Chapter 4: Searching for Diverse Voices
Kathryn Holmes, Lea Sansom, and Heather Campbell
Learning Objectives
By the end of the lesson, learners will be able to:
- Adjust their language and search terms, balancing their use of dominant language with inclusive and community-created terms
- Apply a knowledge justice lens when using tools like Google, the library catalogue, or ChatGPT
- Reflect critically before engaging with others’ lived experience, recognizing the potential for harm and the need for consent, care, and context
- Identify strategies for respectful engagement with First Nations, Métis, and Inuit ways of knowing, including the importance of practicing Indigenous Allyship
Introduction
In Chapter 3 we explored your discipline’s epistemology by answering questions like “What is knowledge?” and “How does one become knowledgeable?” as part of our work to understand and practice knowledge justice. We reflected on what it means to engage in evidence-based practice in the helping professions and began uncovering some of the values embedded in their knowledge practices, also known as axiology.
Now, in Chapter 4, we introduce four strategies for seeking out diverse voices and knowledge forms that are essential evidence to our professional practice but are otherwise missing or marginalized due to epistemic injustice. As we’ve learned throughout this resource, most global knowledge systems continue to privilege Eurowestern ways of knowing. As a result, even finding diverse and marginalized voices requires patience and persistence, as we learn how to navigate within and around these dominant systems.
The strategies introduced in this chapter do just that. Throughout, we name how mainstream information systems are built, and offer tips for locating underrepresented perspectives within them, when possible. We also explore how language, especially terms shaped by colonial histories and dominant discourses, can influence our search results. In addition, we consider how lived experience is a form of knowledge valued in our professional work, but not always discussed in the context of “evidence-based practice.” Given this chapter’s broad range of topics, we expect that the searching tips that apply to you most may change from one moment to the next.
We won’t be covering traditional library search strategies in this chapter, since those are already well-documented and often taught in other courses. Be sure to seek out support with using academic catalogues and databases from your local library. Instead, this chapter focuses on searching with a knowledge justice lens, centering the perspectives and voices that dominant systems tend to overlook.
A Note from Your Librarians
If you come from a discipline, or support disciplines, that use the term Grey Literature, this chapter is going to challenge that phrasing or idea. For those who aren’t familiar with this term, grey literature refers to any type of material produced by entities whose main tasks is not publishing, such as government agencies, NGOs, IGOs, and industry bodies, among many others (International Conference on Grey Literature, 2004).
We recognize many of you will still need to know this term and use it in your fields. However, we’re intentionally choosing not to use it in this resource. Often, grey literature and scholarly literature is compared in a binary that positions grey literature as being less valuable than academic sources of knowledge. Think back to the Levels of Evidence Pyramid: where does grey literature fall in that hierarchy?
Even definitions of grey literature can be bound up in power dynamics. There are debates around which forms of knowledge “count” as grey literature and which don’t qualify or are considered less legitimate (Bonato, 2018, 22). For example, a blog post may or may not be considered grey literature, but even if it is, it may be seen as a less valuable source of knowledge than a government report.
In this chapter, we’ll offer other ways to discuss knowledge that move beyond the scholarly and grey literature binary, and that recognize knowledge is not limited to “literature” or written forms alone.
The act of challenging the dominance of Euro-Western knowledge systems, paired with a commitment and responsibility to respectful, reciprocal engagement across diverse ways of knowing.
The systematic process of making work-place decisions that integrate best-available professional evidence.
A branch of philosophy, studying the values and beliefs people hold.
When people "undermine, undercut, disvalue, curtail, exclude, outright dismiss, or, in some cases, gaslight a person/or persons in their capacity as potential knowers" (Dunne, 2020).
Information or material produced by groups outside of commercial and academic publishing, such as government agencies, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and industry bodies, among many others.
