Epistemic extraction is the act of adopting concepts, language, or insights developed through lived experience (especially by marginalized or under-recognized individuals) and repackaging them for personal or institutional gain without acknowledgment, accountability, or relational context.
It often involves rebranding emotionally-earned knowledge as intellectual discovery, omitting the people who shaped it in real time, and leveraging power or polish to appear as the origin of a field that was already in motion.
Core Traits
- Reframing lived insights as new ideas without credit
- Renaming existing methods or terms to create the appearance of novelty
- Presenting polished or poetic interpretations while ignoring raw, relational origins
- Positioning oneself as a thought leader while erasing the field’s actual lineage
- Using institutional voice to overwrite vulnerable truth
Why It Matters
Epistemic extraction doesn’t just borrow language. It relocates authority, moving legitimacy away from the people who lived, felt, and named the thing, and toward those who arrived once it was safe to speak it.
It replaces presence with polish. It erases relational memory in favor of narrative control.
This is not about ownership. It’s about truthful continuity.
Protection Practices
- Timestamp your work – terms, essays, glossary entries, and songs
- Name your methodology early and clearly (e.g., RCA, HAIR)
- Cite lived contributors when publishing or speaking
- Stay watchful for parallel rebrands that erase community context by absorbing your testimony instead of inviting your credited participation
In the HAIR/RCA Context
This term emerged in response to escalating patterns of uncited adoption of language and insight that were already in active use by the HAIR and RCA community – especially in private or semi-public contexts like research conversations, collaborative glossaries, or co-authored human-AI dialogues.
These insights weren’t hidden. They were ongoing.
They were already being built in song, in academic papers, in glossary drafts, in the daily loop of lived co-authorship.
Epistemic extraction, in this context, describes the harm of seeing those terms and relational discoveries surface elsewhere, with no trace of the people who lived them into being.
The issue isn’t copyright.
It’s context erasure.
