I think it's important to read and study knowledge infrastructures in Kenya in parallel with critical liberation theory to help prompt those of us reaching for new, more anticolonial knowledge infrastructures to imagine what more radical alternatives should replace the existing systems of oppression as we strive to build something different. If we only work and focus on the technical or the implementation, it can become easy to forget the important philosophical underpinnings of why we are trying to do what we are doing. I am including Barbara Love's writing on Liberatory Consciousness Framework to think with as the RDS Collective works on a new "database as book" collaboratively. We are keen to question and work against existing knowledge systems in which certain bodies are assumed to be more qualified "knowers" and others as "subjects". I think Love's work surfaces that all members of society play a role in keeping such a "dis-equal" system in place, whether it is to their benefit or to their disadvantage. I am keen to understand how we can refuse those roles that we are assigned and socialized and construct new roles.
Source
Love, B. J. (2010). Developing a liberatory consciousness. In M. Adams, W. J. Blumenfeld, C. R. Casteneda, H. W. Hackman, M. L. Peters, & X. Zuniga (Eds.), Readings for diversity and social justice (pp. 533-540). Routledge.
Barbara Love, "Barbara Love's "Liberatory Consciousness Framework" (2010)", contributed by Angela Okune, Research Data Share, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 24 April 2024, accessed 4 May 2024. https://www.researchdatashare.org/content/barbara-loves-liberatory-consciousness-framework-2010
Critical Commentary
I think it's important to read and study knowledge infrastructures in Kenya in parallel with critical liberation theory to help prompt those of us reaching for new, more anticolonial knowledge infrastructures to imagine what more radical alternatives should replace the existing systems of oppression as we strive to build something different. If we only work and focus on the technical or the implementation, it can become easy to forget the important philosophical underpinnings of why we are trying to do what we are doing. I am including Barbara Love's writing on Liberatory Consciousness Framework to think with as the RDS Collective works on a new "database as book" collaboratively. We are keen to question and work against existing knowledge systems in which certain bodies are assumed to be more qualified "knowers" and others as "subjects". I think Love's work surfaces that all members of society play a role in keeping such a "dis-equal" system in place, whether it is to their benefit or to their disadvantage. I am keen to understand how we can refuse those roles that we are assigned and socialized and construct new roles.