Cognitive Justice Research Articles

Language teaching in the 21st century: incorporating culturally sustaining pedagogies for social and cognitive justice in education

Language teaching in the 21st century: incorporating culturally sustaining pedagogies for social and cognitive justice in education

Border Tensions for Rethinking Communication and Development: A Case of Building History in Ticoya Resguardo

This article proposes rethinking communication, development, and social change from a decolonial perspective through the case study of the Ticoya resguardo. It examines how the oral traditions of Indigenous elders construct a history of the territory, positioning orality as a practice of communicative and cognitive justice that transcends the dominant structures of the nation-state. Border tensions are explored both as a physical reality between Colombia and Peru and as a metaphor for identity conflicts. The theoretical framework incorporates debates on post-development, pluriverse, and southern epistemologies, challenging social inequalities. A qualitative methodology based on the praxeological method was implemented in four stages in collaboration with the resguardo’s communications committee. Producing a radio series narrated by participants was crucial for gathering the elders’ narratives through conversations, social mapping, and storytelling. The findings emphasize the break with linear temporality in narratives, the sense of territory beyond state borders, and the identity tensions of river dwellers. The conclusion underscores the necessity of a decolonial perspective, recognizing the impact of monocultures in obscuring diverse forms of life. The Ticoya resguardo case illustrates how communicative justice can highlight the local and everyday, considering the territory essential in the pluriverse, aligning with Escobar’s and Santos’ proposals on transitions toward a pluriversal world.

Integrating Indigenous Knowledge in South African Geography Education Curricula for Social Justice and Decolonization

This paper analyzes the integration of indigenous knowledge into South African geography education as an intersection of social justice and decolonial imperatives. Historically, colonial education systems have marginalized indigenous epistemologies by privileging Western knowledge as universally superior. Integrating indigenous perspectives into curricula can counter this legacy by promoting cognitive justice and unsettling Eurocentric dominance. However, meaningful integration requires moving beyond superficial additions of indigenous elements within unchanged Western-centric curricula as this risks appropriating indigenous knowledge in disempowering ways. The paper argued that ethical integration necessitates recentring indigenous knowledge systems in their own right alongside Western frameworks to enact pluralistic, horizontal cognitive frameworks. A qualitative literature analysis identified key themes around recognizing indigenous epistemologies, dismantling enduring hierarchies, and developing responsible community-centred integration processes. While systemic constraints pose barriers, integrating indigenous perspectives into geography education holds the transformative potential to advance both social justice inclusion aims and decolonial decentralization agendas. This convergence provides opportunities to develop anti-oppressive curricula that empower marginalized knowledge and ontologies. However, realization requires extensive efforts to sustain reflexivity and enable indigenous self-determination over knowledge. Ultimately, the paper underscored that indigenous knowledge integration must move beyond tokenism towards fundamentally transforming education systems through ethical, empowering processes grounded in partnerships with indigenous communities. This is vital for nurturing students able to navigate the world through plural epistemologies and enacting both social justice and decolonial futures. Keywords: Indigenous Knowledge, Decoloniality, Social justice, Geography Education

RETRACTION NOTICE: Challenges to decolonize the university

Retraction note: García Rangel, F. (2022). Challenges to decolonize the university: Cognitive justice from the epistemologies of the South. TECHNO REVIEW. International Technology, Science and Society Review Revista Internacional De Tecnología, Ciencia Y Sociedad, 12(3), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.37467/revtechno.v11.4415 The Editorial Office of Eurasia Academic Publishing Group has retracted this article. An investigation carried out by our Research Integrity Department has found a group of articles, among which this one is found, that are not within the thematic scope of the journal. We believe that the editorial process was manipulated and, furthermore, acceptance decisions were made under possibly inappropriate peer review.

