Dr Clare Lesley Hughes.
Abstract
This paper investigates how epistemic injustices and harms are perceived and experienced within the British university system by practitioners of nature-based spiritualities. This study draws on semi-structured interviews alongside an autoethnographic component, in which I also interviewed and analysed my own experiences. Interviews were conducted between March and October 2025 and explored the enchanted yet marginalised experiences of plant practitioners living in Britain, also known as wortcunners (from Old English wort, meaning ‘plant’ or ‘root’ and cunner, meaning ‘one who knows’). Within this research emerged accounts that highlighted how the spiritualities of university-based wortcunners (staff and students) occupied an uneasy and precarious position within dominant academic paradigms. Through their testimonies, I identified various entangled epistemic harms, including testimonial smothering, testimonial betrayal, contributory injustice, and dynamic hermeneutical injustice where wortcunners described being cautioned against “coming out” as witches, observed colleagues belittled or bullied for their spiritual plant practices, and fearing professional retribution or reputational damage. Others adopted self-deprecating language to frame their spirituality as “quirky” or “woo-woo” to maintain academic legitimacy or endured “mortifying” silences when attempting to articulate spiritual experiences. Collectively, these accounts reveal a snapshot of how nature-based spiritual knowledges are rendered vulnerable within the British university system, and how wortcunners are compelled to navigate and balance spiritual identity with academic legitimacy in environments that privilege normative and dominant Western knowledge systems.
Introduction
The General Concept
The concept of epistemic harm provides a crucial framework for understanding how certain forms of knowledge and experience are rendered less credible within societies where a dominant paradigm prevails. In 2007, Miranda Fricker’s seminal publication, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, explored two overarching forms of epistemic harm or injustice that have been widely applied across sociological and feminist epistemologies to examine how power imbalances affect and structure knowledge production and its credibility. These are testimonial injustice, whereby “a speaker receives an unfair deficit of credibility from a hearer owing to prejudice on the hearer’s part” (Fricker 2007, 9), and hermeneutical injustice when “someone has a significant area of social experience obscured from understanding owing to prejudicial flaws in shared resources for social interpretation” (Fricker 2007, 147). Together, these two forms of injustice or harm expose how epistemic credibility is unevenly distributed across social and institutional contexts.
Numerous authors have taken Fricker’s 2007 work and have further explored and refined both testimonial and hermeneutical injustices, harms and oppressions, including Fricker (Fricker 2013; Fricker, Peels and Blaauw 2016; Fricker 2017) and Allen (2017), Blackmore (2024), Boni & Velasco (2020), Byskov (2021), Coady (2017), Dotson (2011, 2012, 2014), Dunne (2023), Giladi (2018), Godrie et al. (2020), Kotzee (2017), McKinnon (2016), Medina (2017a, 2017b, 2020, 2021, 2022), and Wanderer (2017). I expand briefly on some of the broader concepts below.
Testimonial and Hermeneutical Injustices
Testimonial injustices can be understood through three related perspectives: transactional testimonial injustice, where credibility deficits arise within specific interactions between a speaker and a hearer; structural testimonial injustice, where these deficits are sustained, patterned, and reproduced through wider social or institutional arrangements; and testimonial betrayal, a harm that occurs between individuals who share “thick relations of intimacy” (Wanderer 2017, 28, 35). Kristie Dotson develops the concepts of testimonial quieting when an audience fails to identify a speaker as a knower and testimonial smothering when the speaker perceives one’s audience as unwilling or unable to gain the appropriate uptake of proffered testimony, resulting in the truncating of the speaker’s own testimony (Dotson 2011, 242, 244). Dotson identifies a further form of epistemic oppression as contributory injustice in which a marginalised group possesses the conceptual resources to understand and articulate their experiences but is faced with a dominant group that refuses to adopt or even engage with those resources, thereby maintaining structural ignorance (Dotson 2012, 31).
