ART-AI Seminar
We are pleased to have Joris Hulstijn, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Sciences at Utrecht University, join us for this ART-AI seminar entitled ‘Epistemic Injustice and Government Information Systems’.
This seminar will take place in person in room 1W 2.104 on Tuesday 14th October 2025, 13.15pm-14.15pm (GMT). There is also an option to join online. Marina De Vos will chair this seminar. For more information, please e-mail [email protected].
Title
Epistemic Injustice and Government Information Systems
Abstract
This talk will mostly be based on Joris’s EGOV2024 paper written with Huimin Dong and Réka Markovich about epistemic injustice in two government scandals, with some latest developments in follow-up research on algorithm audits and bias, developed by Jet Verbeek (Utrecht University). The abstract for the paper is below:
Cases of bias and unfair decisions in automated decision-making are heavily discussed. When unfair decisions can be attributed to a difference in the knowledge of groups of subjects, we can speak of epistemic injustice (Miranda Fricker). In this paper, we analyse the various types of epistemic injustice: testimonial, hermeneutical, distributional, and content-focused epistemic injustice, and show how they can be conceptualised. We apply the notion of epistemic injustice to analyse what went wrong in two automated decision making scandals: Toeslagenaffaire (Netherlands), and RoboDebt (Australia). Similar issues appear in the PostOffice scandal (UK). We discuss key observations from the cases and show that they can indeed be categorised as various types of epistemic injustice. Based on these observations, we draw lessons about governance of automated decision making systems.
Bio
Joris Hulstijn is a researcher and teacher in the field of Information Systems. He works as assistant professor in the Department of Information Sciences at Utrecht University. He is coordinator of the master in Business Informatics. His research is mostly concerned with Responsible AI. Recently, he has published on such topics as computational accountability, trust and epistemic injustice. In addition, he works in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Law, and various applications, for instance in cybersecurity, regulatory supervision and e-government.
