Epistemic Injustice and Cultural Processes in Education

This article provides a framework for understanding social and cultural inequalities in education in the context of cultural processes and epistemic injustice. Insight into the cultural processes and the concept of epistemic injustice direct us to the conceptualization of agency of the actors within the educational domain and the institutionalized relations of domination and recognition. The article employs two cultural processes: identification (stigmatization and racialization) and rationalization (standardization and evaluation) and two epistemic injustice models: testimonial and hermeneutical injustice to understand the production of inequalities and relations of domination in a school setting (Lamont, Beljean and Clair, 2014; Fricker, 2017). This goal is animated by this research question: “How to understand the production of inequalities in a school setting through cultural processes and epistemic injustice?” Taking into account cultural processes and epistemic injustice, this article argues that the literature on education should include diverse epistemic approaches to problematize the ways of the transmission of structural inequalities in society to education and how these inequality forms are complementary to current practices. This article indicates that cultural processes and epistemic injustice forms should be taken into consideration in understanding the production and maintenance of inequalities in education.


INTRODUCTION
This article provides a framework for understanding social and cultural inequalities in education in the context of cultural processes and epistemic injustice. Insight into the cultural processes and the concept of epistemic injustice direct us to the conceptualization of agency of the actors within the educational domain and the institutionalized relations of domination and recognition. The article employs two cultural processes: identification (stigmatization and racialization) and rationalization (standardization and evaluation) and two epistemic injustice models: testimonial and hermeneutical injustice to understand the production of inequalities and relations of domination in a school setting. This goal is animated by this question: How to understand the production of inequalities in a school setting through cultural processes and epistemic injustice? Taking into account cultural processes and epistemic injustice, this article argues that the literature on education should include diverse epistemic approaches to problematize the ways of the transmission of structural inequalities in society to education and how these inequality forms are complementary to current practices.
In his book, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations, José Medina (2013) problematizes the nature of particular grounds where knowledge is produced, negotiated, and circulated without sensitizing the paths and the constitutive elements of those grounds. As Medina (2013) points out, the sphere of epistemic activity should focus on epistemic dimensions of social interactions and trace power and privilege structures in society. In this context, Medina (2013) proposes some central questions that potentially interrogate the scope and the limits of individual and collective agency based on identity: "Who has a voice and who doesn't? Are voices interacting with equal agency and power? In whose terms are they communicating? Who is being understood and who isn't (and at what cost)? Who is being believed? And who is even being acknowledged and engaged with?" (Kidd, Medina, and Pohlhaus, 2017, p. 1). Medina (2013) tries to generate a critical link between the forms of knowledge and identity to construct a responsible and responsive approach to the issues of subjectivities. In this context, Medina (2013) invites us to question and problematize epistemic practices and monolithic cultural and social contexts. In this article, taking these questions as the prominent items of the literature on the structural inequalities in society, it is critical to engage in and problematize the inequality structures in education and examine the production of inequalities, institutionalized relations of domination, and recognition.
The institutionalized orders of domination and recognition have the potential of organizing symmetrical and asymmetrical distributions of power and privilege in society. Therefore, there is a need to consider the social and cultural aspects of domination and recognition. In education, the growing inequalities are the results of disparities in worth and cultural membership which mobilize recognition gaps (Lamont, 2018). Then, the production of inequality forms in schools is stabilized and normalized through the routine, (in)visible forms of pedagogic actions performed by the actors in schools. How to approach the normalization and stabilization of these processes? In their study, Lamont, Beljean and Clair (2014) argue that the production of inequality can be understood over two cultural processes: identification and rationalization. In describing these two cultural blocks, the authors identify four analytical paths: racialization and stigmatization for identification, standardization and evaluation for rationalization. By this categorization, the authors also concern the relationship between micro-level cognitive processes and macro-level processes. Here, macro-level dimensions are: material inequality, symbolic inequality and location-based inequality. Complementing these three macro-level social dimensions, the authors bold another dimension: cognitive dimension as part of cultural processes (Lamont, Beljean and Clair, 2014). All these categoric units are part of stratification literature, which refers to unequal distribution of people across social categories that are characterized by differential access to scarce resources. The resources may be material, such as income and wealth; they may be symbolic, such as prestige and social standing; or they may be emotional, such as love, affection, and, of course, sex (Massey, 2007, p.1).
