Rethinking Freedom: A Framework for the Implementation of Ethical Space in the Academy

Abstract

Knowledge making is a social act requiring people, texts, and resources besides the individual author, affecting both self and others. In knowing the world, we transform it. Thus, knowledge making bears a responsibility toward the lives, lands, and world shaped by it. As such, the authors question the ethics involved in the liberal value of freedom as a guiding principle for colleges and universities. We claim the liberal tradition of freedom is a Settler freedom, and its modes of practice enact and maintain Settler-colonial domination. Within the university, academic freedom and freedom of expression are neither intrinsically good nor universally extended to academe’s members. Privileging such freedoms over other values helps form and sustain inequities within and outside the academy. As the Truth and Reconciliation process underway in Canada tasks post-secondary institutions with decolonizing structural and systemic inequities in education and administration, we offer exemplification of Indigenous 1 epistemological concepts to shift a focus from exclusively on the rights of individuals in the academy to considering all our relations and what might be the ethics of responsibility and accountability that come into focus when we see and practice knowledge making within an ethical space of engagement.