This presentation begins by emphasising that Environmental Justice (EJ) in education begins with epistemic justice. Most Environmental Education (EE) in Europe is predominantly focused on scientific knowledge transmission about climate change and conservation. It perpetuates ideas of human exceptionalism by separating human activity from ‘nature’ by teaching about the environment rather than acknowledging how we live within it (Dunlop & Rushton, 2022b), resulting in inadequate pedagogic practices to address the challenges of the current ecological crisis (Taylor et al., 2020). Thus, we highlight the need for diversity in educational and research methods, focusing on international and intersectional views of EJ centred on challenging dominant narratives, power structures, and knowledge systems that perpetuate environmental injustices across the world, and within education (Zembylas, 2018). This presentation links issues of environmental (in)justice to the dominating epistemologies of the Global North, which are extensions of ongoing colonial practices that justify the exploitation of both people and nature and exclude different knowledge systems (Silva, 2014). We approach this provocation by first summarising the preliminary findings from ongoing literature review work, informed by critical hermeneutic (Habermas, 1971) and decolonial frameworks (Collins, 2019; Maldonado-Torres, 2007). We will identify both the broad assumptions within contemporary EE practices in the Global North and nuances or gaps that are often overlooked in standard literature reviews. Next, we discuss the implications of these findings on education for environmental justice, and highlight identified openings for future transformative action in EE. We then focus on one such opening for approaching epistemic justice in education, grounded in decolonial and feminist new-materialist philosophies of entanglement and relationality. Understanding ourselves as entangled entities, deconstructing human exceptionalism, and resisting anthropocentric philosophies which implicitly justify the exploitation and destruction of multi-species ecologies, could help us reimagine education within a changing world (Haraway, 2016). We demonstrate an example of pedagogy for epistemic justice that explores participatory creative activities using arts-based methods. This example proposes that creating stories with/in our local environments can intertwine physical landscapes with remembered and imagined ones to foster an understanding of entanglement. We will outline experiences of participating in mixed-media story-making as a way to understand ourselves as ‘entangled’ within the world in its affective state of becoming - knowing that our actions and futures are constantly engaged in relation with all else. This presentation will therefore contribute a proposal for beyond-anthropocentric pedagogies to enact the urgent onto-epistemological shift towards learning to live sustainability.

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