Key points

• • Expertise and insights based on lived experience dismantle academic norms about what constitutes knowledge and whose perspectives are valued in this context, thus contributing to epistemic justice.

• • While academic research continues to privilege some forms of knowledge over others, and engagement with lived experience-led knowledge can be limited, the expertise shared in this book demonstrates the strengths of lived experience-led scholarship that no other approach to research can replicate.

• • Three main characteristics of lived experience-led research that make it distinctive from other approaches are that it is unapologetically personal, inherently intersectional and undeniably visible.

• • There are several tensions linked to the politics of editing contributions drawn from lived experience for an academic publication, many of which remain unresolved.

Introduction

In her book Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color, Professor of Latinx Studies, Lorgia García-Peña describes how academia continues to privilege specific knowledge to the detriment of other ways of knowing, a deeply entrenched ‘culture’ that is slow to change: ‘Academia's power resides precisely in its exclusivity and exclusion. Knowledge, as imagined by the university, is measured by its proximity to particular notions of civility that are grounded … on the Eurocentric, colonial, patriarchal, heteronormative, and white supremacist understanding of the world’ (García Peña, 2022: 93). In the process of establishing and reinforcing the status quo over centuries, academic research has delegitimised forms of knowledge such as lived experience expertise, labelled as ‘non-scientific’, and ‘dismissed [them] as unsystematic, irrational, and false’ (Alonso Bejarano et al, 2019: 28). The silencing of epistemologies (or epistemic injustices), perspectives and knowledge grounded in diverse lived experiences has produced a partial understanding only of social justice issues, often lacking in intersectional nuances.

The knowledge conveyed in each chapter of this book demonstrates quality and integrity, negates the silencing and manipulation of lived experience in contemporary academia, and contributes towards epistemic justice. The authors’ complex accounts situated in their everyday realities and socio-cultural contexts offer new angles on each social justice issue – not in a tentative way, but through strong assertions about what they know best.