Short Abstract

This panel challenges academic knowledge's hegemony in urban research. It explores how community knowledge can be co-produced and mainstreamed through African prisms. We invite work on power, agency, and epistemic justice in research and action-research with African urban communities.

Long Abstract

Historically marginalised communities have long used their agency to challenge established knowledge systems that exclude them from knowledge production, while also leveraging and creating opportunities for both individual social mobility opportunities and more collective contributions. Viewed through African prisms, this agency demands steering away from hegemonic theories of participation, towards engagement with knowledge production as it is practised within African cities.

While the significance of indigenous knowledge to urban development has been increasingly recognised, knowledge rooted in urban communities has proved a more elusive concept, and its integration in research praxis a more complex undertaking. The framing of urban community knowledge - akin to indigenous knowledge but attuned to the fast-paced, multi-systemic urban context – resists straightforward framing. It has proved similarly difficult to mainstream the value of this knowledge for more collaborative, co-produced forms of research capable of challenging the hegemony of academic and technocratic knowledge in African urban contexts specifically.

This panel seeks to enhance understandings of the meaning and significance of urban community knowledge, and the pathways through which it can be integrated as a central element of knowledge production about African cities, on African terms. We welcome experiences from and research on the response of systematically marginalised community groups across urban Africa to opportunities for knowledge co-production within action-research projects. We encourage joint reflections between community-based researchers and city-based professionals and academics, and varied insights into issues of power and agency in research and action-research projects that seek to contribute to epistemic justice within the urban.

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