Un/doing Justice-Oriented Education Practice in the Global Landscape (Knowledge Cultures Special Issue, 2025)
ABSTRACT. The articles in this special issue apply various lenses towards a study of the often-substantial disconnect between justice-oriented educational futures and the systems and participants responsible for producing and sustaining colonial structures in education. Authors included in this collection explore how arbitrary norms and systemic constraints frame our imagination about education in theory and practice, and how we might look towards imagining our experiences and understandings otherwise. The persistence of coloniality within educational institutions remains a critical issue, as its operating structures are variously bypassed, reinforced, challenged and reconstructed in ways that expose deep tensions and contradictions. At the heart of these dynamics is the enduring operation of power, which continues to sustain inherited discourses in Westernised educational contexts, even in the face of intentional efforts to unsettle and transform them.
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Russial, M., Hiitola, J., & Paradis, A. (2025). Un/doing justice-oriented education practice in the global landscape: Introduction to the special issue. Knowledge Cultures, 13(2), 7–14. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc13220251
Discursive Drift in Changemaker Education:
Patterns of Change Resistance (2025)
ABSTRACT. This article offers an analysis of entangled discourses across the multiple facets of changemaker education in Western-derived governance models, using website materials from two change-oriented educational consortiums (the United World College movement and the UNIC European University) as case studies and concept exemplars. Taking inspiration from the theoretical and methodological foundations of Foucauldian discourse analysis, the article explores the phenomenon of discursive drift in institutions, defined herein as the movement of shared words, phrases and images across the various discourses in play within institutional language systems. The analysis is oriented within an understanding of coloniality as an originary discourse in changemaker education, with an axiomatic understanding that education, if it is to serve as a catalyst for social and ecological justice, must inherently be grounded in decolonial values to meet the mandates of the stated changemaking visions. While considerable research has attended to various discursive threads in global citizenship education, peace and human rights education and sustainability education worldwide, this analysis offers additional insight into locations of contradiction within institutions, suggesting opportunities for mission-vision concordance and continued development towards a decolonial framework for justice-aligned educational praxis.
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Russial, M. (2025). Discursive drift in changemaker education: Patterns of change resistance. Knowledge Cultures, 13(2), 15–46. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc13220252
For the Love of Research (2025)
ABSTRACT. In this article, we discuss what we have learned about love and how it is perceived in academia. We wish to celebrate some of the complex global histories and contemporary practices of love as a political concept. While the concept of care is much more common than love in Eurocentric research that attends to issues of social justice, we suggest that love has much to offer the conversation. Following varied contributions from Black feminist, Indigenous and postcolonial lines of thought and drawing from sources across the social sciences, arts and humanities, we approach love as a choice of action that requires an open and honest atmosphere of trust and a collective will to work towards shared wellbeing. Based on this conceptualisation of love, we propose love as a premise and source of praxis for ethical research.
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Kauhanen, I., & Russial, M. (2025). For the Love of Research. Knowledge Cultures, 13(1), 50-81. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc13120253