A Study of Cognitive Justice Issues in Big Data Mining Behaviour

随着大数据时代的降临，算法技术的正当性问题引发人们关注。区别于算法正义和数据正义，认知正义以认知主体为视角并具有法律意义，要求认知主体的认知水平与认知客体的可信度相匹配。实践中存在对大数据挖掘所获证据的证明力进行天然推定，证明标准难以对法官心证形成控制的现状。这是由于大数据挖掘基于相关关系的思维冲击了人们的认知惯性，将解释权交给了算法，降低了认知水平，算法黑箱的不透明性和难以检验性导致认知客体本不应当赋予过高的可信度，算法歧视导致难以对二者匹配的过程进行矫正。需要将内心确信符合信念标准、偏见性算法信息应仅发挥补强性作用、将大数据挖掘所获信息在辩护人阅卷中进行披露、破除相互印证的因果逻辑桎梏，从而回归于认知正义，走向法治而非“算法治”。 Abstract: With the emergence of the big data era, questions about the legitimacy of algorithmic technologies have arisen. Distinguished from algorithmic justice and data justice, cognitive justice takes the perspective of the cognitive subject and has legal significance, requiring the cognitive level of the cognitive subject to match the credibility of the cognitive object. In practice, there is a natural presumption of the probative power of evidence obtained by big data mining, and the standard of proof is difficult to control the judge’s mental evidence. This is due to the big data mining based on the correlation of thinking impacts the cognitive inertia of people, the interpretation of the right to the algorithm, reducing the level of cognition, the opacity of the black box of the algorithm and difficult to test leads to the cognitive object should not have been given too much credibility, the algorithmic discrimination leads to the difficulty of the process of correcting the matching of the two. There is a need to return to cognitive justice, towards the rule of law rather than the “rule of law”, by bringing inner certainty in line with the standard of conviction, biased algorithmic information should play only a reinforcing role, disclosure of the information obtained from big data mining in the reading of the defense case file and breaking the shackles of the causal logic of mutual corroboration.

Jurisprudential Discernment and Protection Path of Personal Biological Information in the Context of Metaverse

摘要：随着大数据时代的降临，算法技术的正当性问题引发人们关注。区别于算法正义和数据正义，认知正义以认知主体为视角并具有法律意义，要求认知主体的认知水平与认知客体的可信度相匹配。实践中存在对大数据挖掘所获证据的证明力进行天然推定，证明标准难以对法官心证形成控制的现状。这是由于大数据挖掘基于相关关系的思维冲击了人们的认知惯性，将解释权交给了算法，降低了认知水平，算法黑箱的不透明性和难以检验性导致认知客体本不应当赋予过高的可信度，算法歧视导致难以对二者匹配的过程进行矫正。需要将内心确信符合信念标准、偏见性算法信息应仅发挥补强性作用、将大数据挖掘所获信息在辩护人阅卷中进行披露、破除相互印证的因果逻辑桎梏，从而回归于认知正义，走向法治而非“算法治”。 Abstract: With the emergence of the big data era, questions about the legitimacy of algorithmic technologies have arisen. Distinguished from algorithmic justice and data justice, cognitive justice takes the perspective of the cognitive subject and has legal significance, requiring the cognitive level of the cognitive subject to match the credibility of the cognitive object. In practice, there is a natural presumption of the probative power of evidence obtained by big data mining, and the standard of proof is difficult to control the judge’s mental evidence. This is due to the big data mining based on the correlation of thinking impacts the cognitive inertia of people, the interpretation of the right to the algorithm, reducing the level of cognition, the opacity of the black box of the algorithm and difficult to test leads to the cognitive object should not have been given too much credibility, the algorithmic discrimination leads to the difficulty of the process of correcting the matching of the two. There is a need to return to cognitive justice, towards the rule of law rather than the “rule of law”, by bringing inner certainty in line with the standard of conviction, biased algorithmic information should play only a reinforcing role, disclosure of the information obtained from big data mining in the reading of the defense case file and breaking the shackles of the causal logic of mutual corroboration.

Botho/Ubuntu paradigm as cognitive justice in psychology

The concept of Botho/ Ubuntu emerges as a balancing paradigm poised to drive cognitive justice in psychological discourses. A paradigm is a universally recognized scientific model that represents a worldview of the nature of the world. There are enduring concerns about the privileging of Western European paradigms, ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies over their African counterparts. In this article, we present the Botho/ Ubuntu paradigm as a strong contender for the promotion, and humanization of epistemologies in psychology. The 59th annual conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) in Washington, DC in 2015, whose theme was “ Ubuntu! Imagining a Humanist Education Globally,” as well as the World Council of Comparative Education Societies’ (WCCES) recent book, Comparative Education for Global Citizenship, Peace and Shared Living through Ubuntu, are examples through which Ubuntu began to emerge as a paradigm poised to deliver cognitive and epistemic justice in the area such as psychology. We use Critical African Psychology as a lens through which we interrogate cognitive injustice. We conclude by demonstrating that Botho/Ubuntu paradigm might serve as a driver of cognitive justice in psychology and makes inroads into major discourses driven by African scholars.

