Part I: Epistemic Justice and Decolonising Knowledge Systems
Christine Woodrowa and Juan Salazarb
aSchool of Education, Western Sydney University, Australia
bInstitute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia
This opening section of the book foregrounds Southern epistemologies, Indigenous knowledges, and challenges dominant narratives in research, language, and education contexts. The chapters herein explore the themes of subjugation and marginalisation of the knowledges and linguistic repertoires that exist in families, communities, and professions and the associated entrenched hierarchies of power, status and legitimation. The chapters explore in various ways how identities, ontologies, and pedagogies might be reimagined through a decolonial and pluralistic lens, referencing the authors’ own research or pedagogical innovations.
A significant contribution of the chapters lies in the richly diverse range of theories and theoretically informed concepts presented that pertain to a decolonising Southern knowledges project. These theories and concepts, and the authors’ exemplars of innovations and extrapolations based on them, are critical assets and tools to leverage in the shared quest to disrupt hegemonic knowledge framing and address epistemic and linguistic injustice. These theories and concepts can also inform policies and pedagogies that go beyond the superficial by positioning “diverse epistemologies as core, not peripheral” (Oliveira, this section).
Collectively, the chapters amplify, expand, and illustrate some contemporary concerns and impacts of epistemic and linguistic injustice, as well as the limitations, inaccuracies, and injustices arising from colonial perspectives and practices. Further, they offer critical insights into transformative change through showcasing new resources (conceptual and material), innovations and approaches in curriculum and pedagogy.
In the lead chapter, Ndhlovu explores the dominant, colonial theoretical frameworks that underpin most approaches to language, migration and diasporas, noting that these are often masked by other discourses and typologies such as “multiculturalism”. He mounts a powerful critique, highlighting their tendency to privilege an imperialistic, scientific view of linguistic, immigrant and diaspora identities and problematises how these reify, universalise, categorise and homogenise peoples, identities and the ontologies of the diasporas. Inevitably, these “social-scientific” theorisations about diasporas exclude the knowledge systems of the colonised from mainstream discourses. Of particular concern is the tendency of these approaches to conceptualise diaspora identities with reference to a perceived, romantically imagined homeland, which Ndhlovu argues ignores the complex lived experience of diasporas, their emergent transnational solidarities and capabilities and their interactions with other diaspora communities from elsewhere, often acquired in transit during their migration journeys as well as their newly found homeland. Ndhlovu highlights what diaspora identities might look like from an alternative, decolonising, or “frontier” perspective that promotes an ecology of knowledges, recognises diverse knowledge systems, and elevates the activist identities of people and communities as “knowledge producers”. Inevitably, such a view captures a more dynamic, hopeful and agentic view of migrant and diaspora communities. Ndhlovu argues that a frontier perspective built on the ontologies of incompleteness and unfinishable possibilities holds promise for disrupting the scientific models that sustain global inequalities and established hierarchies of languages, cultures, ontologies and epistemologies.
Drawing on Australian and international research, Brace, Filmore and Calma consider the significance of learning in the languages of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, rather than English being the language of teaching and learning. The case is made on equity grounds, together with the accumulated evidence of benefits, such as better literacy and learning outcomes, improved wellbeing, and strengthened identities and social connections. They highlight several new Australian initiatives that centre Indigenous knowledges to argue the importance of treating First Languages as foundational and community engagement and ownership as critical to success. However, many entrenched structural barriers to integrating First Languages and literacies into mainstream teaching and learning remain. These barriers include the dominance of Eurocentric assumptions and the privileging of Western academic qualifications over community knowledge, leaving little room for Indigenous ways of knowing and languaging. The way forward requires overt recognition and the centring of Indigenous communities as the primary authorities of their own knowledge systems in First Language research and practice, which Western institutions remain inclined to dominate.