Hermeneutical injustices can include source hermeneutical injustices that can be either semantically produced whereby harms that have resulted from the unavailability of labels and cases where understanding fails because words are lacking, and those that are performatively produced where knowers and subjects are judged as less intelligent because of their communicative style as opposed to the actual words used (Fricker 2007; Medina 2017a, 45). There are also dynamic hermeneutical injustices that can be institutional, where institutions refuse to accept specific categories and expressive styles to the detriment of particular portions of society and interpersonal injustices that result in behaviours such as micro-aggressions, sceptical stares, etc. (Medina 2017a, 46). Hermeneutical injustices can also vary in breadth (where concepts can either be vastly beyond the reach of even the communicator, or conveyed in principle), and in their depth of harm (from skin deep harm isolated to just one aspect of a person’s life, to harm that is “Marrow of the Bone” and causes considerable repercussions across all aspects of a person’s life)(Medina 2017a, 47). Hermeneutical harm can also appear as willful hermeneutical ignorance when “dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally [and] such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world” (Pohlhaus 2012, 715).
Injustice and Spirituality in the Western University System
Western educational institutions play a central role in perpetuating epistemic injustices, as demonstrated across numerous studies (Allen 2017; Blackmore 2024; Boni & Velasco 2020; Dunne 2023; Foucault 2003; Godrie et al. 2020; Kotzee 2017; Reibold 2023). Allen (2017), for example, argues that the disciplining of knowledge systems within the academy enabled “the eradication of false or non-knowledge, the homogenisation and normalisation of the content of knowledge, the centralisation of knowledge around core axioms, and the hierarchisation of different forms of knowledge production,” a process formalised through the rise of the modern university as an institution that “selected some knowledge and disqualified others” (Allen 2017, 191). The effects of this hierarchy are disproportionately felt by marginalised groups, including women, non-binary people, and people of colour, whose epistemic harms are often complex, overlapping, and irreducible (Dotson 2014). Reibold (2023) further outlines how forms of willful or motivated ignorance manifest in university settings, including credibility deficits in cases of gendered discrimination, the discounting of student knowledge due to presumed lack of expertise, and the structural burdens placed on women as caregivers. All of which limit epistemic participation and constrain academic flourishing.
Together with these epistemic injustices, practitioners of non-normative or marginalised spiritualities encounter additional layers of spiritual injustice in Western universities. Shahjahan (2005) argues that peer-review systems, dominant disciplinary norms, publishing gatekeeping, and even ethical review mechanisms reproduce colonial epistemic hierarchies that diminish or exclude spiritual knowledge forms (Shahjahan 2005, 691). Panin’s (2015) work on Pagan Theology similarly highlights the suspicion or hostility directed toward pagan scholars: their work being perceived as “dangerous for the academia” (Panin 2015, 604) due to the dominant model of European Religious Studies which remains shaped by scientism, empiricism, and historicism frameworks often positioned as “clean” or “untouched” by insider perspectives (Panin 2015, 604). However, research on paganism conducted without some degree of personal entanglement can itself hinder the collection of rich data and may obscure meaning (Harrington 2004; Zwissler 2018b). This tension contributes to concerns within pagan communities that the academicisation of paganism risks becoming “dogmatic, overgeneralising and ecumenist” (Panin 2015, 605). Recent scholarship calls not only for critique, but also for a transformative reimagining. Zembylas (2025) suggests that scholars can resist Eurocentric epistemic-affective regimes through practices of refusal and affective activism, where emotions can function as political acts, and where feelings such as anger, hope, or vulnerability become forms of resistance against dominant power relations. Whilst Zembylas insists that such practices alone are insufficient, their presence can contribute to the creation of new academic spaces that cultivate less violent pedagogical and research practices for marginalised scholars (Zembylas 2025, 803).
This marginalisation extends sharply to contemporary witchcraft and related spiritual practices. Charnock and Schaller (2025) poignantly ask, what kind of spell are we under? The answer: “a dispellment, the systematic disavowal of witching as both epistemology and ontology within the knowledge-industrial complex” (Charnock and Schaller 2025, 410) and even when witchcraft does appear in the academy, it is often restricted to specific disciplines.
