Transforming Knowledge and research for Just and Sustainable Futures: Towards a new Social Imaginary for Higher Education

The paper considers why it is important to transform knowledge and research for just and sustainable futures and discusses the role of higher education in these transformation processes. The paper sets out how knowledge, research, and knowledge systems can be understood and critiques knowledge hierarchies that have emerged in the context of colonialism, leading to the marginalization of the knowledge systems and languages of the colonized. It is argued that there is a need to create new ecologies of knowledge that value and develop synergies between ‘all of the archives of the world’ and that can revitalize and expand the knowledge commons and contribute to more just and sustainable futures. Higher education has a pivotal role to play in the creation of new ecologies of knowledge and a revitalized knowledge commons through promoting socially and ethically engaged research, the decolonization and reorientation of university curricula and pedagogy to foster sustainable futures, and the democratization of universities to better represent historically marginalized groups. Underpinning this role must be a shift from a Western modernist social imaginary of higher education to one based on a new planetary consciousness.