Rosa del Olmo Prize: 2025 Recipient Announcement

Abstract

Western academic dominance, including in criminological theorisation, has occurred through a long and ongoing process of erasing and marginalising the knowledge produced in other regions of the world and by other intellectual traditions. Such epistemological injustice—which on occasion amounts to an epistemicide—not only affects the voices rendered invisible, but the entire planet, as knowledge that could be useful in generating an accurate reading of reality and productively responding to its challenges and injustices is discarded. Redressing epistemological justice entails, among other things, challenging colonial logics to rebalance the distribution of epistemological capital among peoples and among traditions of knowledge production. Knowledge that has been marginalised, neglected, or discarded must be recentred; knowledge creators who have traditionally been positioned as “informants,” “sources,” and “mines,” or treated as “exotic,” must be acknowledged in their creative activity. By centring contributions that develop criminological theorisation beyond Western scripts, the Rosa del Olmo Prize seeks to redress epistemological injustice.