Community knowledge with Beth Chitekwe-Biti and Diana Mitlin

And I wonder if you could just outline more from an academic perspective, how is community knowledge kind of understood? Does this differ between different social science disciplines? And overall, how seriously is it taken?

That's a really good question.

I think this kind of real, you might say, passion, vocation, but also very scholarly approach to community knowledge is longstanding.

So there's always been a group of academics who've recognised the importance of understanding knowledge.

what it means to live in informal settlement, what it means to work informally, and who's really wanted to work in a collaborative fashion.

So there's been a kind of minority interest, you might say, in this work and a deep appreciation of really people's knowledge wherever they're located.

There is, in recent years, become a broader understanding of its significance through, for example, work on fine-tuning approaches to participation, participatory research, participatory action research.

So this has been for a long time a specialism, but a specialism which has been growing and has a recognised significance.

Some of that, as indeed we have done, has been linked into decolonisation debates.

There is relatively little appreciation, I think, though, about what it means to do that at a scale that goes beyond the project.

So for us, what's been really important in working with SDI, Slum Dwellers International, is the ability to work with groups that have been networked and federated and who've been doing that work now for decades.

So we're not going back to the beginning and we're not constrained at the local level.

So we're working with people who've had a level of exposure, who can rapidly come up to speed with what we're trying to do.

We can understand what they're trying to do.

But also because these federations and networks exist at the city and the national scales, that learning is not, for example, confined to what are the problems with this political leader.

Rather, it's linked into what are the problems at the local level with leadership, but also what are the ways in which the city leaders, political leaders, city officials understand the challenges we face? What are the ways in which that's been captured at the national level in electoral choices? Our opportunity here is really to try and both learn from community knowledge for ACRC, but also try and help the discipline, the multiple disciplines, to take it forward in a wide variety of ways.

I would also say that for SDI, I think the experience or the interest around sort of like academics sort of like studying SDI over the years have also sharpened.

from the perspective of the leadership of the network and communities, what it is that they see is beneficial or is a two-way process and what they see is extractive and being able to actually be quite confident in saying, you are not taking our information out and then that's the end of it.

So if you are coming to us with a research project, how do we co-design what it is we want to learn? There is a term that Federation leaders use, how do you unlearn what you have learned as an academic or as a professional student? in order for you to really understand what it is, the value of our existing knowledge, but also how you can then ask us the right questions that creates that opportunity to then build our capabilities and capacities to actually analyze our own situation.

So there's that progression and also that growth that has happened over the years.