Creating Inclusive Knowledges

There has been a growing interest in the role of arts and cultural practice in tackling perennial forms of social exclusion, marginalization, and oppression. Researchers and educators from different disciplines have been collaborating with community-based agencies and community groups to forge new ways to challenge these forms of exclusion. This volume discusses how various social actors, work in interdisciplinary and cross-institutional ways to push an agenda that privileges those individuals and groups, who experience and live at the front line of social inequality, discrimination, racism and oppression. For instance, what new understandings are generated through creative, interdisciplinary, action oriented work, and the implications for social action and transformation? How are community pedagogies constructed and communicated through arts-based research, contemporary and innovative mediums such as creative performances, arts, technologies, mixed-cultural practices and social media and networking?

This collection of articles, blurs the lines between cultural practice and knowledge production, with the process and products coming in the forms of theories, creative methodologies, and a range of arts. Together these act as powerful pedagogical tools for engaging in social justice and transformative work. The contributions further highlight the multifaceted and diverse ways of creating and disseminating knowledge, and the attempts to decenter text-based ways of communicating in hopes of sharing collaborative knowledge beyond the academy and engaging the ‘public’. This volume was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Inclusive Education.

Christopher C. Sonn, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Community Psychology at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia on the land of the Wurundjeri of the Kulan nation. His research examines histories of colonialism and oppression and its continuities in various forms of structural violence and its effects on social identities, intergroup relations and belonging. He is co-editor of Psychology and Liberation and co-author of Social Psychology and Everyday Life.

Alison M. Baker, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in Social Pedagogy at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia on the land of the Wurundjeri of the Kulan nation. Her research focuses on the implications of structures that produce inequality in the lives of various disenfranchised groups as well as those in positions of privilege. She is interested in blending creative research methodologies and documentary techniques, particularly visual and sound modalities, to develop young people's sense of social justice and capacity for action.