book cover for Promoting Equity and Justice through Pedagogical Partnership
Buy in Print

ISBN: 9781642672091

June 2021

Chapter 3 of Promoting Equity and Justice through Pedagogical Partnership applies the conceptual framework presented in the second chapter to the pedagogical partnership literature. It highlights the ways in which partnership work may have pushed against forms of epistemic, affective, and ontological harms from associated violence without naming it in these terms, and it takes up the promise of partnership to meaningfully contribute to redressing these harms to bring about greater equity and justice. In order to flesh out and illustrate these claims, the chapter draws on student experiences quoted in published research that the authors and others have conducted, unpublished data from three ethics-board-approved studies (see Appendix A) and works in progress.  Ultimately, this rereading of the partnership literature suggests that pedagogical partnership can contribute to epistemic, affective, and ontological justice in a range of ways, such as by affirming students from equity-seeking groups as knowers, relieving some of the emotional effects of oppression, and enabling students to develop and have affirmed their sense of who they are and might become.

Discussion Questions

In this chapter, the authors reread outcomes and experiences of pedagogical partnership in relation to the concepts of epistemic, affective, and ontological justice. Draw on the tables in the book depicting partnership’s facilitation of justice via redress of the harms resulting from epistemic (page 28), affective (page 32), and ontological (page 38) violence to address the questions below.

  • What, if anything, does this reframing of partnership literature open up for you? What possibilities or concerns does it generate?
  • What concrete practices might be enacted to better realize the potential outcomes listed in the third column of the tables? What are the limitations of these practices?
  • This chapter, and the book as a whole, focus primarily on the experiences of students participating in pedagogical partnership initiatives. How, if at all, might partnership contribute to redressing epistemic, affective, and ontological harms experienced by faculty and staff belonging to equity-seeking groups? What are partnership’s potential limitations or tensions in this respect?