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Accepted Paper:
Learning, unlearning and relearning: centering a decolonial approach in social justice research projects with communities in Africa
Tara Korti
(Change Alliance)
The author reflexively engages with the question of how a co-creation approach to research projects in Africa was able to shift power for epistemic justice. The work was guided by the question ‘how can research spaces be transformed so that communities have a greater shared epistemic agency?’
Paper long abstract:
This paper is an autoethnographical account by a female social science researcher based in India on her reflections on providing advisory support to social justice research projects in Africa striving to align with a decolonial praxis. Decolonizing research strategies are less about the struggle for method and more about the spaces that make decolonizing research possible (Miguel, 2013). This paper discusses the various ways in which a co-creation process was set up in various research projects on which the author provided advisory support so that these projects align with a decolonial praxis. The co-creation process was guided by the question ‘how can research spaces be transformed so that partners and communities in the global south have a greater shared epistemic agency in knowledge creation processes?’ Feminist researchers emphasize on the importance of ‘non-hierarchical interactions, understanding, and mutual learning” (Golfin, Rusansky and Zantvoort in Harcourt, 2022). This ethic guided the co-creation phase. The motive for co-creation was to have a project which is committed to equity in research partnerships and has a commitment to social justice. Each project applied an approach of co-creation, with an emphasis on co-designing the research, intentional participant selection, participatory data collection, diversifying research methods and outputs, and intentional reciprocity and reflexivity at all stages of research. The author reflexively engages with the question of whether and how the co-creation approach was able to shift power for epistemic justice. It is hoped that this learning will inspire and challenge thinking and practice of decolonization of knowledge production.