We notice too that within the humanities, witchcraft tends to be studied predominantly by historians and literature departments…In the context of the former, this is because witchcraft belongs to the past; in the latter, because it belongs to the imaginary world of fiction. Elsewhere in the academy, witchcraft in the contemporary is positioned as a question for anthropology and sociology and, more recently, geography (Charnock and Schaller 2025, 408).
Epistemic Limitations and Cautions
Defining epistemic injustices, oppressions, and harms too narrowly can cause further problems. While Fricker’s original account provides a robust foundation for understanding testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, subsequent scholars have argued that her framework does not fully capture the intricacies, depth or persistence of the epistemic harms experienced by marginalised groups. Kristie Dotson (2011, 2012, 2014), who extended and critiques Fricker by introducing the concepts of testimonial smothering and epistemic oppression, emphasises that epistemic harms are often pre-emptive, anticipatory, and rooted not in mere isolated exchanges, but within the very structure of dominant epistemic systems. Unlike Fricker, who treats epistemic injustice as a malfunction within an otherwise workable epistemology and society, Dotson, who works within the experiencing of women of colour and black feminisms, argues that many forms of epistemic harm are irreducible, meaning they cannot be remedied through any improved hearer practices because the system itself lacks the conceptual resources to recognise specific knowledges as intelligible (Dotson 2014, 116). Dotson (2012) goes as far as to say that Fricker’s narrow definitions of epistemic injustices, “if allowed to shape hermeneutical resources, will perpetuate epistemic oppression” (Dotson 2012, 41). Dotson’s accounts, therefore, highlight the epistemic vulnerability of individuals whose ways of knowing and indeed, being fall outside Western dominant norms.
Further caution is advised by Pohlhaus, Jr. (2017), who states that:
Epistemic injustices are something that occur within the activities and institutions knowers engage in order to know, and given that a chapter that seeks to convey knowledge concerning the varieties of epistemic injustice does, by definition, engage in epistemic activity, we would do well to consider at the outset the ways in which this essay might itself participate in and perpetuate epistemic injustice (Pohlhaus 2017, 13).
Pohlhaus Jr. therefore does not offer an exhaustive list of the varieties of epistemic injustice and prefers to offer initial examples of epistemic injustices so that “readers may begin to understand the grammar of the term “epistemic injustice for future and new use” (Pohlhaus 2017, 13). Hence, this paper will also work in the same reflexive way, and I acknowledge my positioning as a white female academic and the positioning of the testimonies of the wortcunners who all identified as either white female or white non-binary individuals. Whilst themes are uncovered, explored and attributed to various concepts of epistemic harm, this paper does not claim to offer the whole picture, merely the partial situatedness of the wortcunners and the researcher.
Methodology
Designing and implementing a feminist-led and reflexive methodology was of utmost importance to this research project, as it aimed to yield the richest data from individuals who embodied various nature-based spiritualities (for the context of this paper, defined as a spirituality that recognises the natural world as sacred, vital and interconnected), including healer, witch, herbalist, pagan, etc. When studying pagan communities, Zwissler (2018) suggests that we have an ideal opportunity to reflect on and adapt methodologies that explore and push the boundaries of self-reflexivity and integration, particularly as these groups of people tend to emphasise spiritual experiences and where active and personal engagement is desired and encouraged. The design stages of this research methodology, therefore, presented a perfect opportunity to construct a bespoke and targeted methodological approach that enabled a data-rich environment while also ensuring that participants were protected, enabled, and mutually benefited from the interaction.
As a wortcunner and pagan myself, with complementary visible tattoos, it would have been impossible for me to opt for a position of neutrality and would have been reductive. As Harrington (2004) states,
if we are to develop the study of paganism, it would perhaps be of value to become more reflexive in our work. Rather than trying to eradicate the researcher’s personality and pretend that they do not have bias or personal interests by adopting a pseudoscientific approach in a non-scientific field, we could instead aim for further reflexivity (Harrington 2004, 78).
