How, as researchers, do we recognise and address the implicit biases when engaging across multiple knowledge ecologies. In this paper, we consider the way historical and epistemic justice and injustice plays into our knowledge making when dealing with a specific issue: forest biosecurity. Specifically, we focus on the Aotearoa New Zealand context where knowledge making has been, and still is, dominated by a western paradigm, but where there is increasing discussion on mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) as a valid and valuable form of knowing. Drawing on the experiences of a transdisciplinary research programme that sought to examine the human dimensions of biosecurity aspects of the plant pathogens kauri dieback and myrtle rust, we approach our original question using the theoretical concept of epistemic injustice and draw on our experiences as a way to highlight instances and forms of epistemic injustice in the science-society relationship. We argue that the division of epistemic labour (into fields, disciplines, etc), and the ranking and assigning of relative epistemic credibility based on this division is a fundamental part of the western knowledge ecology which creates the necessary conditions for specific and potent forms of epistemic injustice. We contrast this by discussing how other knowledge ecologies, specifically mātauranga Māori, comfortably engages with a variety of knowledge and knowers and discuss the possibilities other knowledge ecologies offer.

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.

Critical Forest Studies is a rapidly growing field that takes multispecies relationships with/in forests as the starting point for critical and creative inquiry. Shaped by the contested political ecologies that emerge where different forest cosmologies, languages, histories, and ecologies meet, the field builds on related developments in the environmental humanities which explore multispecies relations through artistic, historical, philosophical, poetic, literary, and performative approaches. As the first special issue dedicated to Critical Forest Studies, this collection brings the field into direct dialogue with the theories, methodologies, and practices of environmental education. Environmental education has a rich and generative history of relational engagement with forests — from place-based and outdoor learning traditions to more-than-human and posthumanist approaches — and this collection builds on and extends that history. Indigenous and place-based perspectives are foregrounded throughout, bringing together diverse interdisciplinary understandings across four key areas: forest sentience, forest imaginaries, forest regeneration, and forest pedagogies. The collection bridges conceptual, artistic, empirical, methodological, and educational practices across these four themes, opening new possibilities for how environmental education might think, feel, and act with forests in times of ecological urgency.

Toi Taiao Whakatairanga (TTW) is a three-year transdisciplinary artistic research project based in Aotearoa, New Zealand. TTW explores the ways arts practices can contribute to public awareness of two plant pathogens threatening native tree species – kauri dieback and myrtle rust. The project commissioned and curated Māori artists to create artworks through engaging with iwi (tribes), hapū (sub-tribes), communities, mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) and Western science. In this chapter, we discuss two art projects from Te Tai Rāwhiti, on the East Coast of New Zealand’s North Island. TTW is not explicitly a development project, but, we argue, both artworks reveal the ways colonial economic and environmental development initiatives have contributed to species extinction and ecosystem degradation, threatening the continuity of Māori socio-environmental knowledge, health and spiritual and economic well-being. Both works also raise questions about sovereignty and self-determination, and we draw on Māori scholarship to interrogate the extent to which, through the East Coast projects, TTW developed a methodology for curating and researching creative practice that supports the mana motuhake (self-determination and a sense of mana through authority) of Māori iwi and hapū. <!----> <!----> <!----> <!---->

This article explores what it can mean to navigate notions of productive idiocy with aspects of mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge), through some recent art-as-activism practices of the author, Aotearoa/New Zealand artist Mark Harvey. The works explicated include Waitākere Drag and Auau in the Te Wao Nui ā Tiriwa forest ranges and Productive Promises, which was part of TEZA (Trans Economic Zone of Aotearoa) in Ōtautahi/Christchurch. Avital Ronell’s Nietzschean-influenced perspectives on idiocy are drawn from in relation to Western and Māori perspectives, along with Roger Sansi’s work on idiocy as dissent. From this aggregation of epistemologies, it is proposed that idiocy can be productive through art as activism and that this can align with Indigenous Māori perspectives on playing the fool as a form of resistance and refusal. Examples of Māori concepts engaged with here include perspectives on relationship building, human relationships with forests and the environment, and sovereignty under Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi). These art-activism projects promised micro-attempts at making positive changes for the communities in which they were situated through performatively generated actions from a Māori perspective within the shroud of ongoing colonization and capitalism.

Native forests in Aotearoa/New Zealand are at significant risk from the plant diseases myrtle rust and kauri dieback. Mobilising for Action (MFA) was a four-year transdisciplinary research project exploring the social dimensions of these pathogens and forest health through social science, humanities, creative arts and mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge), with experts, artists, iwi/hapū (tribes/sub-tribes) and communities, empowering and supporting them in their efforts to address forest disease and promote forest health. A waka houora (double-hulled canoe) framework guided MFA to enable Western knowledge systems to operate alongside mātaurangā Māori, allowing for collaboration, cross-cultural learning and Indigenous empowerment through artistic research and related approaches. We propose that through various creative arts approaches, MFA built relationships and partnerships between Māori and other cultures, people and forests and disciplines, in addition to developing novel research methods in forest health through storytelling and narratives, offering new possibilities in critical forest studies and care.