Justice as inclusion: a critical conversation about inclusion and belonging

Abstract

ABSTRACT Using Kovach’s conversational method and with our epistemological assumptions (knowing through embodiment, lived experience and scholarship) three leisure scholars used conversation and storytelling as method to explore current understandings of inclusion and belonging that perpetuate the violence of colonialism and the heteropatriarchy. For example, inclusion as it is often enacted is a token gesture of an organization but without making any of the structural changes necessary to ensure true belonging. Much like current rhetoric around decolonization, inclusion can become a metaphor that ultimately maintains the notion of settler futurity. Reframing inclusion to ‘justice as inclusion’ insists that practitioners and scholars, for example, de-program essentialist and capitalist notions of what we imagine Indigeneity to be, name systems of oppression and privilege, and centre Indigenous notions of relationality, including emphasizing the experience of connecting over what it means to be human, and establishing and re-establishing a connection to the non-human world.