‘Taking knowledge on a journey’: Creating conditions for epistemic justice

Abstract

When stakeholders in participatory action research [PAR] projects live in poverty, practices sometimes fail to recognize and draw on their capacity for critical reflection. This constitutes epistemic (knowledge-based) injustice. It is problematic for approaches rooted in covenantal ethics and beliefs that PAR should empower participants as ‘actors of knowledge.’ This paper reflects on a research project carried out by All Together in Dignity Fourth World [ATD]. To ensure co-production of knowledge, ATD made unconventional decisions about methodology, allocating resources, and interacting with academics. In many ways, these choices created conditions for epistemic justice. However ATD faced important challenges around North-South power dynamics, engagement with academia, and the comprehensibility of deeply personal conclusions reached by project participants. More positively, a dogged effort to invent conditions for epistemic justice transformed ATD’s governance, the ways some institutions address poverty, and the way participants addressed inter-generational traumas.