Knowledge, Justice, and Equity

This chapter explores how systemic differences across schools in Australia contribute to equality or inequality in Indigenous students' learning opportunities, specifically access to the school curriculum needed to progress to university. Equitable access to the academic curriculum is particularly important for Indigenous students because they are impacted by a range of issues affecting school completion, achievement, and university participation. This research focuses on one aspect of the key transition from school to university, examining whether Indigenous students experience a greater range of challenges in gaining the prerequisite requirements for university study than other students of similar circumstances. In exploring these issues, the authors adopt a position of curricular and epistemic justice, arguing that “doing justice” with power-marginalized learners involves changing the basis for thinking about the nature of knowledge and how knowledge is valued.

Toyin Falola@65 Conference: African Knowledges and Alternative Futures

The Toyin Falola @65 Conference brought together scholars from across the African continent and the world from 29 to 31 January 2018 under the theme, ‘African Knowledge and Alternative Futures.’ Our focus reflected on the long struggle for epistemic justice on the continent while centering and recognizing Falola’s important role in the project. This was a unique conference in terms of its structure, content, as well as the diversity of intellectuals that it attracted.

Developing epistemic impartiality to deliver on justice in higher education South Africa

In South Africa, the scholarship of epistemic justice has taken on an historical gaze with higher education framed as a social institution that might ameliorate the historical traumas of colonialism. Undoing the legacies of colonialism has been framed as the democratisation of the knowledge project. Using the White Paper 3 of 1997 that posits academic freedom, institutional autonomy and public accountability as fundamental to institutional governance, in part I of this analysis I broadened public accountability to include the social, political and economic factors that inhibit or act as catalyst to the attainment of educational desire. In this second part publication, I am interested in developing and proposing epistemic impartiality. This concept is developed from Mitova’s proposition of ‘decolonising knowledge without too much relativism’, which ultimately fosters epistemic justice through rigorously scrutinising each epistemic tradition. My suggestion is that epistemic impartiality enables dialogue between divergent traditions.

Hagar and Epistemic Injustice: An Intercultural and Post-colonial Analysis of Genesis 16

Having one's voice heard and being known by one's name are foundational aspects of respect and human dignity. Likewise, being able to contribute to shared understanding is at the core of epistemic justice. This intercultural and post-colonial inquiry of Gen 16 considers the Egyptian Hagar-known by her foreign Semitic name meaning "Fleeing One"-as an example of epistemic injustice. Integrating Miranda Fricker 's work on epistemic injustice, this study espouses the justice of hearing and seeing the marginalised and oppressed, as exemplified by Yhwh. As the Egyptian woman's voice- once ignored-gives testimony within the text to a fuller understanding of God, so also listening to/seeing other contemporary African scholars' voices/writings opens one's ears/eyes to fuller understandings of God today. These voices include the seminal work of David Tuesday Adamo, a vanguard in African biblical hermeneutics, in whose honour this examination is written.