There have been some significant learnings over the past while that have deepened my understanding of what social justice truly means.

It’s a term I use often, in conversation, in writing, in my work, yet I’ve always felt a quiet confused when asked to define it clearly. When debating with friends or colleagues, I could gesture toward what social justice does, but articulating what it is felt slippery. Over time, I’ve noticed how easily the term becomes a catch-all for equity-related conversations, even though I’ve come to understand that social justice and equity are not interchangeable. They overlap, but they are not the same.

Reading Understanding Education for Social Justice helped clarify that distinction for me. Each school of thought presented throughout this reading reflected something I instinctively speak to when I invoke social justice, but seeing those ideas named and situated gave me language I didn’t yet have.

One moment in particular stood out.

In their article, Hytten and Bettez quote Rizvi (1998):

“The immediate difficulty one confronts when examining the idea of social justice is the fact that it does not have a single essential meaning, it is embedded within discourses that are historically constituted and that are sites of conflicting and divergent political endeavours.”

Reading that line brought an unexpected sense of relief. I actually paused and reread it. For a long time, I had assumed my inability to land on a single, tidy definition meant I was missing something — that I hadn’t read enough, thought deeply enough, or articulated carefully enough. Instead, this framing affirmed that the ambiguity is not a failure of understanding, but a feature of the concept itself.

Social justice is not fixed. It is shaped through discourse, context, and lived realities. Meaning is created relationally and in response to the moment, the people involved, and the histories at play.

That realization connected powerfully with Eve Tuck’s work, particularly her distinction between damage-centered and desire-based approaches to research. This was an undeniable ah-ha moment for me.

The more I read, the more I begin to recognize how much of what I’ve encountered about marginalized communities has been framed through damage, what has been done to people, what they lack, what they have endured. While this work is often well-intentioned and necessary, it can unintentionally reduce entire communities to harm narratives. Tuck’s call for desire-based research, research that centers wisdom, hope, complexity, and futurity, felt like an invitation to reimagine how knowledge is produced and shared.

With this lens, I began reflecting on books that have shaped my own thinking. White Tears, Brown Scars (one of my favourites), White Fragility, and my most recent read, Biting the Hand by Julia Lee, are all deeply rooted in naming harm and exposing systems of power. I don’t see that as a flaw, but I do see now that I want to return to these texts with a more nuanced awareness. I want to ask new questions as I reread them: What wisdom is present alongside the critique? What possibilities are being imagined, even quietly?

This shift doesn’t mean turning away from injustice or refusing to name harm. Instead, it feels like a movement toward balance , toward an understanding of social justice that holds truth and possibility, critique and care.

For me, this is what learning is beginning to look like now: not arriving at definitive answers, but allowing my frameworks to soften, expand, and evolve. Social justice, I’m learning, is less about mastering a definition and more about staying in relationship with complexity.

And perhaps that, too, is part of the work.