This chapter brings together key concepts from decolonial, feminist, and liberation-focussed psychologies to advocate for the role of community arts in the pursuit of epistemic justice and liberatory community empowerment. The chapter focuses on three areas of praxis that are evident in community-oriented psychology’s engagement with calls for decolonizing science: archival retrieval, relational knowledge practices, and storytelling and counter-storytelling. These areas are further illustrated via two case examples from Australia that detail how people who are marginalized and racialized form communities to address structural and symbolic violence while also strengthening practices and capacities for re-existence. The cases show how, through forming intentional settings and mobilizing cultural practice, practices of cultural remembering and reauthoring of stories can contribute to decoloniality and epistemic justice. These cases also highlight that marginalized and racialized communities can create home places of healing, connection, and memory. These relational practices of accompaniment require ongoing critical reflexivity and deliberate deep rethinking as well as equitable access to material and symbolic resources to engage in decolonial and antiracist work.

This introductory chapter outlines how children are active agents with motives and intentions, and what practitioners can do to support children’s learning, development and well-being in different age periods. It is therefore relevant for adults who work with children from birth to late adolescence, both within and beyond formal institutions. We also intend it to be useful to researchers and other professionals concerned with children and young people.

Our aim is to look forward toward children’s futures and how they can be supported to benefit from and contribute to what society has to offer. We argue that, by taking children’s intentions and emotions seriously, we can create an education that benefits children across the age periods. When children move through the institutional practices that society creates for them, they will learn, acquire new motives and develop. Therefore, the tools that we offer will allow carers and practitioners to tailor their support to children in different age periods. These ideas underpin a caring relational form of pedagogy, which is particularly but not only, important when children are dealing with changes in society’s expectations for them. These changes occur as they move, for example, between family, day-care or school, and when new challenges arise in familiar situations.

Chapter 1 recovers the pastoral precedents for the culture that directly precipitated Cervantes’ first poems within the court of Isabel de Valois (Queen of Spain, 1560–1568), in which literary art forms and forms of cultural practice became intertwined in complex mimetic processes. From Theocritus, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poliziano, and Sannazaro to Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán, and Jorge de Montemayor, the retreat of the pastoral was understood to be a device employed to encode and allegorize the private life and lived experience of the court which made poiesis possible. Drawing on archival records (relaciones) of life in the court, the diary kept by one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and histories of Isabel’s reign, Chapter 1 explores the frequent and often improvisational imitation of various literary genres, including the romance of chivalry, by members of the court caught up in erotic entanglements which became the content of pastoral fiction. At the confluence of literary allegory and contemporary history, through the exchange of motes in the terrero, the palace became pastoral.

In the introduction to their edited book The Theatre of Sa’dallah Wannous: A Study of the Syrian Playwright and Public Intellectual, Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and Robert Myers trace the importance of studying the life and works ofSa’dallah Wannous. They argue that for those who care about the role of culture, especially as manifested in literature and theatre in various global traditions, as a key indicator and explicator of the dynamics of societies, it is imperative to examine the work of artist-intellectuals like Wannous as a means of measuring the extent to which theatre and literature still matter today. Through introducing the wide-ranging topics of the chapters of their book, the editors highlight the significance of the thought, work and legacy of Wannous not only in the Arabic tradition and in world literature and theater but also in Arab politics and history, especially in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the recent Arab uprisings.