the nation’s most elite post secondary institutions, and instead to consider how affirmative action might be understood as a way to challenge the relations of power that govern the legitimation of knowledge and knowers within academia. Specifically, I present a model where Hispanic-Serving Institutions employ funds of knowledge work in order to foster epistemic justice: spaces where Latina and Latino students and the broader communities from which they come are positioned as thinkers, knowers, problem-solvers, and theorists in their own right.