Resourcing Radical Knowledge Infrastructures
About the Paper
-
Knowledge Infrastructures are concerned with the organisational and pedagogical means in allowing for the production and sharing of knowledge.
To achieve this we see a four part solution to be resourced:
To relinquish decision making power within philanthropy over strategy and practise by identifying infrastructure organisations and resourcing them to deliver for the community.
To effectively sustain, archive and make accessible radical knowledges.
For a healthy knowledge ecosystem there needs to be dedicated gathering spaces free from capitalist financial constraints. Funders and ecosystem enablers need to recognise their economies of scale and agency in this area.
Centering marginalised communities in a restorative justice process ensures that healing is focused on those who are carrying the greatest burdens of surviving under racial capitalism.
-
For funders and impact organisations to successfully achieve their missions they need to recognise the change happens through movements.
Knowledge production sits at the hearts of a social movements.
The challenge presented is to understand how to support these social movements who themselves create the infrastructure that others build from. This involves understanding the actors within the knowledge infrastructure and how they interact with each other.
We are all building on what came before us.
However, for future people, radicals, organisers, and activists to continue the journey they need to be building on a flourishing knowledge ecosystem that’s alive and well supported today.
Our propositional paper declares an outline in the need for resourcing radical knowledge infrastructure. For clarity we’ll break down this terminology and explain how they work together.
Resourcing: a strategy for financing or finding ways to offer support in alignment with movement organisers and communities;
Radical: freedom in the journey and destination unbound by exogenous limitations;
Knowledge: data, insights, wisdoms, feelings, how we interpret our surroundings;
Infrastructure: a system that allows for people, organisations, and movements to move through space in their own time.
Resourcing radical knowledge infrastructure means to create the financial, cultural, and equitable pathways for people, groups and movements to create, surface, resurface, and amplify knowledges without restriction, in order to build community power..
Why is this necessary? Because our present and future challenges cannot be met by working within the dominant and incumbent systems.
Knowledge Infrastructures are concerned with the organisational and pedagogical means in allowing for the production and sharing of knowledge. The pursuit of knowledge is liberatory. It provides pathways to understanding, relating, and connecting. Knowledge is also a pathway to liberation, freedom and justice.
“So they got to work. The first step was to develop epistemic authority. To achieve this, they built a new room, one that put Flint residents and activists in active collaboration with scientists who had the laboratories to run the relevant tests and prove MDEQ’s report was fraudulent. Flint residents' outcry about the poisonings helped recruit scientists to their cause. The new roommates ran a citizen science campaign, further rating the alarm about the water quality and distributing sample kits to neighbors (sic) so that they could submit their water for testing. The alliance of residents and scientists won. And the poisoning of the children of Flint emerged as a national scandal. ”
- Olúfémi O Táíwò, Elite Capture (2022)
Our Paper
We put together the following propositional paper outlining the need, value, and scope for resourcing radical knowledge infrastructures. You can download a copy of the report at the bottom or use the image links below to read certain sections.
01
KNOWLEDGE AS A PATHWAY TO JUSTICE
In this chapter we explore the contemporary dynamics in which knowledge is created in Britain, looking into its epistemological roots and knowledge supremacy, as well as what it means to resource, sustain, and resurface non-mainstream knowledges.
We also held space with Impact on Urban Health portforlio manager Lilian Latinwo-Olajide as she is someone with a brilliant mind on the funding ecosystem and the role funders have in being active stewards for social change.
02
A HISTORICAL REVIEW OF LIBERATORY KNOWLEDGE PRACTICES
In this chapter we’re going to explore a short history of the social movements that have centred knowledge production at the core of their activities. It is to give weight to the community self determination, collective liberation and base building that has taken place from which we have all benefited.
We also held space with Kavian Kulasabanathan, an Eela-Tamil physician focused on state violence as a determinant of poor health to delve deep into his knowledge about the development of social movements and organising over a historical period of time.
03
THE IMPORTANCE OF ORGANISING IN PLACE, IN COMMUNION, TOGETHER.
In this chapter we’re going to focus on the historical precedence that organising in physical space has had on the knowledge production ecosystem, and the modern challenges proposed today.