Applied Theatre: Research-Based Theatre, or Theatre-Based Research? Exploring the Possibilities of Finding Social, Spatial, and Cognitive Justice in Informal Housing Settlements in India, or Tales from the Banyan Tree

This article draws on a twenty-year relationship of short-term interventions with Dalit communities living in informal settlements, sub-cities and urban villages in Mumbai, that have sought to create public theatre events based on research by and with communities that celebrate, problematise and interrogate sustainable urban living. In looking back over the developments and changes to our working methods in Mumbai, I explore how the projects priorities the roles of the community as both researchers and artists. I consider where a specific applied theatre project, which focuses on site specific storytelling with Dalit communities in Worli Koliwada and Dharavi, functions on a continuum of interactive, participatory, and emancipatory practice, research and performance. Applied Theatre practices should not and cannot remain static, they need to be constantly reformed and as practitioners and researchers we need to constantly re-examine the ways in which we work. This chapter poses two central questions: firstly, can this long-term partnership between practitioners, researchers and artists from the UK and India working with community members genuinely be a space for co-creating knowledge and theatre? And secondly, if so, is this Theatre-based Research or Research Based Theatre? I interrogate Applied Theatre’s potential to create a space of cognitive justice, which must be the next step for applied theatre, along-side its more widely accepted aims of searching for social and spatial justice and which places the community as both artists and researchers. The Dalit social reality is one of oppression, based on three axes: social, economic and gender. The chapter explores how working as co-researchers and the public performance of their stories has been a form of ‘active citizenship’ for these participants and is a key part of their strategy in their demand for policy changes. In looking forward I ask how working in international partnerships with community members can promote cognitive justice and go beyond a merely participatory practice. I consider why it is vital for the field that applied theatre practice includes partners from both the global south and north working together to co-create knowledge, new methods of practice to ensure an applied theatre knowledge democracy. In doing so I will discuss if and how this work might be considered to be Theatre-based Research.

Regenerative and restorative pedagogy: The foundation of a new contract for cognitive justice

Regenerative and restorative pedagogy: The foundation of a new contract for cognitive justice

A geopolitics of knowledge analysis of higher education internationalisation in Kazakhstan

AbstractThis critical interpretive paper deploys Walter Mignolo's geopolitics of knowledge concept to examine higher education internationalisation in Kazakhstan. Amidst growing concerns about economic and environmental sustainability, elitism and cognitive justice, among other critical issues, internationalisation remains a vital government policy. By tracing Kazakhstan's development since independence from the Soviet Union and focusing on key higher education development policy frameworks, the paper argues and illustrates that: (1) the internationalisation of higher education in Kazakhstan promotes a specific representation of the world that is considered universal and modern; (2) the internationalisation of higher education in Kazakhstan illustrates the existing hierarchical global higher education system that is dominated by the West as centres of knowledge and learning while allocating other countries peripheral roles; and (3) the geopolitics of knowledge concept enables the reading of higher education internationalisation beyond what is knowledge to who, why and where knowledge is produced. The data for this paper came from a qualitative study that involved 15 semi‐structured interviews with graduates who studied abroad at Western universities through the government‐sponsored Bolashak Scholarship. Three focus group sessions with 21 graduate students at Nazarbayev University complemented the interviews. The qualitative data suggest that Mignolo's geopolitics of knowledge offers a close‐to‐perfect description of the internationalisation of higher education in Kazakhstan. The conclusion drawn from this post‐Soviet study is the universalisation of Western knowledge as nations utilise it for meaningful development, despite decolonial and cognitive justice concerns.

Valedictory Editorial Valiance and Tenacity to the Course for Cognitive Justice

Valedictory Editorial Valiance and Tenacity to the Course for Cognitive Justice

Rosa del Olmo Prize: Introductory Essay

Academic prizes have three problems: they feed an individualist ethos, perpetuate the idea of the ‘marketplace of ideas’ as a fair and even playing field, and build a stereotype of white, Western men as the ultimate knowledge creators. However, prizes can also challenge stereotypes and help democratise knowledge creation by enlarging the visibility of communitarian knowledge creation beyond Western scripts and outside hegemonic masculinities. The International Journal for Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy, committed to cognitive justice, knowledge democratisation, and encouraging voices on the periphery to partake in global academic debate, established the Rosa del Olmo Prize. Seeking to challenge criminological stereotypes about who can create knowledge that contributes to the development of criminology, the Journal honours Venezuelan criminologist Rosa del Olmo (1937-2000) through this award. Rosa symbolises critical, feminist, decolonial criminology working to advance social justice.