Jones Díaz’s chapter shares research findings from a study conducted in Australian early learning contexts that explored initiatives to extend the Home Languages (HL) of multilingual children. Despite the extensive diversity in language backgrounds of Australian children, Jones Díaz finds that monolingual mindsets inform much of educational policy in Australia, leading to perceptions of linguistic and cultural diversity as deficits rather than assets. This is despite a robust evidence base that suggests otherwise. In this study, identified gaps between policy, evidence and practice are revealed through the application of a socio-critical theoretical frame of analysis. Specifically, the lack of a national policy for multilingual education in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) and the absence of an ECEC multilingual pedagogical framework, together with evident ambiguities in ECEC discourse, contribute to inconsistency in multilingual pedagogies. Importantly, where educators are well-informed about the benefits of multilingualism and work in environments supportive of it, they mobilise effective pedagogies to support home language extension. For such initiatives to be more widespread across the ECEC field, rather than limited to centres with strong family and institutional support of multilingualism, greater policy and curriculum support might be required.
Pardo and Opazo explore the “schoolification” of early childhood classrooms in Chile, interrogating the historical antecedents, policies, and structural elements implicated in the subjugation of play-based pedagogies and their replacement with school-like pedagogies emphasising early literacy and numeracy, as well as instructional pedagogies. Their research reveals how a strong early childhood tradition of holistic teaching and learning is colonised by an entrenched and more powerful orthodoxy about what constitutes teaching and learning, which itself is being shaped by dominant political discourses and high-stakes testing regimes. The study findings indicate that despite recent policy emphasising the principal’s pedagogical leadership, principals lack the knowledge and expertise in play-based pedagogies necessary to lead in this area. As principals are key change agents, they argue for new policies and practices that will better equip them with the necessary capability to disrupt entrenched assumptions and practices and to facilitate meaningful child-centred, age-appropriate pedagogies in the early childhood classroom. The issues of reductive curriculum content and erosion of play-based pedagogies are of global significance in the context of recent OECD moves towards measurement standards in evaluating early childhood learning outcomes.
Oliveira’s chapter deploys two key concepts to argue for the embedding and elevation of Global South epistemologies in teacher education contexts. Building on the notion of “deficit thinking” in which educational failure is attributed to individual or cultural lack, he conceptualises the notion of “global deficit thinking”, which derives from the framing that locates the Global South and Southern knowledges as “less than”, or “developing”. The Australian-originated concept of “lazy multiculturalism” is also used to signify tokenistic efforts to engage with diversity that fail to challenge hegemonic leadership hierarchies and epistemic power relations centred on surface-level representations of culture. In the second half of the chapter, Oliveira outlines the key concepts and resources utilised in a university-based curriculum he developed and discusses the mixed student responses and levels of engagement observed during implementation. While there was evidence of shifts away from “global deficit thinking” perspectives and genuine engagement with decoloniality, Oliveira discerns a reluctance among staff and students to fully engage with and incorporate alternative epistemologies in teacher education. This suggests the significant challenges associated with moving school curriculum and pedagogical practices beyond surface recognition and engagement with diverse knowledges.
Together, these chapters highlight energy and resilience across research and education to resist colonising tools and discourses and reimagine and create theoretical tools and social and educational spaces and practices where the recognition of marginalised knowledges is at the core. Individually and collectively, they offer a kernel of critical hope for a more just world and form a robust opening to this volume.
Author Notes
Christine Woodrow 
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5963-3908
Juan Salazar https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1700-8984
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Christine Woodrow. Email: c.woodrow@westernsydney.edu.au.
Cite This Chapter
Woodrow, C., & Salazar, J. (2026). Part I: Epistemic justice and decolonising knowledge systems. In L. Naidoo, S. Gannon, C. Woodrow, C. H. Díaz, V. Lopez, & J. F. Salazar (Eds.), Sur-Sur Southern Knowledges: Education, sustainability and social transformation. Western Open Books. https://doi.org/10.61588/HGMT4758
Attribution
Except where otherwise noted, this work by Christine Woodrow and Juan Salazar is licensed under CC BY 4.0.