Throughout this study, therefore, I opted for constant reflexivity to guard against bias whilst fully engaging with the rhetoric and discourse offered to me.
The development of rapport was also central to the methodology, reflecting feminist commitments to non-hierarchical, reflexive research (Oakley 1998; Sultana 2007, 375). I initially chose to adopt a “friendly stranger” role (Letherby 2003, 129), thereby normalising the participants’ experiences, while acknowledging inevitable power imbalances (Campbell et al. 2010 ; Flores et al. 2022, 212–213). However, during the first interview, it became apparent that the shift into what Harvey (2004, 251–253) termed “Guesthood,” a form of participation in mutually enlightening dialogue without fully inhabiting the participants lived experiences, was the most productive and natural approach in maintaining rapport with the wortcunners and their nature-based spiritualities. In adopting a closer relationship with the wortcunners, reflexivity became even more critical and central to my approach, particularly given the substantial shared ground between myself and the participants. By privileging semi-structured engagement techniques, as well as constant reflexive engagement, the study not only captured the wortcunners experiences, but enabled them to verbalise, not only the explicit forms of epistemic harm, but also the more subtle hermeneutical injustices.
Between March and October 2025, twenty-five wortcunners were interviewed using a semi-structured and autoethnographic framework and were recruited through requests posted on social media, word of mouth and ‘snowballing’ from wortcunners who had previously been interviewed. My own positioning within a university environment, as an active wortcunner, also yielded contacts. The stipulations were that all participants were 18 years of age or older, had an interest in plants, whether medicinally or spiritually, and that they resided in the United Kingdom. Additionally, participants were required to identify as female (cis or trans) or non-binary. No stipulations were placed on nationality, ethnicity, culture or level of plant-based knowledge or education.
The research proposal was approved by the York St John University Ethics Committee and Interviews were conducted either via Teams or in mutually agreeable face-to-face settings. No time limit was placed on the interviews, and the wortcunners were encouraged to digress into other spiritual topics of their choosing, thereby enabling me, the researcher, to respond to unfolding situations (Waddell 2016) and adapt the focus in pursuit of richer, thicker, situated knowledge. Each wortcunner was asked to choose a plant-based pseudonym from either a supplied list or one of their own choosing. Interviews were recorded and transcribed, and a manual thematic analysis was conducted across all interview transcripts, focusing on the theme of epistemic harm, with pertinent, rich quotes extracted. The quotes were lightly edited for clarity, grammar, and flow, while ensuring that the meaning and voice of the wortcunner was not lost.
Findings
Out of the twenty five wortcunners interviewed for this study, ten self-identified as having or currently occupying a position within the UK university sector, either as staff members or students. These wortcunners were Rowan, Rosemary, Juniper, Marigold, Meadowsweet, Artemisia, Thistle, Sage, Poppy and Flora. Not all narratives were deemed rich enough for this particular study; therefore, the quotes below have been selected due to their illustrative power in highlighting the epistemic harms experienced by the wortcunners when expressing their spiritualities in a university setting. Four broad themes have been identified and explored, accompanied by pertinent quotes. However, this exploration is a caveat as all the quotes can be logically categorised across multiple themes, which would result in repetition and an unwieldy dataset. Therefore, each quote is placed under the theme that my positioning deems the most relevant. Whilst I refer to each theme within specific concepts of epistemic harm, I reflexively acknowledge my potential role in reducing the agency of alternative experiencing. I therefore also offer the quotes so that “readers may begin to understand the grammar of the term ‘epistemic injustice’ for future and new use” (Pohlhaus 2017, 13).
Spiritual Self-Depreciation
Some wortcunners described strategies they used to downplay or mask their spiritual identities in academic settings to protect their credibility, and in the case of Meadowsweet, the embodied reaction when this mask falls.
