5 - Disrupting the Field? Creating Community-centred Spaces for Epistemic Justice with Rwandese Diaspora Youth

Summary

There is an urgent need to pluralize knowledge inquiry and production in the research about Rwanda. Conceptualized as a form of epistemicide (or, killing of knowledge), the systemic biases and highly partisan nature of Western epistemologies continues to deny the diverse ways that Rwandans make sense of their lives (Rutazibwa, 2014). Undoing epistemic injustice requires enabling individuals whose knowledge has been historically invalidated to assert their rights to contribute to, and derive benefits from, the shared knowledge pool (de Sousa Santos, 2015). In the Rwandan context, alongside including more Rwandan academic voices, epistemic justice requires reimagining research approaches, methodologies and practices so as to include and value Rwandan's lived experiences, expertise and insights as legitimate sources of knowledge (Ndahinda et al, 2022). Making such transformations to research practice is more important than ever, in the context of wider calls to dismantle epistemic injustice in Africa- centred research more widely (Ogone, 2017) and the reformulations of scholarly activity in the service of decoloniality (Esson et al, 2017; Barker and Pickerill, 2020; for example, Daley and Murrey, 2022).

This chapter reflects on our efforts to create community- centred spaces for collaborative research, as a tool for including Rwanda's multiple epistemic contributors as part of a critical and pluralized academic landscape. Destabilizing notions of ‘the field’ in academic research (Radcliffe, 2022), community- centric research using methods that are participatory and collaborative can facilitate the types of dialogue necessary for the urgent work of undoing academic knowledge hierarchies (Zavala, 2013; Barker and Pickerill, 2020). However, inherently intersubjective (Thambinathan and Kinsella, 2021), the researcher identities, positions, time pressures and funding deadlines that are brought to such spaces generate the power dynamics and hierarchies suffusing the practice of community- centred research. Focusing on our navigations of the competing practicalities and ethics around creating spaces for epistemic inclusion, in this chapter we surface the compromises that play out. We suggest that the potential of community- centred research for working towards epistemic justice can remain unfulfilled because of the relational nature of research spaces, where the inclusion and valuing of diverse knowledge contributions become subsumed to the pressures of academic expectations and project deadlines.