The quest for cognitive justice: towards a pluriversal human rights education

ABSTRACT

This paper turns to the work of the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos and explores how a set of concepts he developed over the years may constitute valuable tools in the task of decolonising and pluriversalising Human Rights Education (HRE). Informed by decolonial theory, Santos highlights that the struggle for global social justice is inseparable from the struggle for cognitive justice, namely, the recognition of epistemic diversity. This paper makes a contribution to the efforts that view the pluriversalisation of HRE as inextricable parts of the wider task of decolonising knowledge and education and struggling for social justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Human rights
• human rights education
• decolonisation
• cognitive justice
• pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For example, Raewyn Connell’s Southern Theory (2007; see also 2014, 2017, for more recent discussions) is one of the influential works documenting the link between imperialism and the formation of sociology as a field of knowledge and challenging the production and circulation of social science knowledge. Connell’s work complements and, in some ways, extends Santos’s, emphasising that the continuing hegemony of the global North has diminished the epistemic significance of the South.

2 Santos (2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2008) has written extensively on the World Social Forum (WSF) and its central role in the ‘work of translation’, namely, the construction of accounts that are mutually intelligible between Western and non-Western conceptions and practices (see also Santos 2014, 222). According to Santos, the WSF contests the hegemony of Western science and rationality and counters its suppression of knowledges anchored in alternative modes of life (see Conway 2013). Santos attributes to the WSF an ‘epistemology of the South’ because it privileges knowledges arising from Third World, South and indigenous sites of suffering and exclusion. Importantly, the work of translation makes visible and explicit the epistemic violence and cognitive injustice that has enabled the expansion of modernity and coloniality.