Critical and radical analyses view ‘development’ as propagated via colonial modernist agendas predicated on an evolutionary societal model in which ways of being, living, and knowing and their organisation into forms (systems) of the centres of colonial power were made aspirational and obligatory for colonised peoples. This relied on exalting knowledge systems and knowledges of proclaimed colonial centres of enlightenment by ignoring, subjugating, and obliterating existing, traditional, and ancient knowledge systems and knowledges through ‘epistemicide’, or the annihilation of Indigenous and Southern knowledges (Hall & Tandon, 2017). ‘Development’ hinged on ‘cognitive imperialism’ (Battiste, 2018) and the disappearance of knowledges, rooted in violence (McKittrick, 2021).

Exalted knowledge systems and knowledges have been positioned in dominant discourse and international development architecture as those of ‘Western’/high-income OECD countries; and those in need of ‘development’, as of the majority world. Critical discursive views expose this dualistic characterisation as the product of colonial enterprises affixing the centrality of the perspective, according to Stuart Hall’s ([1993], 2018) classic formulation, of ‘the West and the Rest’, propagated by myths of relational superiority of ‘the West’. This is furthered by the construction and legitimisation of particular knowledges and knowledge regimes as taken for granted and valued and explicitly organised into formal education systems and taught, thus, becoming dominant.

Increasingly, there are calls for epistemic justice as part of a global project to realise social justice. This panel addresses specific aspects of epistemic justice relevant to research and practice. Epistemic justice is seen to rest on the right to knowledge, or ‘the right of every people to their own knowledge and ways of generating, legitimizing and valuing it, as well as the right of everyone to the knowledge of humankind’ (Schmelkes, 2023), i.e., the active participation in the creation of the knowledge commons and to access and transform it.

Outside of a specialist literature, the study of violence occupies a marginal position within comparative and international education scholarship. A key contributing factor is the absence of a holistic conceptual framework that can capture the nature, extent and causes of violence in education. The article proposes such a framework, by updating Johan Galtung’s model of direct, structural and cultural violence and putting it into dialogue with more recent theoretical work from the social sciences and humanities, including ideas of epistemic violence. This dialogue affirms the importance of each form of violence and the interconnections between them but proposes a deeper appreciation of the depth ontology of violence and a reappraisal of Galtung’s ideas about the visibility and invisibilization of violence. The article explores the utility of the framework by using it to explore the so-called learning crisis, which it argues may be more accurately considered a crisis of violence.

This paper puts forward epistemic humility as an explicit acknowledgement of the limits of knowledge – in time and in fact – and the socio-political and historical contexts within which knowledges are framed and legitimised. It posits epistemic humility from a Freirean perspective to be essential to consciously and critically engaging in processes of collective questioning with the aim to reach epistemic justice. Inspired by McKittrick’s (2021) radical approach to rupture dominant ways of scientific presentation in form and content, the paper uses reflexive stories and storytelling to ‘signal the fictive work of theory’ (p. 7). It recounts the author’s experiences of presenting the concept of epistemic humility for epistemic justice in high-level international fora, and asks the question, ‘Why is epistemic humility provocative, and for whom?’ In so doing, it promulgates epistemic humility as necessary to engage with transformational processes of discomfort to critically question one’s own normative positionalities, and to decentre and deconstruct long-held views and institutionalised structures of relational superiority of dominant knowledge systems.

Not dissimilar from Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, ‘epistemic violence’ becomes productive through consent and within institutions of learning and agreed-upon conventions and codes of understanding. Many of our disciplines are products of expert knowledge forged through the fires of colonialism and settler-colonialism and continue to harbour the embers of violence and exclusion. Such academic violence takes place through the wilful occlusion or the absent presence of certain histories and geo-political realities. If within one university multiple university worlds coexist, how do we speak back to the systemic occlusions of settler colonialism and the neoliberal story of individualized success? Through a discussion of some of the work done by Everyday Orientalism and University Worlds, this talk will examine how public-facing platforms can become loci where epistemic justice can be reclaimed in liminal spaces of unlearning, through enabling access to alternative stories and through deliberate acts of disruption that are necessary to create the world that we want to get to someday.

Academic and professional conferencing have long been seen as crucial sites for establishing, expanding, and mobilizing specialist knowledge to address pressing global challenges. They are also important sites for building membership in specific epistemic communities, particularly for new members to these communities, such as early career scholars. Conferencing practices, however, also tend to reinforce the same inequities and knowledge hierarchies that have characterized academia. Further, with the growing awareness of how fly-in, fly-out conferencing contributes to the climate crisis, we are now confronted with a double challenge of reimagining knowledge mobilization and knowledge exchange practices that are at once more equitable and more sustainable. This paper shares lessons and findings from a design-based research initiative aimed at testing responses to this double challenge through a global climate change adaptation conference held in Montreal in 2023. It highlights the opportunities, but also the deeply ingrained barriers to transforming processes of global knowledge exchange in academia and beyond.