Based on the literature on how stratification works in society, Lamont, Beljean and Clair (2014) turn our attention to the context of cognitive dimension of distribution of resources and how it is activated and mobilized in society as well as in social institutions. While the cognitive dimension in the literature includes "intra-individual cognitive processes" (Ridgeway, 2011 cited in Lamont, Beljean andClair, 2014, p.580), for Lamont, Beljean and Clair, (2014, p.580), what is missing is the inclusion of "inter-subjectively shared meaning structures." This means, the interaction between actors has a cognitive dimension which has a potential of reconfiguring distribution of resources in society. So far, there are three essential stations to understand the production of inequalities: 1. Macro-level processes which are material inequality, symbolic inequality and location-based inequality, 2. Microlevel processes which should include intra-individual cognitive processes and inter-subjectively shared meaning structures, 3. Meso-level cultural processes which are identification (racialization and stigmatization) and rationalization (standardization and evaluation) (Lamont, Beljean and Clair, 2014). Based on the cultural processes and the concept of epistemic injustice, this article aims to reflect the interaction between micro-macro-meso level cultural processes through analyzing a school-based ethnographic study conducted by Simone Ispa-Landa (2013) titled "Gender, Race, and Justifications for Group Exclusion: Urban Black Students Bussed to Affluent Suburban Schools."In the context of Turkey, locating a debate in a space where epistemic injustice and cultural processes are addressed is critical to examine the current inequalities in Turkey's education system in terms of: cultural representation of actors in education, the representation of epistemic communities, the rights of equal access to education, epistemic representation of underrepresented population and communities -e.g. their representation in the curriculum, the organization of school culture and environment (ERG, 2017a;ERG, n.d., ERG, 2017b;ERG, 2016)

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
The question of in what ways cultural processes influence education has a diverse literature. In order to explain the role of cultural processes in education, this article is based on an analysis of a school-based ethnographic research conducted by Simone Ispa-Landa (2013) titled "Gender, Race, and Justifications for Group Exclusion: Urban Black Students Bussed to Affluent Suburban Schools." The reasons behind identifying this research article for this study are a. It is a school-based ethnographic study which, as a qualitative research design, is based on everyday actions and accounts of the participants including multiple data collection methods; and includes unstructured data collection process with in-depth interpretation (Hammersley, 2007), b. The study deals with the following cultural processes: identification and rationalization, finally c. It provides how epistemic injustice functions in a school setting. In this respect, the article will be overviewed considering the core characteristics of cultural processes and the practices of epistemic injustice.

a. Cultural Processes
In the first place, what is cultural process and how can we understand identification and rationalization as part of meso-level cultural processes? According to Lamont, Beljean and Clair (2014), there are six characteristics of cultural processes: 1. Cultural processes are formed through meaning-making; 2. Cultural processes include the voices of both dominant and subordinates, 3. Cultural processes operate in a routine way, 4. Cultural processes concern both the distribution of material and non-material sources as well as recognition, 5. Cultural processes are interested in when, how and how much inequality is the result of cultural processes, 6. Cultural processes operate in organizations and institutions (pp.583-585). With reference to Lamont, Beljean and Clair's (2014) article, cultural processes will be examined under two categories: identification and rationalization.
