Conference Agenda

Research Question and Objectives: Addressing Epistemic Violence Current Ainu education policies in Japan are fundamentally limited by a framework of "domestic cultural preservation," which perpetuates epistemic violence against Indigenous people. As critical analyses indicate, the "Ainu Culture Promotion Act" depoliticizes Ainu identity, confining it to a safe cultural sphere while severing connections to historical land stewardship and political rights (Okuda, 2001; Sato, 2012). This "domestic containment" functions as a colonial mechanism that denies the Ainu people their epistemic sovereignty—the right to define their own relationship with the land. Consequently, education fails to address the structural injustices of dispossession, treating Ainu heritage as a museum artifact rather than a living system of Indigenous rights.

This research asks: How can language education be transformed into a practice of social justice that reclaims Indigenous land rights and ecological sovereignty? The objective is to shift the educational paradigm from "cultural appreciation" to "epistemological restoration." We propose a pedagogical framework that utilizes toponymy (place names) not merely for linguistic preservation, but as a tool for restorative justice, challenging the colonial erasure of Indigenous geography and asserting trans-border Indigenous rights.

Theoretical Framework: Ecological Semantics for Justice To operationalize this shift, this study employs Ecological Semantics within a Social Justice framework. We posit that the colonial renaming of the land (using Japanese Kanji) was an act of injustice that obscured the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) embedded in Ainu place names. By analyzing place names through Langacker’s (1993) "reference-point structure," we demonstrate that these names encode sophisticated systems of resource management and "affordances" (Gibson, 1979). Reclaiming these names is an act of Environmental Justice, proving that the Ainu people possess a distinct, scientifically valid stewardship over the northern ecosystem that predates the modern nation-state.

European and International Dimension This study addresses the urgent European and global challenge of decolonising education to achieve social equity. The struggle against "domestic containment" resonates with the experiences of the Sámi in Scandinavia and other marginalized groups in Europe, where national education systems often fail to accommodate trans-border Indigenous rights. By offering a model that links toponymy directly to human rights and epistemic justice, this research contributes to the European discourse on Critical Intercultural Education. It provides a transferable framework for educators working to dismantle structural inequalities and empower marginalized communities through the restoration of their ecological and cultural heritage.

The objective of this presentation is to explore how knowledges were constructed as more or less legitimate or valuable, in a Finnish adult basic education (ABE) context. I report on data from a 5-year ethnographic study in rural community college that offered adult basic education (ABE) to students with interrupted educational trajectories. More specifically, I offer examples related to one of my focal students, Hanadi (a pseudonym), a women who relocated to Finland from Afghanistan via Iran. I discuss how some of the knowledges she enacted at school (e.g. art-making) were marked as more or less legitimate, both within specific interactions, and over time.

To do this, I draw on decolonial scholarship in the area of epistemic justice that understands knowledges as geopolitically and sociopolitically shaped. As a theoretical starting point, I understand current knowledge landscapes in schools as shaped by epistemic oppression (Mitova, 2020), which has historical roots in colonialism. Colonial attempts to erase Indigenous/subaltern knowledges and replaced them with so-called “western” created the illusion of an epistemic “zero point” (Castro-Gomez, 2007), from which the universality of Eurocentric knowledges is promoted (Posholi, 2020). This effort continues today, albeit maybe more subtly, through the normalization of epistemic structures in modern nations states, or what Quijano (2007) has referred to as coloniality of knowledge. For the Finnish context, colonial complicity (Vuorela et al., 2009) can also be a helpful concept to understand the participation of white-perceived or traditionally victim-positioned (e.g. Finland as victim of Russian occupation) societies in a colonial world order. As Finland is, like many other European countries, reckoning with its role as a colonial power, I use international and emerging Finnish decolonial theory to shed light on the ways in which colonial practices and logics permeate the Finnish society and educational system, including in its relationship with migrant communities. The maintenance of colonial logics is particularly evident in the education of forced migrants from the Global South, or, as in this study, students from so-called SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) contexts. Against this backdrop, I tell parts of Hanadi’s story at Asema School (a pseudonym), in respond to my overarching question:

How is epistemic il/legitimacy of knowledges constructed in one Finnish ABE context?

Answering this question by focusing on Hanadi and her knowledges of art-making, pain sharing, and home-claiming not only illustrates how epistemic value can be claimed, withheld, and change over time, it also directly speaks to the Eurocentric nature of educational practices and policies, and inspires question about the possibilities for decolonial pedagogies.

Contemporary debates on social justice and intercultural education emphasise the need to address epistemic injustice and the persistence of colonial hierarchies in educational knowledge production. Decolonial and critical intercultural approaches have shown how dominant epistemologies exclude non-hegemonic ways of knowing, producing what has been conceptualised as epistemicide (Santos, 2000; Santos & Meneses, 2014). Despite these critiques, educational theory and practice often remain grounded in modern rationalities that privilege cognitive and discursive forms of knowledge. As a result, embodied, affective, and experiential dimensions of human experience are marginalised or treated as merely expressive, rather than recognised as epistemologically legitimate. This exclusion constitutes a persistent form of epistemic injustice with direct implications for justice-oriented and intercultural education.

