Hacking's Human Kinds and the Ethics of Participatory Science

We make the case that participatory approaches to the social sciences mitigate the risk of epistemic injustice. We define the social sciences as those that study what Hacking calls "human kinds", which are subject to "looping effects". We argue that the line between theory and practice in the social sciences is blurred and theoretical frameworks and definitions can feed into what Fricker calls "epistemic injustice". We discuss the case of epistemic injustice that autistic females are subject to due to scientific notions that feed into widely held stereotypes. We finally introduce how participatory approaches in the Autistica Project mitigate the risk of epistemic injustice in autism research.