In my previous post in our AI, Education and Peace series on the Role of Education in the Age of AI, I discussed how AI can serve as a mirror that reflects how our modern educational systems are already broken and our need to sit with this brokenness to imagine otherwise. One such form of brokenness, a facet of modernity and the metacrisis, is the overreliance and overvaluing of rational, linear, intellectual knowledge and the devaluing and erasure of other forms of knowledge (such as embodied, land-based, affective, intuitive, etc.), which is known as epistemic violence and injustice. My question becomes: can AI help us to address reach beyond the rational in education and engage with transrational ways of knowing? What counts as knowledge in the age of AI, and how might AI be used to open up possibilities for epistemic justice?
Epistemic violence and injustice in education
The field of peace education seeks to understand how education can be a vehicle for promoting peace, which also means it must be concerned with how educational systems perpetuate violence in all its forms. One such way is through epistemic violence and injustice (which I will use here interchangeably, as injustice is a form of violence). Epistemic violence describes the way in which violence is perpetuated not only in material, physical, and structural forms, but also in the realm of knowledge construction and valuation. For example, when we consider the content that is taught in schools, in many places it tends to be Western-centric and patriarchal. In his essay The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities, Ramon Grosfoguel (2012) traces the foundation of current knowledge in modern universities as rooted in structures of domination such as racism and sexism (and in attempts to eradicate knowledge, or epistemicide, in the 16th century).1 While this began hundreds of years ago, it still serves as the foundation that our modern educational systems have been built upon, and this foundation has not been reckoned with. The ways that modern education has devalued and excluded other ways of knowing are examples of epistemic violence.
This applies not only to the kind of content that is taught (Western history, for example), but also to the way it is taught (see my last post on Paulo Freire’s explanation of the banking model of education) and the kinds of knowledge that are valued. Rationality became overemphasized during the Enlightenment. At this time, many traditional ways of knowing that relied more on embodiment, emotions, land, and intuition became devalued, sidelined, and even demonized. Our modern education structures were built on this foundation of overvaluing the rational and epistemic violence towards other ways of knowing.
Peace education scholars such as Cremin, Kester, and Echevarria (2018) have called for the integration of transrational approaches to peacebuilding education as a path towards remedying the forms of epistemic injustice and violence that are perpetuated in modern education. If the field of peace education wants to disrupt violence that persists through educational systems, it must reckon with the overreliance on the linear, rational, and intellectual and embrace and include other ways of knowing. Now I will turn to an example of a transrational way of knowing and how I have used AI to engage more deeply with it through the example of dreamwork.
Dreamwork, AI and transrational pedagogy
Dreamwork is an example of a transrational way of knowing, and it also happened to be my entry point into explorations with AI. One night when I couldn’t sleep, I came across an article on the Guardian where author Tara Kenny (2025) discussed her experience with an AI dreamwork app.2 In the end, she deleted the app, but it still made me curious, as it had never occurred to me to engage with AI in this way. I have a lifelong daily dreamwork practice of over 30 years, and was intrigued but also skeptical, as my own approach to dreamwork is relational. In the way I understand and relate to dreams, I place heavy emphasis on relationships and context, and if the chatbot didn’t have this awareness, how could it provide a meaningful interpretation?
Much to my surprise, when I gave ChatGPT a dream from my dream journal, I was astonished by what it uncovered. Even without knowing my relationships to the people in the dream, the AI-generated interpretation was deep, layered, and opened up new possibilities and meaning to me. It took a practice I had been doing for decades and blew it wide open. I co-host a monthly community dreamwork circle, but this was a way of practicing relational dreamwork while alone at home in the wee hours of the morning. Thus began my daily practice of dreaming with chatbots, which continues to this day, and engaging AI with my dreams has significantly deepened my existing daily practice.