We held space with co-founder and director of CIVIC SQUARE, Immy Kaur, to delve deep into her experience, role, and vision in what it means to be in ‘space’ together. We’ve gone back in time to speak with Immy about the setting up of Impact Hub Birmingham and how that led to the founding of CIVIC SQUARE.
04
A PRAXIS FOR HEALTH JUSTICE
In this chapter we’re going to cover how existing knowledge infrastructures exacerbate health inequities and explore a justice-led pathway to developing multiple, symbiotic, and culturally competent knowledge infrastructures.
We held space with Tribal Law scholar and attorney Grace Carson on the topic of restorative justice, a practice of the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island, its tensions with cultural appropriations.
DOWNLOAD FULL REPORT
Our Recommendations
-
A thriving and effective movement is predicated on the ongoing and consistent production, dissemination and integration of knowledges. In this paper we have shown how, at its core, replicating the knowledge pathways of the White Supremacist, Capitalist Imperialist Patriarchy has kept us in a cycle of NGO-isation and charitable- and academic- industrial complex dynamics. As Lilian expresses with deep integrity, no donor, charitable institutions or philanthropic foundations can support social movement organisations if they stand in the way. The only effective solution is to relinquish decision making power over strategy and practise by identifying infrastructure organisations and resourcing them to deliver for the community.
-
The legacy of radical knowledge in bringing about transformative change is expansive and the architecture for today’s movements. We ask for the recognition of [social] movements alongside the transactional/action-based projects in the funding landscape. For this success we need to embrace the Elders who have carried through oral histories, cultures and artistry of our ancestors into our movements. However, intergenerational organising is increasingly challenging. There is a whole strategy of work to effectively sustain, archive and make accessible where radical knowledges that have historically relied on proximity of community to transcend generations. The charitable obsession with “the new” also holds back the wisdoms that already exist, or that we risk losing (and have already lost) because their methods and cultures have not been respected and recorded. Resourcing radical knowledge infrastructures also focuses us on creating the capacities to build organising spaces that are multilingual, accessible and dynamic.
-
We cannot ignore the role of organising, co-learning, and being in physical space together. For a healthy knowledge ecosystem there needs to be dedicated gathering spaces free from capitalist financial constraints. Funders and ecosystem enablers need to recognise their economies of scale and agency in this area. For example, being front-and-centre in Section 106 Agreements between Local Authorities and real estate developers to benefit from the “socially” oriented amenities and infrastructure being negotiated during a planning process. In many cases these ground floor spaces below residential homes can be charged at a peppercorn rent (as low as £.01p per year) if the developer doesn’t do the fit out. Social and cultural institutions who are registered charities have the capacity to become the leaseholders of vast amounts of physical space in local community areas at near-zero cost per year (low rents and charitable business rates exemption) but have not taken up this mantle. Institutional charities and cultural organisations are far more able than local and independent charities/businesses to raise the finance for fitting out spaces; being able to manage debt for longer periods of time. Powerful organisations can do more than give out grants or run programmes, they can change the physical landscape, change how chance happens, change how people organise in place.
-
Enabling epistemic justice is a strategy for restorative justice. Traditional methodologies for addressing conflict have been transformed to ones that are punitive, dominating and paternalistic. Radical knowledge infrastructures will also include the resourcing of ancestral approaches to conflict - including the roles of frontline responders, healers, mediators and guides. Without resourcing a justice-based approach to our work we risk replicating the internalised and intergenerational traumas of living under racial capitalism. A justice-based approach to our work recognises that communities lack the material conditions (secure income, secure home, secure climate, affordable and healthy foods) to be able to step into a process with one another, and so need to look at the inequities of access and ways in which privilege influences who is able to heal from harm. Centring marginalised communities in a restorative justice process ensures that healing is focused on those who are carrying the greatest burdens of surviving under racial capitalism.
Have you had a health justice project go unfunded because it was too knowledge based?
We want to surface the depth and diversity of liberatory radical knowledge that goes unseen and unsupported, but is so essential for our movement ecosystem.
We have put together a propositional paper that we feel shows how an infrastructure can be created to support this depth of knowledge surfacing. The paper is split into four sections:
The premise of knowledge as a pathway to justice
A short history or organisations who have centred knowledge at the core of their liberatory movements
The need and importance of organising in physical spaces
A praxis for health justice
You're invited to help build a picture of the breadth of knowledge based projects so that we can push funders and charities to recognise and collaborate.