The concept of identification is "the process through which individuals and groups identify themselves, and are identified by others, as members of a larger collective" (Lamont, Beljean and Clair, 2014, p. 587). In another context, Brubaker and Cooper (2000), indicates that " 'identification' lacks the reifying connotations of 'identity,'" and they address that identification has a robust contact with social context while identity has a limited one and has a more introverted orientation (p. 14). This means, identity "suggests a characteristic that is inherent and fixed while identification avoids essentialism" and communicates with the identifying process in the social context (Lamont, Beljean and Clair, 2014, p. 587;Brubaker and Cooper, 2000). So, identification of people with some specific characteristics makes contact with stigmatization and racialization. In the first place, what is stigmatization? The etymological origin of the word stigma means "mark made on skin by a burning with a hot iron" and the figurative meaning is "a mark of disgrace" (Online Etymology Dictionary). In social science, stigmatization refers to "the branding or marking of certain people [...] in order to make them appear different and separate from others" (Goffman, 1963cited in Coleman, 2006. In Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology, stigma "refers to a deeply discrediting attribute or 'mark of social disgrace' that is likely to become the focus of others' attention and concern, making it difficult for a person to engage in smooth or pleasant interactions" (Turner, 2006, p. 610). In the second place, what do we mean by racialization? Racialization is defined as "the process by which social markers or biological and phenotypic differences between human bodies are imbued with significance by social actor" and meaning-making process is central to racialization since markers are need to be interpreted by the social actors (Lamont, Beljean and Clair, 2014, p.587). In another context, race as the root of racialization is defined by Desmond and Emirbayer (2009) as a "symbolic category, based on phenotype or ancestry and constructed according to specific social and historical contexts, that is misrecognized as a natural category" (p. 336).
The second cultural process is rationalization. In Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology, rationalization refers to "the historical development of institutional orders such as the law, the market, capitalist enterprise, and the bureaucratic state, all of which are organized by impersonal and amoral principles that facilitate the instrumental pursuit of means and ends" (Turner, 2006, p.499). In another definition, rationalization "entails the displacement of tradition and values as motivations for action by a means-end orientation" ( Lamont, Beljean and Clair, 2014). In these two definitions, the common ground is attaching a rational orientation to action and to organize social life based on the constitutive elements of capitalist and modern society. Rationalization has two components: standardization and evaluation. In the first place, standardization can be considered as "the process by which individuals, groups and institutions construct 'uniformities across time and space' through 'the generation of agreed-upon rules'" (Timmermans andEpstein, 2010, p. 71 cited in Lamont, Beljean andClair, 2014, p. 591). In this definition, there are two critical grounds, one is constructing a solid uniformity with a fixed and stable nature, and second is a kind of social contract with agreedupon rules. In Timmermans and Epstein's (2010) study, one of the characteristics of standardization is that it moves beyond single social context, it communicates with multiple heterogeneous sites by bridging them, and it is secured by the social institution, organizations, moral structures, the state, etc. Creating and instituting standards is decisive in the distribution of resources. The second category under rationalization is evaluation which mainly deals with "the negotiation, definition and stabilization of value in social life" (Lamont, Beljean and Clair, 2014, p. 593) and it has two sub-categories: a. categorization which is "determining in which group the entity (e.g., object or person) under consideration belongs," b. legitimation which refers to "recognition by oneself and others of the value of an entity (whether a person, an action, or a situation" (Lamont, 2012, p. 206). Evaluation and its sub-categories are central to everyday functioning of school and occupy a critical position in problematizing the production of inequalities.

b. Epistemic Injustice
In the literature on epistemic injustice, two major concepts come into prominence: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice (Fricker, 2017). Testimonial injustice is perceiving the speaker epistemically lesser and misjudging as a result of having a prejudice towards the speaker in relation with the speaker's identity such as gender, race, etc. This is a direct form of discrimination (Fricker, 2017;Wanderer, 2017) and may result in "credibility deficit" and a "tracker prejudice" when "the prejudices imposed by the negative stereotype tracks them through different domains of the social world" (Kidd and Carel, 2017, p.177). Hermeneutical injustice is a form of indirect discrimination in terms of having unequal hermeneutical opportunity. It is the absence of knowledge about the speaker's social experience, thereby it is devaluing and the marginalization of social experience (Fricker, 2017). In both forms of epistemic injustice, according to Fricker (2017, p.53), the speaker is "wronged in their capacity as an epistemic subject." In testimonial one, for Fricker (2017), injustice is actualised through ingenious misjudgement, there is no deliberate manipulation; in hermeneutical one injustice is structural and cannot be eroded through personal effort. Considering the structural forces, Fricker (2017) highlights the relation between hermeneutical injustice and social powerlessness and remarks: hermeneutical marginalisation is a product of social powerlessness (and is a form of it), the actual eradication of this kind of injustice will require significantly more than such slight interpersonal hermeneutical empowerments; it will require sufficient social equality in general, to ensure that new areas of hermeneutical marginalisation do not keep re-emerging with new patterns of unequal power. (p.55) Therefore, the impacts of epistemic injustice on a person's life are resulted in social injustice, this means epistemic injustice is integral to social injustice (Kidd and Carel, 2017). Also, insight into the epistemic injustice directs us to the conceptualization of the agency of actors taking into account the relations of domination and the production of inequality in society.