Artemisa reflected on the risk of being perceived as “wicky-wacky-woo” when openly sharing her spirituality and admitted that it forms a very important role in her life:
I wouldn’t always share [my spirituality] with people. Particularly when you’re an academic, it can almost undermine you by being seen as a bit wicky-wacky-woo, you know. But what I’ve shared with you today and what I’ve shown you, that is a very important part of my life, and that’s what nourishes and sustains me.
Thistle similarly spoke about downplaying or framing her beliefs as “quirky” or “goofy” to make them more socially acceptable, even when she was in supposedly comfortable environments:
As people get to know me, I like to show them my quirky side. I have a really lovely team, but I will maybe put myself down, I will put my beliefs in this way – like, it is a bit goofy.
Poppy noted that using academically recognisable language helped her discuss her animism without attracting judgments of unprofessionalism, but admitted that it is not the language of choice she would want to use:
I’m glad there are more acceptable terms out there like spiritual ecology, assemblages and attentive listening because these make my animist beliefs more valid and grounded in academic language. It’s a shame, though, that I must use terms like that when I really want to say that I love hugging and listening to trees.
Meadowsweet recounted a spontaneous moment of tree recognition that made her appear as if she had “lost it” in front of her students:
A couple of years ago, I was walking with my students, and I looked across, and I just saw a tree without its leaves. And I just said, oh, my God, that tree looks just like a lung with the bronchi and the alveoli. And I could see these students thinking, OK, she’s finally lost it.
Flora described her embodied fears and beliefs about the professional consequences of openly identifying as a witch or pagan:
It goes back to what I said about people coming out and telling their bosses that they are witches and pagans. They won’t be taken seriously. They will never get through. They will be overlooked for a promotion because they will be part of the woo-woo clan. There will always be that negativity around it.
Direct Verbal Dismissal
Several wortcunners described experiences in which their spirituality or spiritual interests were directly dismissed or actively discouraged by academic peers.
Artemisia recalled being told how her chosen research topic, homeopathy, was “total nonsense,” which left her questioning why some areas of inquiry were not treated as legitimate within the university:
When I first came to [the university], I cannot remember who I met with, it must have been somebody from the executive board who wanted to meet us all and talk about what we did. And she asked me what I had done in terms of my research when I was a scientist because she was also a scientist, and I explained I was doing homoeopathy, and she was like, “Oh, well, that’s total nonsense”. I was left thinking; we are in an academic world where you feel you should be able to be open and talk about things like that. But it is very clear to me that there are some topics that are absolute no-nos.
Poppy described being judged for holding a supposedly conflicting belief, as though she had to choose between evolution and a higher spiritual power:
I’m convinced I was thought of as being really weird. I never really fitted in with the whole science environment. I remember another academic saying how strange it was that I could simultaneously believe in evolution and a higher power. It was like you could only choose one or the other and needed to commit.
Flora recounted being explicitly warned not to disclose her spiritual identity before completing her PhD, due to potential negative repercussions in her viva:
I had been having a nice conversation with my supervisor and she said, “Do not come out [as a witch] before you’ve got your PhD”. She told me this horror story of somebody she knew who had come out, very similar to me, but before the PhD, and she had a terrible time in the viva. So, she said, do not come out until you have your PhD.
A Betrayal of Values
Some wortcunners recounted experiences of emotional harm and vulnerability, in which moments of dismissal extended into deeper personal consequences.
Poppy described feeling “mortified” when her attempt to share her spiritual connection with her supervisor was met with silence:
At my last university, I was so heavily masking that I could not talk about my spirituality. I would wear pagan pendants, but remember trying to talk about my spiritual connection to the natural world to my supervisor and got no response. Just an awkward silence. So, I never mentioned it again. I felt mortified.
Flora reflected on the “nasty” comments she encountered, which have caused her to hold back aspects of herself and remain cautious about any form of spiritual disclosure:
You often feel like you are sort of living a double life. You always have that feeling because you are in the broom closet. You have this part of you that you cannot come out and talk about because you fear retribution or people making nasty comments or this, that, and the other. So, you just hold back all the time. You are very wary of who you trust with your secret. And it’s just something that you live with.
