Especially when I was in Nairobi, perhaps as a result of the worries of my interlocutors regarding government surveillance, I felt growing wariness about publishing openly. I became increasingly concerned about anonymity and err’ed on the side of caution.
The archive includes public PECE essays (largely organized by thematic topic, e.g.
The archive has connected users through synchronous discussion facilitated on Zoom. This is a small group of self-selected 5 people or so. Most of these people did not know each other but through working together over the past 18 months or so, have gotten to know each other and have now even met in person at events in Nairobi, for example. There is also a broader email list serv that links about 20 members but is mostly blast emails out (rather than conversation). Finally, at the Nov.
RDS working group members as well as other researchers who have been enrolled at various points in time (for example, a research assistant working with me during my fieldwork; a collaborator who conducted participant observation during the Nov 2019 event; a collaborative co-creator of a digital exhibit for 4S 2019) have primarily used the uploading of data function and annotation function, what I think of as the “bread and butter” of PECE. Most of the “assembling” of a PECE essay has been done by me (interesting to think about why… is it a technical issue?).
After sharing a collaboration agreement (Okune 2019a) with the three research groups within the first few months of fieldwork (January through March 2019), I was given access to a variety of qualitative data, especially digital transcripts of one-on-one interviews and group discussions; photographs; coded summaries of data; final reports; and interview guides.
Yes, definitely. The archive provides the technical scaffolding for articulating ourselves as a community of scholar activists / activist scholars interested in exploring what it might look like to decolonize knowledge infrastructure and create relations and systems that are regenerative rather than extractive. It’s not to say that the people who are part of the RDS archive were not already doing important work on these topics.
This archive was designed against the growing commercial encroachment of public knowledge commons.