In order to explore the testimonial injustice in greater depth, Wanderer (2017) suggests three perspectives on testimonial injustice: transactional testimonial injustice, structural testimonial injustice, and testimonial betrayal. Transactional injustice includes acts of exchange between two people which is formed within a social act and the order of justice is secured through selfconscious recognition by both parties. According to transactional one "an exchange is just when it lives up to certain normative standards governing exchanges of that type, including both generic norms governing all such exchanges and/or norms specific to the particular kind of exchange under consideration" (Wanderer, 2017, p.30). On the other hand, the structural injustice includes distribution of relevant goods and resulted from structural inequalities and Wanderer (2017) argues that "a structure is just when each person in the structure gets their due in terms of an appropriate distribution of relevant goods" (p.30). While in the transactional one the hearer relies on a prejudicial stereotype, on the other hand in the structural one the judgement is organized around the unequal distribution of epistemic goods, such as education. A third variety testimonial betrayal is about the trust relations between the sides of interaction within the practice. The injustice takes place in testimonial betrayal as a form of humiliation as a result of betrayal.
In another study, Hookway (2010) argues the other two forms of testimonial injustice: participatory prejudice and informational prejudice both outline "a person or group facing obstacles to their participation in collective epistemic activities" (Kidd and Carel, 2017, p.176). In participatory prejudice, a person or group is misjudged due to the lack of having a sense of relevance which is a capacity of identifying the ideas and discourse that is valued and worth taking (Hookway, 2010;Kidd and Carel, 2017). Therefore, the sense of relevance becomes the central identifier of being recognized by an epistemic community. In this case, the speaker should be familiar with or has the knowledge of the hearer's epistemic domain in order to be recognized and has an agency. The second variety, informational prejudice, is about the capacity to provide information. It emerges when the speaker or a group is misjudged due to the lack of capacity to provide information relevant in a given context and hence as being a discredited speaker in an epistemic activity (Hookway, 2010;Kidd and Carel, 2017). In a given epistemic context, Hookway (2010) argues that when the speaker does not possess the means of being a recognized epistemic agent, then becomes the victim of epistemic injustice which results in epistemic silencing. In this sense, Hookway (2010) offers another form of epistemic injustice that is raised from the participant perspective.
Another important concept to elaborate the epistemic injustice is hermeneutical injustice. As Fricker (2007) puts it, hermeneutical injustice occurs "when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences" (p.1). In this context, it is "having some significant area of one's social experiences obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource" (Fricker, 2007, p.155). For Fricker (2007; collective hermeneutical resources are structural hence they are widespread, systematic and beyond the limits of personal. What is critical here is the link between structural and systematic. Fricker (2007) identifies the role of "systematic" in the context of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice as follows: incidental injustice: if someone is disadvantaged, from having their experience left obscure owing to a lacuna in the collective hermeneutical resource, then that is broadly sufficient for a claim of incidental hermeneutical injustice, even though the hermeneutical marginalization is localized and one-off. systematic injustice: if someone is disadvantaged by having their experience left obscure owing to a lacuna in the collective hermeneutical resource, where the lacuna is caused and maintained by a wide-ranging and persistent hermeneutical marginalization, then the hermeneutical injustice is systematic. (p.158-159) Therefore, it is quite clear that systematic cases involve persistent and wide-ranging marginalization of some social identities while incidental cases involve localized, person-specific experiences, hence do not stem from structural inequality which is resulted in unequal hermeneutical participation with respect to significant areas of social experience (Kidd and Carel, 2017). b.1 incidental injustice: If someone is disadvantaged, from having their experience left obscure owing to a lacuna in the collective hermeneutical resource, then that is broadly sufficient for a claim of incidental hermeneutical injustice, even though the hermeneutical marginalization is localized and one-off (2007, p.158).