Traditional and local communities as key actors to identify climate-related disaster impacts: a citizen science approach in Southeast Brazilian coastal areas

The impacts of climate-related disasters can be estimated by climate models. However, climate models are frequently downscaled to specific settings to facilitate Disaster Risk Management (DRM) to better understand local impacts and avoid overlooking uncertainties. Several studies have registered the increasing importance of recognizing traditional knowledge, co-design, and collaboration with local communities in developing DRM strategies. The objective of this research was co-design local-scale observations with traditional and local communities to characterize their local context regarding the impacts of climate-related disasters. The citizen science approach coupled with participatory action research was conducted with two traditional communities in the Southeast of the Brazilian coast: Quilombo do Campinho da Independência in Paraty, Rio de Janeiro, and the Caiçara (artisanal fishing) community of Ubatumirim in Ubatuba, São Paulo. Working groups were organized with leaders to become community researchers, conducting interviews and actively mobilizing their communities. A structured questionnaire was developed, adapting 22 variables taken from the Protocol for the Collection of Cross-Cultural Comparative Data on Local Indicators of Climate Change Impacts—LICCI Protocol. A total of 366 impacts were analyzed, after combining the georeferencing form data collected—Survey123 (280 impacts) and the interviews with community leaders (86 impacts). The results showed a significant level of cohesion (α = 0.01) between the Caiçara (artisanal fishers) and Quilombola (Afro-descendants) perceptions of climate-related events associated with their subsistence practices and climate variability. These findings highlighting the importance of DRM proposals that recognize traditional peoples and local communities as frontline vulnerable populations while acknowledging their role as key actors in identifying impacts, collecting data on land use and territory, subsistence-oriented activities, and cosmovision. However, it is still necessary to address climate change challenges at different scales. To do this, it is crucial to promote cognitive justice though the recognition of the values of the memories, perceptions and local knowledge, by scaling up locally-driven observations that empower local communities to lead their own climate adaptation efforts.

Promoting socio-spatial and cognitive justice through critical pedagogies

Thousands of people are currently being excluded from the right to the city, which makes urgent a reflection on how to articulate innovative and critical learning actions to promote socio-spatial and cognitive justice in the emerging context. An analytical framework inspired in Giddens' and Fraser’s theories, is proposed for a systematic analysis of the literature on critical pedagogies, and for studying an articulated sequence of learning-action experiences happened over fifteen years. The analysis is supported by qualitative information harvested from the experience of the Polytechnic University of Madrid with the communities in Ginaw Rails Nord (Dakar, Senegal) and Las Sabinas (Madrid, Spain).The results critically question the hegemonic construction of knowledge and the predominant ways of categorisation, crossing the abyssal lines between the Global North and the Global South, showing that (1) transforming structures involves challenging power relations within and outside the educational structure, and engaging in plural and equitable learning-action communities from which dominant policies, practices, and discourses may be challenged; (2) practices and policies may be transformed through collective experimentation processes that contribute to the co-production of both the city and knowledge, and (3) transforming the discourses of dominant power requires questioning acquired knowledge and the way it is produced, assuming the commitment and responsibility for constructing and disseminating an emancipatory pedagogy through the ecologies of knowledge.

Cognitive Justice and the Effective Use of the Principles of Good Teaching at Grade 10 Accounting

This paper analyses the effective use of the principles of good teaching as they are operationalized toward the creation of spaces for cognitive justice in the processes of teaching and learning Grade 10 Accounting. The envisaged spaces enable all forms of knowledges to co-exist and to complement another, in an enabling dialogue among these knowledges. Critical Accounting Research (CAR) is the lens couching the paper since it perceives the co-existence of knowledge as a way to contribute to a more sustainable, equitable and democratic world, and by extension, becoming beneficial to all. Participatory Action Research method operationalises CAR, where dialogues and discussions with the co-researching groups are conducted in order to formulate and operationalise this effective use of the principles of good teaching. Critical Discourse Analysis makes sense of the results as it allows for the use of text by participants to reveal the meaning at the deeper levels of discursive practice and the social structure.

