Introduction

The purpose of this resource is to introduce the concept of knowledge justice and explore how it applies to your academic studies and future professional work. Although our examples come primarily from the helping professions, the ideas and practices described are relevant across disciplines and contexts.

Our definition of ‘helping professional’ is intentionally broad. While your authors, and therefore our examples, primarily come from nursing, librarianship, and counselling psychology, you may be studying physiotherapy, teaching, or dietetics. You’ve likely been directed to this resource because many helping professions share similar expectations for their graduates, as outlined in professional competencies. These competencies often include commitments to ‘engaging in an evidence-based practice’ and ‘practicing cultural safety’ when working with clients, users, and patients.

This resource asks you to consider what it means to use a knowledge justice approach to professional practice by asking: Whose knowledge counts as evidence in our professional practice and academic work? Whose safety are we protecting – at what (or whose) cost? And importantly, who is missing? The reflective exercises used throughout this resource are designed to help you practice critical reflection and humility when confronted with new ideas. For example, do we recognize that each person is knowledgeable and is an authority on their own life?  Complex, emotional, and sometimes uncomfortable reflection questions like these guide our learning about knowledge justice and form the foundation of this resource.

Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of knowledge justice, a working definition of which is shared below. By the end of all six chapters, you will be able to begin applying this lens to your studies, work, and daily life. The following definition provides the framework for this resource:

Chapter 2 looks at how knowledge justice is often denied to individuals based on the social identities they hold, a concept known as epistemic injustice. Many scholars, across a wide range of disciplines and worldviews, refer to this phenomenon. Mi’kmaw scholar Marie Battiste, for example, discusses the concept of cognitive imperialism (2018) in the context of Canadian policies towards First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples, while Buoventura de Sousa Santos discusses epistemicide within the context of the Global Souths (2025). Philosopher Miranda Fricker’s definition of epistemic injustice (2007) is widely  used and supports the growing number of decolonial and Indigenous scholars discussing knowledge injustice including Walter Mignolo (2011), Paolo Freire (1968; 2018), Vanessa Andreotti and Sharon Stein (2022), Aníbal Quijano (2007), among others. Beth Patin’s (2021) work on curricular injustice in information systems also informs our approach. Chapter 2, then, helps us learn to recognize epistemic injustice in academic and everyday life, ranging from our use of social media  and Generative AI to our academic research and clinical work.

Chapter 3 returns to our working definition of knowledge justice, which is informed by Shiv Visvanathan (1997; 2011) and Brenda Leibowitz (2017)’s work on cognitive justice. We’ve chosen to use the term knowledge justice in this resource both for clarity and to honour framing used by librarian scholars Sofia Leung (2022) and Jorge López-McKnight (2021). Chapter 3 introduces the idea that practicing knowledge justice begins with humility – that we must learn to find the limits of our current understanding and become aware of how dominant world views shape our thinking, being, and doing.

Chapter 4 offers strategies to help you seek out the voices that are often missing, silenced, hidden, or excluded from our education, media, and workplaces. You’ll explore how to use tools like Google, ChatGPT, or library databases to find diverse perspectives, and how to recognize their limitations. This chapter also invites you to critically reflect on the role of language in your searching, and to consider lived experience as valid and necessary evidence. While this resource does not provide direct access to Indigenous ways of knowing and being, for reasons we explain in Chapter 4, we share guidance for how to begin seeking knowledge using a reciprocal, relationship-based approach (Loyer, 2018).

Chapter 5, meanwhile, helps you evaluate the knowledge you’ve found. For example, where might a social media video be a valid form of evidence? How can we spot sources that spread false, misleading, or harmful ideas? This chapter provides concrete strategies for assessing whether the sources reflect knowledge justice values, and how to evaluate the diversity and sufficiency of your overall body of evidence. This is especially important if, like many helping professionals, you are asked to use an ‘evidence-based approach’ in your work. Chapter 5 helps you to ask: do I have enough evidence to act? Whose voices am I listening to most? Whose are still missing?

Chapters 4 and 5 are intended to work together. As you learn to recognize gaps and biases in your knowledge systems and personal understanding. Chapter 4 helps you seek out diverse voices and perspectives, while Chapter 5 helps you assess what you’ve found –whether it’s helpful, harmful, or incomplete. These strategies are useful not only in your coursework, but also when you’re reading academic research, interpreting workplace policies, scrolling on social media, or speaking with clients, family, and friends. Because enacting knowledge justice is an iterative and life-long process, we designed these chapters to be re-visited and adapted throughout your career.

Crucially, knowledge justice cannot be practiced without understanding your own social identities and positionality. Chapter 1 introduces this process, inviting you to reflect on how your race, gender, age, ability, and other social identities help to shape your perspectives and relationships with others, including whose knowledge you believe to be valuable and whose knowledge you discredit. Enacting knowledge justice requires us to ‘engage in meaningful dialogue across multiple and diverse perspectives,’ which also means understanding how social identities influence the power, privilege, and oppressions we experience within existing systems. As members of a university community, too, you also have access to knowledge and information that others in the public may, and often do, not.

We recognize that learning about knowledge justice introduces topics that are difficult, emotional, and abstract. Some topics may be activating or challenge beliefs you hold, so a content warning is shared on the next page. Because this learning is both complex and personal, we’ve embedded practical elements throughout this resource to help ground your experience. Chapters 3–5 use a recurring teaching case, where you are asked to apply knowledge justice concepts to a real-life client; Chapter 2 draws on social media platforms to demonstrate how epistemic injustice can manifest in what we read, hear, and see every day. In this chapter, short videos feature your authors discussing how knowledge justice appears in our work. In Chapter 6, we invite practicing helping professionals – people whose work exists outside university systems – to share their own perspectives on knowledge justice.