María Herrera Cárdenas, Universität Bielefeld, Germany:
This article examines how feminist knowledge on violence against women and girls (VAWG) circulates, stabilises, and encounters resistance within contemporary European academic institutions. Drawing on feminist epistemology, particularly Miranda Fricker’s framework of epistemic injustice, it conceptualises feminism in academia as an infrastructure of mediation through which women’s testimonies, literary production, activist knowledge, and institutional frameworks intersect. Focusing on gendered medical violence as an analytically transferable case, the study combines pedagogical engagement and transnational research across Spain, Germany, Finland, and the United Kingdom. It analyses how women’s credibility hierarchies shape the reception of lived-experience methodologies, how traditional quantitative paradigms continue to dominate definitions of scientific legitimacy, and how hermeneutical gaps produce institutional invisibility. This analysis further explores digital platforms as emergent feminist counter-archives in response to epistemic marginalization. By examining the role of medical humanities as preventive pedagogy in professional healthcare training and by tracing the movement from women’s testimony to feminist institutional archive, the article
argues that prevention depends on intelligibility since harms that lack shared interpretive resources remain normalised or dismissed. Feminism in academia operates simultaneously as analytic intervention and preventive infrastructure, challenging epistemic hierarchies while constructing interdisciplinary frameworks capable of reconfiguring institutional responses to misogynistic violence.