Tablo 1. The outline of epistemic injustice with key figures and concepts
b.2 systematic injustice: if someone is disadvantaged by having their experience left obscure owing to a lacuna in the collective hermeneutical resource, where the lacuna is caused and maintained by a wideranging and persistent hermeneutical marginalization, then the hermeneutical injustice is systematic (2007, p.159).

Jeremy Wanderer
Testimonial injustice: a.transactional testimonial injustice, b.structural testimonial injustice, and c.testimonial betrayal a. Transactional injustice: includes acts of exchange between two people which is formed within a social act and the order of justice is secured through selfconscious recognition by both parties (2017) b. Structural injustice: includes distribution of relevant goods and resulted from structural inequalities (2017) c. Testimonial betrayal: is about the trust relations between the sides of interaction within the practice. The injustice takes place in testimonial betrayal, a form of humiliation as a result of betrayal. (2017) Christopher Hookway

Testimonial injustice (TI):
a. participatory prejudice and b. informational prejudice a. Participatory injustice: a person or group is misjudged due to the lack of having a sense of relevance which is a capacity of identifying the ideas and discourse that is valued and worth taking (2010) b. Informational prejudice: is about the capacity to provide information. It emerges when the speaker or a group is misjudged due to the lack of capacity to provide information relevant in a given context and hence as being a discredited speaker in an epistemic activity (2010) In tracing the link between epistemic injustice and education, I exemplify the article "Education and Epistemic Injustice" written by Ben Kotzee (2017). In his study, Kotzee (2017) problematizes the level of credibility assigned to a learner in a pedagogical medium. In a pedagogical space, epistemic injustice might be activated through giving less credit to a student due to the identity prejudice teachers have which resulted in taking student's testimony less seriously. Kotzee (2017) also provides alternative explanations for the emerging testimonial injustice such as the hegemonic culture, institutionalized forms of privilege, and dominant modes of thinking in school. On the other hand, epistemic credit might be given to some students as a result of their identity and its privileged position in society. A second point is that since pedagogical sphere includes multiple capacities that are persisted under different dimensions, the prominent actors in agential operations of power, (in)justice, and recognition and the curriculum taught in class affect the context and practices of education. Then, who becomes a teacher, scholar, researcher in this context, is directly dependent upon the broader network of power relations. Kotzee (2017) extends this through engaging in a discussion that problematizes the privileged positions of teachers, scholars and researchers coming from in society. In other words, certain privileged groups in society have an opportunity to gain a form of recognition to be admitted as students in certain academic fields or elite institutions, then they have a better chance of being a teacher, researcher, scholar or a leader in society. This means, to some degree, the voices that have agency and power in pedagogical medium are represented and dominated by certain privileged groups in society. The curriculum implemented in schools is also another active part of this picture. The representation of privileged social groups compared to the less privileged social groups in the books, cultural, historical, and scientific achievements resulted in the knowledge that belongs to a particular canon. Putting all this together, Kotzee (2017) argues that the curriculum has the potential of blocking and enabling "students' understanding of particular social experiences and encourage or inhibit the ability of students from particular cultures to express their particular understanding of the world." (p.327). Therefore, it functions as the means of epistemic injustice and designs the relations of domination and the production of inequality.

Cultural Processes and Epistemic Injustice: Understanding the Production of Inequality in Education Over a Schoolbased Ethnographic Study
The study Gender, Race, and Justifications for Group Exclusion: Urban Black Students Bussed to Affluent Suburban Schools as a school-based ethnography examines the process of racialization and gendering in a school setting with good conditions and opportunities. At the centre, the research indicates that "teachers and peers often view ethnic minorities' behavior as genderinappropriate" (Ispa-Landa, 2013, p. 218). In the literature, while the label of inappropriateness deepens class and race based hierarchy, Ispa-Landa problematizes idealized versions of masculinity and femininity and tries to identify the ways of standardization and evaluation of masculine and feminine portrayal in a school setting. In this context, Ispa-Landa (2013) conducts in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations in a school setting with black adolescents (n=38) to identify "when and how members of a lower-class minority group's gender performance are used as the grounds for its exclusion" (p. 218). Holding onto this goal, Ispa-Landa (2013) invites us to think about normative commitments of gender performances and extends gender debate in a racially integrated (white and black communities) school setting. In her comparison of everyday practices of male and female adolescents in a majority-white suburban school, it is seen that social relations in this school setting are designed around social class, ethnicity, and gender. The findings of the study address 1. Popularity rate between boys and girls in black community is different due to the privileged position of masculinity. 2. Boys are classified as incapable of academic achievement so they are not taken as a challenge to white dominance, 3. Girls are unpopular because their portrayal is "loud" and "ghetto," 4. Girls are criticized about loudness by the boys in their ethnic community and also other classmates that results in their social exclusion.
