Part II - Justice as Unsettling Asymmetries

Summary

For the three chapters in this section, written by Jen Dickinson and Natasha Uwimanzi, Jennifer Balint and Deepti Chatti, justice is about action. They acknowledge the structural but also mundane, everydayness of injustice and seek to enable spaces for learning and reflection, for all participants to ‘be otherwise’ in an effort to disrupt and decentre Western knowledge in the academy and beyond. The projects discussed work towards a decolonizing praxis, seeking to partner with the historically marginalized and silenced to give voice to their narratives, histories and futures. Their work emphasizes the necessity for accountability and dialogical reflexivity within these partnerships in order to rebalance research spaces and relations, while acknowledging the ongoing challenges in grounding these in local and contextual understandings and interpretations.

Justice here is grounded in unsettling epistemic silencing, both through enabling spaces for testimony, collaboration and situated experiences, and in processing how you do research within – and beyond – the constraints of colonial constructions of ‘fields of study’ alongside the contemporary, neoliberal university context.