Paper short abstract:

In much research on poor urban settlements there is little attention to how the knowledge produced is useful to the inhabitants. The paper argues that knowledge production on informal settlements often leaves them effectively without history or without influence on the production of their history.

Paper long abstract:

In much academic and practitioner research on poor urban settlements there is little attention to how the knowledge produced is useful to the people inhabiting the places subject to research.

Informal locations are often characterized by an absence of comprehensive, formal knowledge accessible to the settlements' inhabitants, which compromises their possibilities for making rights claims, preventive intervention, and participation. Still, academic and practitioner research tends to reproduce a lacking focus on the history of informal urban places and its impact on current analyses and interventions.

Practitioners often produce knowledge for the purposes of acquiring donor funding, for the purposes of reporting back to donors and documenting impact. Such studies often depart from a baseline study or survey that describes the current situation of the given area, unintentionally ignoring the history of the place. Similarly, academic research often emphasizes social processes and institutional dynamics of informal settlements in the context of larger urban and political developments with only little attention to the detailed histories of the locality.

The paper argues that the existing knowledge production on informal urban settlements in many instances leaves them effectively without history or without influence on the production of their own history. The power of knowledge production becomes removed from the informal localities and remains with the academics and practitioners. These tendencies in knowledge production leave the informal urban settlements lacking history, thereby missing an opportunity to establishing a more comprehensive body of knowledge useful for inhabitants in their claims for rights.

Paper short abstract:

This article analyzes the colonial historical knowledge production and access to this knowledge in the urban space of the Congolese capital of Kinshasa. Memory practices during and after the colonial period dealing with the colonial past are comparatively analyzed.

Paper long abstract:

The colonial and post-colonial history of the Democratic Republic of Congo is associated with political oppression like in no other country in Africa: after 80 years of foreign domination by the colonial power Belgium and the subsequent dictatorship under Joseph Desire Mobutu, the afflicted country is characterized until today with press and art censorship, persecution of dissidents and a neo-colonial exploitation. During the dominating production of knowledge to memorize the "heroes" and "pioneers" of the colonization of the Congo Basin in the colonial period by the Belgian occupying power, a colonial amnesia can be observed also in relation to historical discourses in post-colonial Congo. Mobutu 'ignored' the colonial discourse in the course of his africanization campaign (authenticité) for reasons of identity. The incumbent President Joseph Kabila declared the reprocessing of the colonial past to be over in the year 2004.

This entirely undifferentiated dealing with the colonial past in the DR Congo opens questions which should be answered in this contribution with a recourse to post-colonial studies and memory theories: In which shape are those colonial memorial sites and memory practices in the former colony of Congo belge and in the DR Congo today? Which groups dominate the colonial and post-colonial discourses and the historiography? The diachronic comparison investigates the hypothesis that the production of knowledge during and after the colonial period was dictated and will be dictated by political elites (top-down). Alternative memory concepts from the civil society (bottom-up) are also brought into focus.

Paper short abstract:

Research done on extrajudicial killings by 'slum' residents in Mathare, Nairobi challenges both the focus and methodologies of mainstream human rights documentation, and critiques structural violence. It also highlights the violent urban logics that produce the city of Nairobi.

Paper long abstract:

Extrajudicial killings by the police have become normalized in the 'slums' of Nairobi, and, as a consequence, they are chronically under-reported and under-investigated. Since 2015 Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC) has been engaging in participatory documentation of these executions by the police. This grounded knowledge produced by 'slum' residents becomes not just a register of a human rights violation, but also recognition of their presence and legitimacy in the city even as they are denied the most basic services. Our paper argues that by making extrajudicial killings visible and asserting their right to life in Nairobi, these residents critique the non-grassroots focus of larger civil society organizations, the overly bureaucratic methodology central to human rights documentation, and, more structurally, the grave penalization of poverty in Kenya.Through these actions they highlight the broader urban logics that (violently) produce the city.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation reflects on the dilemmas of co-producing knowledge with practitioner around human rights interventions in poor urban neighbourhoods

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation, I will reflect on the dilemmas of co-producing knowledge with practitioner around human rights interventions in poor urban neighbourhoods in Liberia and South Africa (along with Denmark and the Philippines). Conceptually, the paper explores what we might call epistemic communities and how they define what kind of knowledge count as knowledge and what data is convincing. Centrally in this regard is that knowledge must be valid, reliable and useful even if those three criteria often are contradictory.