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 chapter introduces the book. It outlines how Indigenous peoples sought, and were denied, membership of the international community in the early twentieth century, contrasting it to the situation that prevails today of Indigenous peoples’ inclusion in international governance. It is therefore timely to take stock of these developments. The introduction situates the book in the field, relating it to scholarship on the law of self-determination and Indigenous peoples’ rights. The key limitations of the book are noted, including those relating to epistemic positionality and representation, and the empirical method employed in the book. Key terms are defined, including ’international governance’ and ’Indigenous peoples’, before the structure of the book is outlined.

Publications on citizenship, democracy, and disability tend to focus almost exclusively on the labor market, the political system, as well as assistance and support, and not on education. The same holds true in reverse. Democracy in relation to education and schooling is often discussed in a restricted manner. Disability is not treated with specific interest in this context. This chapter addresses this gap with a specific focus on John Dewey’s theoretical considerations. It first outline key aspects of Dewey’s theoretical framework before turning to the issue of disability and the specific risks it entails for democratic life in general and democratic participation in particular. It then explores the question of whether Dewey’s pragmatist approach can be used to make progress for disabled people’s education. It particularly discusses tensions and dilemmas that disability poses for democratic and inclusive education.

Foucault problematizes the relationship between knowledge and power in ways that more traditional epistemology has not, with power always already shaping what we consider knowledge. To capture the nexus between power and knowledge, he introduces the term “episteme.” The significance of an era’s episteme is easiest to see in terms of what it does to possibilities of self-knowledge. Therefore I pay special attention to this theme by way of introducing the theoretical depth of Foucault’s notion. I then develop Foucault’s ideas further, specifically for digital lifeworlds. With this vocabulary in place, I introduce the notion of “epistemic actorhood” that lets us capture the place of an individual in a given episteme. It is in terms of this place that we can turn to the notions of epistemic rights and epistemic justice. Epistemic actorhood comes with the four roles of individual epistemic subject, collective epistemic subject, individual epistemic object, and collective epistemic object. Using this vocabulary we can then also articulate the notions of an epistemic right and of epistemic justice and develop them in the context of digital lifeworlds. Digital lifeworlds engage individuals both as knowers and knowns in new ways. The framework introduced in this chapter captures this point.

Tolstoy occupies an important but often overlooked place in the development of educational thought, situated between the German pedagogical revolution of the eighteenth century and the proliferation of alternative education movements in the twentieth. Although initially inspired by the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Tolstoy’s educational experiments heralded a novel turn by rejecting educational theory as a foundation for the curriculum altogether. For applying any philosophy of education from above would unjustly impose and interfere with the lives of the Russian people. Instead, Tolstoy set out to facilitate the creation of the peasants’ own approach to schooling through dialogue with his pupils. This radical method has a close relationship with the development of Tolstoy’s literature and philosophy. His educational thought was well ahead of his time, and many of the ethical concerns he raised about mass education are still of pressing import.