3.1 What is Knowledge Justice?
Epistemology is Cultural
When we use the word “epistemic”, what do we mean? This term stems from epistemology, a branch of philosophy that studies knowledge and belief (Stroll & Martinich, 2023).
We can figure out someone’s epistemology, or theory of knowledge, by having them answer questions like:
- How does your community define knowledge?
- What do you know to be true? How did you come to know it?
- What counts as evidence for your beliefs?
- Who is allowed to be knowledgeable? How does someone become an expert?
Epistemologies are cultural, so they depend on where and when we live, our values, and our prior experiences with learning. It is possible to think using more than one epistemology. For example, you may have learned one worldview from your family and use another one in school. Those of us who grew up in Canada experienced a school curriculum that is grounded in western understandings of education, so we may not even realize how European values have shaped our learning.
Watch the video below for a quick example of how your math class was influenced by different cultural understandings of numbers and counting.
Defining Knowledge Justice
What is epistemic justice, or what we call knowledge justice in this resource? We finally unpack and explore the definition of this term below.
Definition
Knowledge justice is based on the principle that each person has the equal capacity to be knowledgeable, yet this right is often denied to individuals based on the social identities they hold. It also involves recognizing that some knowledge systems, particularly those of Indigenous peoples, have been purposefully ignored, eliminated, or silenced.
To practice knowledge justice, we must challenge the dominance of Eurowestern systems and act on our responsibility to engage in meaningful dialogue across multiple and diverse perspectives. This requires approaching our own ways of knowing with humility, acknowledging the edges or limits of what we understand. By so doing, we can learn to see the world through multiple ways of knowing and approach diverse epistemologies with an open mind (Leung, 2022; Leung & López-McKnight, 2020; Leibowitz, 2017; Visvanathan, 2002).
