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Paper short abstract

This paper analyses the outcomes of the African Cities Research Consortium's efforts to overcome structural barriers to knowledge co-production. Through an operationalisation of power for expanded agency in urban knowledge production, it focuses on creating the conditions for epistemic justice.

Paper long abstract

Considerable efforts have been expended on exploring how researchers and institutes can forge more equitable approaches to knowledge production that transcend historically constructed hierarchies. While there is much current emphasis on decolonization, and a considerable legacy in participatory research and co-production, substantive gaps remain to overcome the cleavage between academic and community-based forms of knowledge. We argue that meaningful integration of community knowledge in academic research is both an ethical and methodological imperative. Drawing on the case of the African Cities Research Consortium, where research in seven African cities sought to understand drivers and barriers of more just urban contexts with a focus on informal settlements, we examine the possibilities and persistent challenges of epistemic justice work. Through a qualitative approach, working closely with organisations of informal settlement residents, this work’s contribution is threefold. We a) operationalise power for expanded agency in urban knowledge production; b) develop the concept of agentic space to better understand how to create the conditions to overcome structural barriers, and c) utilise our operationalisation of power and conceptualisation of agentic space to analyse the outcomes of the Consortium’s attempts at overcoming structural barriers of ontological, epistemological, and methodological nature. We seek to This work reveals that even well-intentioned efforts at epistemic inclusion can reproduce asymmetries, while also highlighting the importance of agentic space in creating the conditions for deeper epistemic transformations within the urban.