Chapter 6: Integrating Knowledge Justice in the Helping Professions
Ashley McKeown, Marguerite Lengyell, Dani Dilkes,
Britney Glasgow-Osment, and Heather Campbell
Learning Objectives
By the end of the chapter, learners will be able to:
- Reflect on how their social locations impact their professional practice
- Consider how knowledge injustice exists in their professions
- Identify where they can integrate knowledge justice principles into their future professional roles
- Translating theory to practice across various professional contexts
Introduction
Up to this point, we have explored epistemic justice conceptually. Now, we consider what it looks like when theory meets practice, when professionals step into messy, complex realities and choose to act differently.
In the preceding chapters, we have critically examined how identity, positionality, power, and privilege shape both what we recognized as credible knowledge and who is regarded as a legitimate authority. We’ve explored the contextual nature of epistemic injustice and engaged with the principles of knowledge justice as a framework for making space for multiple ways of knowing. We’ve practiced this by applying a lens of knowledge to how we seek out diverse voices, and by critically evaluating knowledge sources for purpose, perspective, and potential harms. As we’ve learned, these skills are essential for inclusive, ethical, culturally safe, and accountable professional practice.
This final chapter brings those threads together. We will hear from practicing professionals from a range of helping fields, who are learning to apply knowledge justice to their lives and work. These practitioners offer candid reflections on how they have confronted epistemic injustice in their fields, how their own social locations shape the way they engage with knowledge, and how they strive to integrate knowledge justice into their daily practice.
As you move through their stories, consider not only what resonates with you but also what unsettles you. Like roots pressing into hardened ground, the interviewees remind us that resistance to epistemic injustices takes persistence, care, and time. Each time we choose to ask questions, to self-reflect, and to purposefully centre marginalized knowledges, is another way we shift even the most entrenched structures. Their stories are an invitation: to notice the limits of your own perspective, to imagine new ways of practice, and to carry forward a commitment to epistemic justice in your own professional journey.
