Literacies of Joy: Responding to Epistemic Injustice in Public Education Research and Practice

Abstract

In this article, the authors utilize Miranda Fricker’s conception of epistemic injustice to reexamine racial inequities in public education through the lens of testimonial and hermeneutical injustices experienced by minoritized youth. Drawing on their lived experiences as BIPOC researchers and teacher educators, the authors delineate the concept of literacies of joy as a means to describe, document, and affirm minoritized youths’ creative resistance to the epistemic injustices inherent within oppressive educational systems and structures. These literacies of joy are defined as ways of being and knowing that enable BIPOC students and educators alike to reap, enact, and embody joy amid oppressive circumstances. By centering joy, we overtly link this work to expressions of mattering and survivance. By centering literacies, we call attention to the systematicity and grammar of these ways of mattering. Literacies of joy affirm and honor the profound creativity and ingenuity with which oppressed communities have carved out spaces of joy since time immemorial. To this end, this concept addresses a hermeneutical injustice of its own. The implications of these literacies of joy are discussed as means of anti-oppressive pathways to educational research and teaching.