In terms of cultural process perspective, the article brings forth the issues of identification with stigmatization and racialization and rationalization with standardization and evaluation. In terms of identification, the article problematizes gender relations and the codes of white femininity for black girls. In a school setting, everyday functioning of idealized forms of white-femininity-in a symbolic way, not being loud and not belonging to the practices of ghetto culture-outlines a social contract for black girls that designates the lines of stigmatization and racialization. Then, the identification process is activated through the portrayal of the idealized relationship between femininity and masculinity in which complementarity and hierarchy are central. In this trajectory, for instance, when black boys perform masculinity in school they are approached as cool and different by their white peers. Being cool and different as forced identification for black boys are preserved within the school setting due to its potential of patronizing idealized gender relations. Such as, for a black boy feeling cool and different means that their positioning in a social order within the school setting is equal to white boys-to some degree-and approved and recognized by white masculinity. How about stigmatization and racialization? According to Ispa-Landa (2013), stigmatization and racialization maintain a close contact with gender relations. Ispa-Landa identifies that there is a list of gender performances in a school setting which are organized around three-tier structure: ethnicity (black versus white), gender (boys versus girls and black boys versus black girls), and social class. In this structure, masculinity has a privileged position because it produces and regulates gender codes within the black community while constituting a rational ground for the possibility of being equal with whites. How does this mechanism function? There are several paths to activate this pattern. First, being cool and different and tough for a black boy builds a masculine domain that equates blacks with whites. Second, in the meantime, this domain produces unequal gender relations between black boys and black girls and white girls. The formation of unequal gender relations are mobilized through compliance, complementarity, and hierarchical relationships. In the study, it is observed that black girls resist to perform the norms of idealized white womanhood through being loud and performing ghetto culture, therefore they do not conform to the standards of white feminism (Fordham, 1993;Ispa-Landa, 2013). In their case, refusing to conform to the dominant norms in a school setting resulted in their stigmatization and racialization hence their social exclusion. In other words, black girls' forms of existence and differences are negatively qualified and not recognized. Another path is related to academic achievement. According to Ispa-Landa (2013), the domain of academic achievement is reserved to whites (Ogbu and Fordham, 1986). Even though black boys are welcomed due to their cool and different masculine performances, this approval is not active for academic achievement, therefore blacks do not threaten white dominance in a school setting in terms of academic achievement.
In Ispa-Landa's (2013) study, another matter of concern is rationalization of producing inequalities in a school setting. In what ways is the rationalization process activated? In the study, it is activated over several patterns. First, the stereotyping mechanism is active in classifying students according to their multiple identities. In the study, based on the interview results with black girls, stereotyping functions as a form of constructing uniformities and proves itself in the characterization of blacks as aggressive, tough, and poor. Such a characterization solidifies into a moral order that reifies the categoric orientation of standards and the ways how to evaluate them. In this context, Ispa-Landa (2013) indicates that moral order is organized around some specific grounds, for instance ghetto as an adjective symbolizes failure to live up to upper-middle-class white life standards, so being loud, aggressive, wearing notable clothes, performing boyish characteristics, failure to manage conflicts, etc. Therefore, the ghetto label carries a baggage which is full of masculinity, is not conforming to Eurocentric beauty standards, and has a web of categoric gender-race-class based practices and emotions that privilege white culture and its standards and evaluation networks in everyday functioning of daily life in a school setting.
