Learning from the Margins: Reclaiming Knowledge Justice in the Age of AI and Climate Crisis
In this blogpost which is part of NORRAG’s #TheSouthAlsoKnows blog series, David Sathuluri illustrates what is lost–in the Global North as well as South–when demands for epistemic justice are given only nominal support, drawing examples from AI and climate justice.
Global education policy in the current world today faces a paradox. The louder global institutions speak of inclusion and innovation, the more clearly one sees whose voices remain unheard. From climate education to the digitalisation of learning, policy frameworks are written in the language of universality but shaped by particular, often Northern, ways of knowing.
I belong to a generation of scholars from the Global South who move across academic, activist, and transnational spaces. Even as technology and data reshape how we talk about education, the same power asymmetries persist. We trade in new metaphors like AI for inclusion, data for development, digital learning for all—but the structures deciding what knowledge matters, and who defines progress, remain curiously unchanged.
The problem is not data – it’s epistemology
When global discussions about AI in education emphasise scaling up, they often miss the deeper question: what kind of knowledge is being scaled? Algorithms designed far from the communities they affect are trained on data drawn from classrooms, children, and lives elsewhere, often in the South. These systems translate local complexity into global generalisations and, in doing so, reproduce epistemic violence–the silencing of ways of knowing that refuse easy categorisation.
This is a call for a different starting point. One that treats education as a space of relational learning, not just algorithmic optimisation. Work on epistemic justice in education shows that the deeper issue is whose knowledge is recognised as credible in the first place. Building AI for education without confronting these hierarchies risks encoding historical inequalities into code and calling them best practice.
Climate, crisis, and the politics of learning
In climate governance, similar patterns unfold usually. Communities in the Global South are framed as vulnerable recipients of knowledge, not as producers of theory. Yet these are the communities that carry generations of ecological wisdom about adaptation, resilience, and collective care. Youth climate movements from the South have already shown how local struggles can reframe global debates on responsibility and justice, as illustrated in accounts such as Stories from the Youth Climate Movement in the Global South.
When this knowledge appears in international education reports only as so-called local case studies, something essential is lost: the recognition that knowledge itself can be a form of resistance. Climate education cannot be reduced to technical literacy about carbon or resilience indicators. It has to learn from the ethics of coexistence expressed in Indigenous, anti-caste/race, and other subaltern traditions, where relationships with land, water, and community are understood as political and spiritual, not just economic in this capitalistic society.
Listening as an act of justice
Reclaiming knowledge justice means reimagining education as a collective right, not only the right to learn, but the right to participate in defining what counts as knowledge. This shifts our understanding of education from access to agency. Platforms through, for example, AI tutors, dashboards, remote learning portals, should serve people and communities, not just the metrics of global monitoring frameworks. Critical reflections on the governance of educational dashboards and data visualisation is important.
Here, listening becomes an act of justice rather than a gesture of inclusion. Across the South, educators are already generating vibrant experiments. Community-led climate curricula that mix storytelling and science, data literacy initiatives grounded in care, and hybrid learning spaces that connect local epistemologies with digital pedagogy. Work in NORRAG’s own resource library on Policy Transfer and International Cooperation: Lessons from the South points to these possibilities. These are signs of epistemic resurgence that education is being re-rooted in place and justice rather than scale and efficiency.
Beyond critique: towards co-creation
Global education governance spaces like United Nations agencies, multilateral banks, philanthropic partnerships—continue to define what counts as credible evidence or effective learning. Their recent frameworks on AI competencies and digital skills, such as UNESCO’s evolving work on AI in education , show both the urgency and the risks of setting global standards from above. Their legitimacy now depends on whether they can move from consultation to co-creation with those they claim to serve.
Initiatives such as NORRAG’s series on AI and the digitalisation of education and its publications on inequalities and digitalisation signal an appetite for more critical and situated perspectives. This shift requires relational accountability. Technology built for education should be accountable to the learners and communities it affects, and climate curricula should be answerable to those whose lands and livelihoods are at stake.
Learning from the margins
The margin is often spoken of as a place of lack. But as bell hooks reminds us, the margin can also be a space of radical openness and possibility, where resistance and alternative ways of living and learning are continuously being created. The South—whether geographic, epistemic, or symbolic, is not a zone of absence. It is where new grammars of justice are being forged.
These grammars push us to speak differently about education. Less as a pipeline for human capital, more as a process of collective becoming.
I write this not as a distant observer, but as someone shaped by the histories of caste, climate injustice, and data extraction that structure many of the spaces I move through. To work on AI, climate, and education from the South is to constantly navigate these tensions, and to insist that they are not side notes but central to the story.
If global education is serious about justice, it must be willing to learn from the margins, not merely about them. That may be the most urgent lesson of this moment: that the future of education will be decided not only in global forums and dashboards, but in the everyday struggles of those who refuse to be reduced to data points.
About the author
David Sathuluri is a research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, working at the intersection of AI governance, climate justice, policy and decolonial knowledge. His work focuses on how data, climate, caste/race and policies shape possibilities for justice in the Global South.
Contact: david.sathuluri@columbia.edu