This proposal argues that social justice in education cannot be achieved solely through curricular inclusion or discursive recognition if epistemological foundations remain unchanged. Critical interculturality has demonstrated that functional or liberal approaches frequently fail to challenge the structures that sustain inequality (Walsh, 2010; 2013). When intercultural education remains anchored in rationalist and representational models of knowledge, it risks reproducing the hierarchies it seeks to overcome (Quijano, 2000). In this context, the marginalisation of the sensible dimension - understood as embodied, affective, and experiential knowing - operates as an epistemic absence that limits the transformative potential of social justice education.

In response to these challenges, the study addresses the following research questions:

• How does the marginalisation of the sensible dimension contribute to epistemic injustice within intercultural and social justice education?
• How can an integrative epistemological framework support more plural and decolonial educational practices?
• What are the implications of recognising sensibility as epistemologically legitimate for human formation and critical intercultural education?

The main objective of the research is to conceptualise the sensible dimension as an epistemological condition within processes of human formation and educational knowledge production. Rather than opposing reason or reducing knowledge to affective experience, the study proposes an alternative epistemological orientation termed Plural Reason. Plural Reason designates an integrative form of rationality that articulates thinking and feeling, cognition and sensibility, without subordinating one to the other. This orientation resonates with decolonial critiques of epistemic monoculture and with calls for an ecology of knowledges grounded in plurality and critical vigilance (Santos et al., 2004; Santos & Meneses, 2014).

Within this framework, the study introduces the concept of the Language of the Sensible Dimension as a communicative and epistemological pathway through which sensibility becomes articulated and shared as meaningful knowledge. Framing the sensible as language challenges its confinement to the subjective and affirms its role in dialogue and critical awareness (Mignolo, 2011). The proposal develops a three-stage conceptual model - perception, integration, and exteriorization - explaining how the sensible dimension operates within educational and formative processes. This model draws on phenomenological and neurobiological perspectives that emphasise the inseparability of feeling and knowing (Damásio, 2010; 2021), as well as on approaches that conceptualise sensibility as a structured dimension of experience (Bois & Austry, 2008).

The theoretical framework brings into dialogue decolonial analyses of coloniality of knowledge (Quijano, 1991; 2000; Mignolo, 2001) with critical interculturality and perspectives on human formation. Art, particularly artistic and musical experience, is theorised as a privileged epistemological mediation through which the sensible dimension becomes accessible and communicable, supporting processes of epistemic disobedience and re-existence (Mignolo, 2011; Walsh, 2013). By foregrounding sensibility as an epistemological condition for ethical and relational learning, the study argues that justice-oriented education requires not only new contents of knowledge, but also new ways of sensing, feeling, and relating.

Internationally, in conversations about how to reduce economic and social inequalities in society, there is considerable interest in the role early childhood education and care (ECEC) can play in achieving political goals, such as social mobility for children growing up in low-income families and improved student achievement at later stages of education (see e.g. Familiedepartementet, 2024; Strietholt et al., 2020). Moreover, in the Norwegian context where we are positioned, there seems to be a growing interest in how ECEC can function as social equalizers (Familiedepartementet, 2024; Kunnskapsdepartementet, 2024). This paper emerges from an ongoing project in which we engage with how early childhood is entangled with the issue of socioeconomic differences. And further with how educational institutions for young children are understood as both part of and as solutions to challenges often associated with socioeconomic differences in the broader society, such as social exclusion, health problems, low educational achievement and barriers to labour market participation. More specifically, in the project we are interested in responsibilities given ECEC institutions in relation to socioeconomic differences and the above-mentioned associated challenges, and in kinds of research and pedagogies these hopeful imaginaries seem to both produce and sideline.

The educational responses ECEC institutions are encouraged to practice in relation to the above-mentioned inequalities, through policy, research and other knowledge-producing fields such as media, depends on how children and childhoods are philosophically approached, and what kind of knowledge these approaches might create (and not). It is here, at the intersection of onto-epistemology, knowledge creation, and pedagogical practices that our project takes shape. Inspired by Nxumalo and Brown (2020) and de Oliveira (2021), among others, we understand pedagogical work aimed at social and economic equity as something more than just a problem to be solved, but rather as a complex difficulty requiring sustained attention and effort. To sit with this complex difficulty we think and imagine with the concept ‘hospicing’ (Andreotti et al., 2015), which might help us turn our gaze towards how we have arrived at this situation as a society, and which, instead of accelerating more of the same as a response, can provide a foundation for palliative care and open up for other pedagogical practices.

The presentation also engages with figurations as a theoretical-methodological concept. In tracing modern figurations of child, we lean on insights from thinkers such as Claudia Castañeda (2002), Erica Burman (2024), and Donna Haraway (1988, 2008). Our interest in modern figurations of child and childhood thus lies in a) what these figurations bodies forth, b) their relations to the world-making circulations of ideas about ECEC as a means to reduce social inequalities and exclusion, c) and how one through tracings of these figurations might push to dissolve the spell of modernity (Andreotti & Pietroiusti, 2023) and make space for more liberatory ways to engage with injustices in ECEC.