Everyday Solidarities and Epistemic Justice: Nourishing Ecologies of Wellbeing

Through our solidarity praxis we seek to move beyond standing up for and with marginalised epistemic communities in their pursuit of self-determination, justice, and the flourishing of wilful subjectivities, and instead embody an orientation to standing up as—which represents communality and a mutual implication towards self-determination. To materialise these hopes we argue that it is necessary to move from monological theories and approaches that are often decontextualized, ahistorical, and individualistic. Drawing on decolonial and other critical perspectives we centre dialogical approaches, transdisciplinary theories and concepts from global and local community-oriented work and activism that mobilise and create knowledges otherwise. These approaches are justice oriented and have generated conceptual resources that speak to the ways communities create generative and healing spaces and settings, embody relational and communal ways of being and working together, and name and re-signify the world. In this chapter, we articulate the ways in which we have oriented ourselves, our positionalities, these theories and concepts, to account for the particularities and atmospherics of Australia, its history, culture, violences and white-settler colonialism. As we illuminate our guiding theories and concepts, which include epistemic justice, relational praxis, cultural re-membering and psychosocial accompaniment, we will illustrate with examples of work that focuses on and critically examines community arts and other cultural practice. As a tool for critical community praxis, we suggest that community arts involve the creation of settings and liberatory possibilities. We contend that it is through this work that our solidarity praxis has made in-roads supporting efforts towards self-determination. Community building and arts is by no means a panacea to the many wicked problems faced by communities, but what we offer are illustrations of how we are working together from decolonial attitudes with relationships as central, to embolden and nourish our ecologies of wellbeing.