CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Horvath, Tina |
|---|---|
| Title | The Epistemic-Merit Cycle: The Ontological, Epistemic, and Democratin Silencing of Roma Voices |
| Summary | Meritocracy does not simply distribute opportunity—it enacts a deeper symbolic regime that converts inherited privilege into epistemic legitimacy and reorders exclusion into perceived fairness. This project argues that merit, far from being a neutral or just principle, operates as an epistemic regime that authorizes dominant ways of knowing and marginalizes others. Introducing the concept of the Epistemic-Merit Cycle, I trace how institutions codify hegemonic styles of knowledge production, reward intersecting forms of advantage, and confer epistemic inheritance rights upon those already structurally empowered. Engaging critical epistemology, political theory, decolonial and Romani scholarship, the analysis reveals how systems that claim neutrality systematically disqualify embodied, oral, and collective knowledge—particularly that of Romani communities. Drawing on T. M. Scanlon’s framework for morally permissible inequality, I show that contemporary educational institutions fail to meet even minimal standards of fairness, procedural justice, or substantive opportunity. Beyond critique, the thesis proposes epistemic co-design: a participatory model wherein marginalized communities do not merely adapt to dominant norms but co-author the criteria of legitimacy themselves. |
| Supervisor | Rippon, Simon |
| Department | Undergraduate Studies BA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/horvath_tina.pdf |
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