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This chapter works as an introduction to the overall theme of the volume, details the origin of the book, and outlines thematic sections and individual chapters. It also supplies a research overview and a summary of the emergence and rise of historical justice movements and processes around the world, detailing the ways that history education, broadly conceived, has been positioned as a significant site of historical injustice, as well as a mechanism for historical redress. Further, the chapter discusses this evolving relationship between historical justice and history education, elaborates on central concepts that appear in the book, and outlines challenges and possibilities this relationship generates for both fields.

This book explores how the expectations of historical justice movements and processes are understood within educational contexts, particularly history education. In recent years, movements for historical justice have gained global momentum and prominence as the focus on righting wrongs from the past has become a feature of contemporary politics. This imperative has manifested in globally diverse contexts including societies emerging from recent, violent conflict, but also established democracies which are increasingly compelled to address the legacies of colonialism, slavery, genocides, and war crimes, as well as other forms of protracted discord. This book examines historical justice from an educational perspective, exploring the myriad ways that education is understood as a site of historical injustice, as well as a mechanism for redress. The editors and contributors analyse the role of history education in processes of historical justice broadly, exploring educational sites, policies, media, and materials. This edited collection is a unique and important touchstone volume for scholars, policy-makers, practitioners, and teachers that can guide future research, policy, and practice in the fields of historical justice, human rights and history education.

In recent times, a conception of history education as facilitating truth, remembrance and critical thinking has been positioned as useful for transitional justice in divided societies, but this analysis has not been extended to settler states which are also characterized by prolonged division and state-administered violence. To explore this, the article draws on examples from Australia where scholars have been extending the framework of transitional justice in order to better address the structural nature of injustice in settler states. By investigating the uses of temporality and historicization in history education, it concludes that while disciplinary models might contribute to the popular theses of transitional justice by encouraging students to emulate the skills of the historian, these models would likely work to strengthen rather than challenge the legitimacy of the Australian settler state. Therefore, any attempts to align history education with reconciliation in Australia will require a rethinking of current disciplinary models.

In times of radical global precarity and unprecedented change, how might histories of education be researched and written and what might be their utility? This special issue of Encounters explores how we might do histories of education in times of disaster and disruption, and how methods, theories and sources in the history of education are being transformed or reinterpreted in light of our precarious planetary and emotional condition (e.g., Grosvenor and Priem, 2022; Priem, 2022; Novella, 2022; Sriprakash, 2022). The unfolding global pandemic, ecological crises, and reckoning with colonial violence have exposed the hubris and failure of anthropocentrism. Human vulnerability and entanglement with the material and natural world has been laid bare. Today, modernist developmental conceptions of change over time, which position the future as the potential fulfilment of that development, look decidedly less assured in a world where the future now heralds unprecedented, catastrophic change. The frameworks of nationhood that rationalised the idea of history as a process of continual movement towards the future with the transcendental human subject as its hero, are now threatened by entangled planetary forces of epidemic and ecological collapse. The myth of human exceptionalism has been sustained by modernist historiography’s emphases on human sovereignty, agency, and development. Histories of education specifically have justified anthropocentric worldviews. Education has been invoked as the place where ideals of human autonomy, freedom, progress, and rights might be developed, realised, learned. Histories of education as a modernising tool, histories of the stratifying effects of education systems, and of the development of human subjects and societies, have long been written without recourse to their ecological consequences. This special issue asks: what modes of historical understanding are needed to orient us in the maelstrom of our times? It confronts questions of plan