As a result, ethnic minority groups' gender performance is the rationale for social exclusion in a school setting. Identification with the idealized masculinity eliminates the idea of negatively qualifying identities and cultural differences (Lamont, 2018) for black boys, so while black boys' masculinities are celebrated in a school setting, black girls' femininity is excluded from white social cliques through creating labels for feminine performances, stigmatizing loudness and aggressiveness and defining ghetto culture inferior to suburban culture. In Ispa-Landa's study, idealized relationship between femininity and masculinity sets the rules for individuals about how to "identify themselves, and [to be] identified by others, as members of a larger collective" (Lamont, Beljean and Clair, 2014, p. 587). In the study, this identification maintains not only white masculinity but also constitutes "social markers or biological and phenotypic differences between human bodies" (racialization) and "an attribute that is deeply discrediting" (stigmatization) (Lamont, Beljean and Clair, 2014, p. 587). In addition, the study analyzes how the social and cultural context in a school setting sets the ground for "a narrower set of social identity options [for black students] than white upper-class students" (Ispa-Landa, 2013, p.231). In this context, the distribution of resources is organized around the limits of recognition gaps based on identity structures which means different identity forms' degree of experience of recognition may result in interrupting and destroying a person's self-realization process (Mattias, 2013). In this case, qualifying negatively identities and differences has a contact with the institutionalized relations of recognition which may limit mutuality contract between different identity forms and practices, so results in the symmetrical and asymmetrical distributions of power and privilege in society. In Ispa-Landa's (2013) study, institutionalized relations of recognition, asymmetrical distributions of power and privilege can be read over the relations of domination based on race, gender, social class and, in this sense, the study contributes to our understanding of the role of cultural processes in the production and maintenance of inequality forms and practices in a school setting which requires a critical intervention.
The second path for the analysis of Ispa-Landa's (2013) article is epistemic injustice. How to understand the practices of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice in a school setting? In the study, the idealized relationship between femininity and masculinity results in the social exclusion of black girls not only because of their gender performances but also being ethnically different and coming from a lower social class. Testimonial injustice is observed when a speaker is perceived epistemically lesser and misjudged and discredited due to a prejudice towards the speaker based on speaker's identity such as gender, race, class, ability/disability, etc. Not conforming to the norms of white femininity may result in credibility deficit and tracker prejudice for black girls since prejudices imposed by negative stereotypes track them in diverse spheres of social life. In testimonial one, for Fricker (2017) injustice is actualised through ingenious misjudgement, there is no deliberate manipulation. In Ispa-Landa's study, it is observed that social acceptance of black girls is different from black boys, therefore they establish a network of solidarity within their black community. In a school setting, keeping a company among black girls becomes very common due to the existing social exclusion mechanisms they experience. Within this frame, there is a place to ask a. Does the relationship between black girls and the rest of the school actors include acts of exchange that are secured by mutual recognition?, b. Do black girls get their due in terms of appropriate distribution of relevant goods? c. Are black girls part of the trust relations in a school setting? In understanding testimonial injustice experiences of black girls in school, another context is related to their sense of relevance, which means they are misjudged and not recognized due to being not familiar with or has not the knowledge of the hearer's (white community and black boys) epistemic domain, the valued and worth taking one. In this sense, systematic social exclusion mechanisms in school play a role in constituting dominant models of knowledge that is built on the same cultural, historical, and social structures. Therefore, exclusion from the institutional units of knowledge or information production in a school environment may result in uneven distribution of privilege and credibility about the capacity to provide knowledge (Hookway, 2010;Kidd and Carel, 2017). In Ispa-Landa's study (2013), everyday functioning of formal and informal knowledge patterns are activated through the idealized relationship between femininity and masculinity, racialized context of valuing achievement, racialized context of everyday representations such as clothing, communication habits, fragmented identities, etc. In a school setting, all these considerations are part of the testimonial injustice debate.
