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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on experiences with a one-year Community-Led Research and Action (CLRA) project conducted with sex workers in Kenya, this paper reflects on the epistemological ideals of co-creation and community leadership, and to what extent CLRA is a form of decolonization work.

Paper long abstract:

Community-led research and action (CLRA) is a practical and innovative community-centered approach to research that can support marginalized communities to reclaim the lead in research. CLRA is a relatively new and experimental research method. It is considered a decolonizing research method as it has potential to shift power relations between the North and South, and between academic- and community researchers. Grounded in a one-year CLRA project conducted with sex workers in Kenya, the paper illustrates that the academic ideals of co-creation and community leadership underlying CLRA regularly conflicted with sex workers everyday lived realities and did not always match community priorities. Moreover, although CLRA strives to be community-driven, and requires academic researchers to take up a facilitating and accompanying role, power differences between academics and community researchers continued to exist, which obstructed the CLRA process from being fully ‘community-led’. This leads to questions such as 'What does community-led mean in practice?'; 'Who was really in the lead?'; 'How did different forms of leadership affect the process'; and 'What does this mean for the design and implementation of future CLRA projects with sex workers?' In trying to answer these questions, I will also reflect on the scientific knowledge CLRA methodology produces, which in my experience is data otherwise difficult to obtain, and how this complements my academic knowledge production, and to what extent this can be considered a form of decolonization work.