Thistle spoke about the sadness of having to selectively reveal her spirituality, even in an otherwise supportive academic environment:
I’ve always been someone who has a very tight knit unit around me and feel very secure in myself so it’s not going to worry me that much if I get laughed at. But it is just picking and choosing who you choose to share those things with because it is quite saddening I guess when someone dismisses that.
Harm to the Academic Career
The wortcunners’ concerns about potential and witnessed professional repercussions shaped how they negotiated the visibility of their spiritual identities, particularly the label of “witch”.
Poppy described a tension between her growing openness and self-acceptance and a fear that appearing “too witchy” could undermine her credibility:
I definitely worry about being seen as “too witchy” and not being taken seriously as an academic. It makes me feel disappointed in myself that I’m still trying to fit in and appear “normal”, although I am vastly more “out” than I have ever been before in my life.
Artemisia reflected more unequivocally and viscerally on the professional risks of publicly identifying as a witch:
As an academic, you are always weighing up how you use that word [Witch]. I wouldn’t ever, at work, use that word witch or call myself a witch…it is a really good way of discrediting yourself professionally.
Yarrow recalled a fellow student’s repeated silencing and bullying (referred to by Yarrow as “almost bullying”) for incorporating spiritually orientated practices with herbs into the university’s medicinally orientated practices, highlighting the potential dangers of expressing spiritual identity in academic contexts:
It has been very refined [her bachelor’s degree course in medical herbalism], and it has also been created to prove itself rather than what we need to be learning. It’s just frustrating. Some stuff you were just told to shut up about. There was this one lovely lady. She was great. She made brooches stuffed with herbs. She was brilliant. And she was just quashed and quashed and quashed, you know, by tutors. It was almost bullying.
Moments of Resilience and Assertion
Some wortcunners demonstrated resilience and subtle resistance, strategically asserting their spiritual identities in professional and social circumstances even when such a disclosure may have been problematic.
Birch recounted a moment of surprise and “boldness” during a job interview when she disclosed her ability to read birth charts, briefly offering her authentic self:
I remember in my interview at (redacted) University, they were asking me about my leadership style and how I work with staff and manage teams, and we were talking about insights, training, and how people have personality types. Then I suddenly said that if I found out their date of birth, I’d probably do their birth chart or astrology. And this was in a job interview! When I said it, everybody laughed, and they looked quite interested. That is definitely the boldest I have ever been. And when I was saying it, I was almost thinking, “What are you doing”? But I felt that I was being naturally me.
Poppy described using her Hedgewitch identity in her email signature as a brief act of self-assertion, highlighting the ongoing negotiation between personal authenticity and academic expectations:
Hedgewitch [as an identity] feels right to me, but I keep adding it onto my email signature in moments of bravado and then deleting it again after a few days. It feels like a constant balancing act or tug of war between my true self and my career/academic self.
Flora reflected on her plans to openly express her spiritual identity after completing her PhD, framing it as a deliberate act of defiance and one that she appears to be looking forward to.
If the opportunity arises [to come out, spiritually], I probably would. Yeah, because it feels like sticking two fingers up at the establishment…I will get this PhD and then I will come out, and I will aim towards more witchcraft stuff.
Discussion
Across the interviews, academic wortcunners described strategies of self-deprecation and careful framing of their spiritual practices to maintain academic legitimacy. Terms such as “goofy,” “quirky,” and “wicky-wacky-woo” appeared to serve as simultaneously protective and yet self-dismissive shields against professional judgment. At the same time, more academically accepted language, like “spiritual ecology” enabled another wortcunner (Poppy) to present her embodied spiritual beliefs in a socially acceptable form. Hence, to Poppy, her type of spirituality is likely to only be palatable when addressed and researched academically by others. Such strategies exemplify a deeper form of hermeneutical injustice (Medina 2017a, 47) and testimonial smothering (Dotson 2011, 244) where wortcunners actively moderated and dismissed aspects of their highly personal and affirming spirituality to navigate a university environment that may be unwilling or incapable of acceptance, unless as already established theories and epistemologies.
