RA1.4 PAPER: Children as Environmental Communicators
URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/su16083124
Addressing epistemic injustice: Engaging children as environmental communicators to support the long-term sustainability of forest ecosystems
April 2024
McEntee M, Thomas K, Mullens M, Houghton C, Harvey M, Craig-Smith A. 2024. Addressing epistemic injustice: Engaging children as environmental communicators to support the long-term sustainability of forest ecosystems. Sustainability, 16 (8). 3124
ABSTRACT
Closure of a forest for biosecurity purposes led to the marginalisation and disconnection of Year 6 children from a local forest of significance to them in Aotearoa, New Zealand. The marginalisation of children’s voices and concomitantly of their knowledge, ideas, and values from environmental issues can be viewed as an example of epistemic injustice, which manifests widely in the environmental area, particularly in relation to marginalised groups. To counter this marginalisation and promote epistemic justice, we explored how the creative arts involving a child-driven environmental communication project could foster children’s sense of agency by supporting the protection of a local forest affected by a tree disease. We show that the creative arts could facilitate the children’s meaningful engagement in environmental issues in a learning environment that fostered child-centric approaches that enabled children to express their visions for sustainable futures in distinctly unique ways that were relevant to them. Furthermore, enabling the children to participate as environmental communicators re-established their relationship with their local forest and re-balanced the power structures that had led to the children’s sense of marginalisation. The insights on how this child-centred relational approach can promote epistemic justice and provide a meaningful contribution to the long-term sustainable management of forest ecosystems has implications for other marginalised groups.
KEYWORDS
epistemic injustice; environmental communication; environmental management; biosecurity; power structures; participatory research; transdisciplinary research; mātauranga Māori; art-based practices; behaviour change
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| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Data last updated | unknown |
| Metadata last updated | 12 April 2024 |
| Created | unknown |
| Format | unknown |
| License | CC-BY-4.0 |
| Created | 2 years ago |
| Datastore active | False |
| Has views | False |
| Id | e0aebf46-e0ef-43fa-9005-760960a2421e |
| Package id | 6e320eef-e8a8-4daa-946f-0796b680273a |
| Position | 40 |
| State | active |