Decolonization Projects

Decolonization Projects

Soft Decoloniality and Decolonising the Displays at Chiddingstone Castle, Kent

In the UK many popular misconceptions concerning Buddhist thought, practice, and material culture endure based on the colonial-era understanding of ‘Buddhism’ originating from the long 19th century. While academic Buddhist Studies has taken a more critical stance since the 1960s, a more nuanced understanding has not, by and large, percolated out of academia and dislodged earlier more simplistic ideas. Decolonising exercises such as those undertaken by national museums in the UK go some way to addressing this by presenting Buddhist cultures as dynamic and varied, and contextualising earlier colonial images of Buddhism. This constitutes a form of ‘soft decoloniality’ that addresses global cognitive justice in contrast to the ‘hard decoloniality’ of activist movements addressing global social justice. This article unpacks these ideas and discusses them in the context of an exercise to decolonise the displays in the Buddhist collection at Chiddingstone Castle, Kent: a small, independent museum based on the collections of the late Denys Eyre Bower (1905-1977), whose understanding of Buddhism was influenced by his close friend, Christmas Humphreys.

Cognitive (In)justice and Decoloniality in Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse

Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) is an insightful deliberation on the layered inequities and asymmetries created by the intersection of colonialism and anthropogenic activities. In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh conceives the present-day climate and ecological crisis as fallouts of colonial thinking and its manifestations in dominant epistemic and ethical constructions. This article underscores Ghosh’s critique of the Eurocentric discourses for their instrumentality in producing the totalitarian binaries of human and non-human, in which the ‘human’ was always the whites and the ‘non-human’ comprised all ‘others’—the non-whites, indigenous people, nature and ecology. In attributing agency and signifying authority to the white capitalist, this dualistic thinking has always conceived of the ‘others’ as non-humans—those who could be objectified, commodified and tampered with. This article explores how Ghosh repudiates this colonialist monolithic demarcation, which, in compliance with the discourse of the Anthropocene, had annihilated non-Western forms of signification, knowledge and ethics. The article focuses on how the systemic othering of Western modernity’s episteme had been incremental, leading to occurrences of ‘testimonial injustices’ and ‘hermeneutical injustices’—which had culminated in severe forms of epistemicide and unleashed, what Boaventura de Sousa Santos terms ‘cognitive injustice’—relegating indigeneity and ecology to precarious conditions. In accordance with this, this article argues that Ghosh envisages a critical necessity to dismantle the matrix of Western capitalist modernity and its associated narrative of the Anthropocene and claims for a conceptualization of decolonial ecological ethics that would prioritize an encompassing of the episteme produced by the ‘other’. An engagement with the indigenous voices and a restoration of non-Western modes of knowledge production are crucial, as they can offer new ethical dimensions to envision ecology and life with its multiplicities and facilitate ‘cognitive justice’ for the oppressed and unrepresented ‘other’.

Toward Cognitive Justice: Reconstructions of Climate Finance Governance in Fiji

In response to climate change’s devastating impacts on Pacific nations such as Fiji, climate finance—that is, the flow of public and private funds toward climate-aligned investment—has been presented as a promising solution. However, climate finance has had mixed results in delivering positive climate-aligned development benefits. In this article, we explore the climate finance governance around Fiji’s energy sector using postcolonial analytical tools, which allow us to explore some of the asymmetries playing out in climate finance and offer some alternatives. We argue that climate finance dysfunction is, in part, derived from the application of hegemonic knowledges in climate finance governance, and we aim to deconstruct these knowledge practices and subsequently, through the analysis of empirical, ethnographic data, to reconstruct governance alternatives that provide for epistemic inclusivity. This article demonstrates how Indigenous approaches such as talanoa and ‘iluvatu can facilitate recognition of governance innovation, and, in doing so, it considers the potential of cognitive justice, which calls for epistemic inclusivity, within the context of climate finance governance. The article concludes that including cognitive justice in climate finance governance can indeed promote better climate-aligned development benefits in Fiji and beyond.

The epistemologies of the South and the future of the university

AbstractEven though the university has the potential to help humanity in what amounts to a paradigmatic transition, it has been very restrictive and very selective in the kinds of knowledges it validates. In fact, the kinds of knowledges in which it has excelled are those most responsible for the paradigmatic crisis in which humanity finds itself. In a nutshell, the paradigmatic change calls for cognitive justice, justice for the different ways of knowing that circulate in society. Cognitive justice is the polar opposite of ‘anything goes’. The assumption is that there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice, justice among knowledges. Looking back, while privileging one specific kind of knowledge and, indeed, granting it a cognitive monopoly, the university has been the privileged site for producing and legitimating cognitive injustice. As a result, the immense epistemic diversity of the world has been ignored or suppressed. In the following, I identify the problem and the promise for overcoming it.