Direct verbal discouragement or interpersonal dynamic hermeneutical injustices (Medina 2017a, 46) serve to reinforce these dynamics. wortcunners recounted being told that their area of expertise, homeopathy, was “total nonsense,” whilst dualistic beliefs in evolution and higher powers were considered “strange.” In another incident, a supervisor explicitly warned a wortcunner against disclosing a witch identity before completing a PhD. Later in the interview, the wortcunner in question mentions that her PhD is unrelated to the topic of witch-based spiritualities and wonders if this is why she was warned not to disclose her spirituality. It may appear therefore that this type of spirituality is only acceptable or permissible if one is engaged in research about it and in all other situations, the spirituality must be hidden incase of repercussions. Such harms represent structural testimonial harm (Wanderer 2017, 28), where the Western academic establishment appears to be both unable and unwilling to encompass non-normative forms of being and knowing. The emotional consequences of harms were both deep, significant and represent a form of testimonial betrayal (Wanderer 2017, 35), with Poppy feeling “mortified” by an awkward silence, Flora describing having to live a “double life,” and Thistle expressing sadness at having to share beliefs even within trusted circles selectively.
Structural harms and career considerations further constrained openness. wortcunners regulated their spiritual identities to avoid being potentially discredited, with Poppy negotiating between professional acceptance and personal authenticity, Artemisia viewing the label “witch” as self-discrediting, and Yarrow recalling the observance of repeated suppression of creative spiritual expression. It was interesting to note that Yarrow, having witnessed the sustained bullying of a fellow student by lecturers, referred to the incidents in question as “almost bullying.” This suggests the presence of hermeneutical injustice within the experiencing of Yarrow whereby she struggles to identify bullying even when repeatedly witnessed.
Despite these pressures, moments of resilience and affective activism emerged. Much to her surprise, Birch disclosed astrological knowledge during a job interview, Poppy intermittently signaled her hedgewitch identity within professional spaces, and Flora seemingly relishing a post-PhD engagement with witchcraft as an act of defiance against the system. These instances highlight ongoing agency, subversion and authenticity within epistemically constrictive academic environments, illustrating the complex interplay of marginalisation, risk, and resistance in academic spaces (Zembylas 2025, 803). These acts of subversion and defiance may appear to be simple, but to the wortcunners, are likely to imbue them with a sense of resilience, hope and agency.
Conclusions & Limitations
Through the lens of epistemic injustice, oppression and harm, this study demonstrates how practitioners of nature-based spiritualities, known here as wortcunners, navigate an academic environment that simultaneously values knowledge while constraining which forms of knowing are deemed legitimate. Across the testimonies, the wortcunners describe entanglements of testimonial and hermeneutical epistemic harms resulting in the need for self-deprecation and strategic masking (in case of professional repercussions), where the dismissal of one’s spirituality took the form of verbal warnings and uncomfortable silencing, and where instances of bullying and contributory injustice (where spiritual expertise was requested, but simultaneously disavowed) were witnessed.
These experiences, albeit from a small sample size of participants, still revealed a pattern of exclusions shaped by the dominant and normative knowledge hierarchies of the British university system. However, whilst this study offers an initial insight into the epistemic conditions shaping the experiences of university-based wortcunners, it is limited by its small sample size and its demographic composition. All participants were white, female or non-binary, and their accounts reflect situated experiences shaped by particular histories of whiteness within contemporary Western pagan, witchcraft, and spiritual communities. Further research is therefore needed to explore how epistemic injustices, oppressions, and harms may be differentially experienced by those from other ethnic and cultural backgrounds, those who identify as male and individuals situated within other marginalised esoteric spiritual traditions. Expanding this work would deepen the understanding of how people with these marginalised spiritualities navigate the path between spirituality and academic legitimacy.
Acknowledgements
This author would like to thank Dr Sharon Jagger for guidance and support during the formulation of this piece of work and the wortcunners for sharing their stories with me.
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