While black girls experience direct discrimination through testimonial injustice, they experience indirect discrimination through hermeneutical injustice. Hermeneutical injustice is defined as the absence of knowledge about the speaker's social experience, thereby it is devaluing and the marginalization of social experience (Fricker, 2017). According to Fricker (2017), in both forms of injustice the speaker is "wronged in their capacity as an epistemic subject" (p.53). On the other hand, considering Ispa-Landa's study, the critical point is while testimonial injustice can be eliminated through personal efforts of black girls, hermeneutical injustice is structural and cannot be eroded by personal efforts. In this context, hermeneutical injustice sets the ground for social powerlessness for black girls in relation to their black [fragmented] identity (Fricker, 2017). Interviews with black girls indicate nuances of this relationality. For instance, the characterization of black community as loud, aggressive, tough, defensive, unable to manage conflicts, etc. are all obscured from collective understanding. For Fricker (2017), this is related to a structural identity prejudice. For instance, when "the loss (or radical curtailment) of one's voice, of one's interpretative capacities, or of one's status as a participant in meaning-making and meaning-sharing practices" (Medina, 2017, p.41) become persistent and wide-ranging, it is called systematic injustice. In a pedagogic medium, a systematic absence of knowledge about the speaker's social experience, black girls' social experience, holds unjust distributions of credibility, trust, recognition in place; contributes to the institutionalized hierarchy of knowledge; and designs the codes of relations of recognition. Considering the different aspects of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, it can be summarized that in testimonial injustice, prejudicial injustice is activated in relation to the speaker, here black girls; on the other hand in hermeneutical injustice, prejudicial injustice is activated in relation to what a specific identity, here black girls from lower class, is trying to say or how saying it (Fricker, 2007). In this sense, this article offers a rethinking of inequality forms which do not live in its immediacy but requires a critical eye to trace situated cultural, social, and historical realities behind them.

RESULTS AND SUGGESTIONS
This article offers a theoretical framework for understanding the production of inequalities in education in the context of cultural processes and epistemic injustice. Along the article, first I put into circulation the literature on cultural process and epistemic injustice to outline their potential contributions to our understanding of the irrepressible connection between unjust structures, cultural processes and epistemic disadvantage in a pedagogical medium. Second, in what ways cultural processes and epistemic injustice operate in conjunction with multiple identities in a pedagogical domain are traced through a school-based ethnography. Through the concepts of cultural process and epistemic injustice, this article aims to mobilize a new research model for education that problematizes the routine of identification and rationalization used in understanding pedagogical practices and how it is pursued and sustained in a pedagogical medium.
There is a diverse literature on the effects of cultural processes in education. For instance, Ingram (2009) argues the role of the institutional habitus of school in constructing identity of working-class boys. Ingram's (2009) study addresses the interpretation and (mis)recognition of working-class culture through problematizing masculine working-class habitus and the cultural battle they are experiencing in a school setting. In another study, Kinney (1993) studies the recovery of identity process with a special attention to the impact of school culture and peer culture on the self-perceptions of students. The role of cultural processes in the production of privileges is also critical in education. The study conducted by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (1979) titled The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture examines how privilege forms (such as predispositions and prior knowledge) inherited from the family are decisive factors in academic achievement (Göktürk and Ağın, 2020). In his renowned ethnographic study, Learning to Labour: How Working-Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, Paul Willis (2016) examines the role of social and cultural structures in the production of inequalities in a school setting with a special focus on the anti-school culture of white, working-class kids (Sayılan and Özkazanç, 2009). In addition, in another school-based ethnography, John Ogbu and Signithia Fordam (1986) problematize the burden of 'acting white" in a school medium and examines a web of practices which constitute mechanisms of social exclusion (Göktürk and Ağın, 2020). All this literature has focused on the social and cultural processes in a pedagogical domain to understand the relations of domination, the distribution of material and nonmaterial resources and problematizes privileged gender, class, and race relations. On the other hand, this article offers the concept of epistemic injustice to extend the field in terms of identifying epistemic agency and authority of the actors in a school setting which has a close contact with cultural processes. In sum, this article attempted to address alternative ways of understanding the production of inequalities in a school setting by employing cultural processes and epistemic injustice. In this sense, other possible suggestions for further research can be listed as follows: 1. The existing literature on the production of inequality in education can communicate forms of epistemic injustice through raising these guiding questions: "Who has voice and who doesn't? Are voices interacting with equal agency and power? In whose terms are they communicating? Who is being understood and who isn't (and at what cost)? Who is being believed? And who is even being acknowledged and engaged with?" (Kidd, Medina and Pohlhaus, 2017, p.1).