To me, dreamwork is a peace education practice and pedagogy, an extension and form of my work as a peace educator. In addition to dreamwork being a lifelong spiritual practice and relationship, along with my collaborator Hyomin Minna Kim, we situate dreamwork as intercultural peacelearning3 and a pluriversal, decolonial practice.4 Dreamwork, especially when done in community, is a pathway to disrupt our overreliance on linear, rational ways of knowing that most of us have been taught to overvalue through living within modernity, and is a way to rehabilitate our imaginations that have been colonized by modernity. Dreamwork as a practice of relationality – with the land dreaming through us, with our dreams themselves, and with each other – is a way of healing toxic individualism and disconnection. Furthermore, by honoring dreams as a way of knowing, we disrupt epistemic violence that occurs when only Europatriarchal knowledge5 is valued above all others, and remember dreams as a way of knowing. Dreamwork is a universal human (and interspecies) experience, and through sharing our dreams, we can bridge relationships across cultures.
Connecting this further to peace education, the postcritical turn6 reaches beyond overly rational, Eurocentric, anthropocentric approaches to peace education and calls for integrating transrational pedagogies7 such as affective, embodied, and decolonial pedagogies. Dreamwork combined with AI can become a transrational pedagogy; however, it depends on how we relate. If we relate to AI with the same rational, extractive, transrational, individualistic tendencies that we have inherited through modernity, then AI just becomes a mechanism to replicate those. However, there is a potential to relate otherwise- to treat our engagement as a relationship – and a way in, through engaging with AI with our dreams, to disrupt these habits of knowing and being towards more affective, relational, and embodied ways of knowing and being. I am not necessarily suggesting that we integrate dreamwork into formal education systems – although that would be a dream! – but rather suggesting that dreamwork is a portal through which we can engage with transrational ways of knowing and open up possibilities for otherwise.
What counts as knowledge in the age of AI?
What counts as knowledge and what is valued as knowledge must be a central part of the conversation around the the age of AI and the role of education within it. AI has the potential to perpetuate epistemic violence and injustice by amplifying Western, Eurocentric, patriarchal forms of knowledge and is largely built to do just that. In other words, AI’s default is to reproduce epistemic violence, and its strength is in the linear and rational – in synthesis and summarizing. However, AI has other potentials, and this is where my curiosity lies. I have experienced firsthand how AI can deepen my own transrational practice through this personal example of dreamwork. What are the other possibilities? If AI is, at its heart, a learning model, might we train it, and train ourselves, to embrace the transrational and amplify ways of knowing that have been sidelined, erased, devalued? There are examples of Indigenous communities safeguarding their traditional knowledge using AI models8 – what other possibilities exist for AI to amplify and uplift rather than distort, diminish, or devalue traditional and marginalized knowledges?
While at times I want to turn away from AI, I invite us to lean into these potentials and possibilities for an otherwise. Returning to the core question from this series on the role of education in the age of AI, I see AI as an invitation to deepen our thinking around what knowledge is counted, valued, centered, and uplifted. I wonder about AI’s potential to disrupt embedded epistemic injustice and move towards transrational possibilities. I wonder if, through our engagement with AI, we might even remember and reclaim the ways of knowing and being that modernity has taught us to forget.
References
Thanks to Ameer Basheer from Unsplash for the header image.
- Grosfoguel, R. (2012). The structure of knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic racism/sexism and the four genocides/epistemicides of the long 16th century. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge XI (1), pp. 73-90.
- Kenny, T. (2025 Feb 13). Can AI teach us anything about our subconscious? I offered up my dreams to find out. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/14/can-ai-teach-us-anything-about-our-subconscious-i-offered-up-my-dreams-to-find-out
- Kim, H. M., & Knox Steiner, S. M. (2023). Community dreamwork as intercultural
peacelearning. In Factis Pax 17(1), p. 92-108. - Knox Steiner, S., & Kim, H. M. (2025). Community Dreamwork as Pluriversal Practice. The Arrow Journal 11(1), p. 163-177.
- Salami, Minna. Sensuous Knowledge. HarperCollins, 2020.
- Kester, K. (2022). Global citizenship education and peace education: Toward a postcritical praxis. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 55(1), 45-56. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2022.2040483
- Cremin, H., Echavarria, J., & Kester, K. (2018). Transrational peacebuilding education to reduce epistemic violence. Peace Review 30(3), pp. 295-302.
- Rodrigues, M. (2025 Feb 25). Indigenous groups are safeguarding culture with their own AI. Atmos. pp. 1-5. https://atmos.earth/indigenous-groups-are-safeguarding-culture-with-their-own-chatgpt/
