This dissertation seeks to address an important but underexamined part of communities' survival and flourishing in the face of marginalization and oppression: community epistemic capacities and community epistemic self-determination. I distinguish community epistemic capacities as a subset of community capacities, to mean the abilities of a community to gain, maintain, adapt, and continue the knowledge needed to solve problems and flourish. I have argued previously that community epistemic capacities are necessary for a community to meaningfully participate within the larger society in just, deliberative processes. This dissertation argues in part that community epistemic capacities are also necessary for a community to effectively engage in their own, independent projects (often in cooperation with other communities) which are important to the communities' members, particularly ones which promote the survival and flourishing of the community. I take this other application of community epistemic capacities to be a form of self-determination for communities. I focus in this dissertation on epistemic self-determination as an important sub-set of self-determination. By epistemic self-determination I mean the ability of community members to jointly engage in epistemic projects and determine the epistemic practices of their community, which can include methodologies for knowledge production and evaluative assumptions. To understand community epistemic capacities and self-determination, I contrast them with the Capabilities Approach, including the growing literature on collective capabilities. I also look at the environmental justice and food sovereignty paradigms – two activist discourses which take seriously the importance of both justice within larger institutions, as well as justice claims for communities to be able to build their own alternative projects outside of those institutions. The latter justice claim, which I call self-determination justice, has been insufficiently examined in political philosophy, but as I argue it is vital for community survival and flourishing. The justice conversations in these discourses help explicate the community epistemic capacities and self-determination framework, and these concepts likewise help deepen our understanding of these social justice movements. With this understanding in place, I apply the concepts of community epistemic capacities and community epistemic self-determination to a number of topics to show how they can inform our understanding of policy, activism, and transdisciplinary research. I explore the concept of trust as an epistemic capacity, and look at ways in which external experts can ameliorate a lack of community epistemic capacities through structured decision-making. I also look at how policies in food systems and the environment can be evaluated based on the degree to which they promote epistemic self-determination or undermine it. In the final chapter, I discuss a transdisciplinary project I have been conducting with partners in La Via Campesina and KRRS to look at women's barriers to participation in the food sovereignty movement in India. This work not only provides illustrations of the concepts discussed in this dissertation in its findings, but the study itself stands as a useful model of how incorporating a concern for community epistemic capacities and self-determination can inform external experts' work with communities.
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