Collective Knowledge Making and Infrastructuring as an Act of Resistance in Kenya

How do we reclaim the systems that govern what we know? In this work, the Research Data Share (RDS) collective explores how technical, social, and cultural knowledge infrastructures dictate who is recognized as a legitimate knower and to what ends. From maandamano (anti-government protests) and Nairobi’s public graffiti to contemporary AI development, higher education policies, and the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), this book examines how actors in Kenya contest and rebuild the tangible and intangible frameworks governing epistemic life.

What sets this work apart is its radical, experimental format. Breaking away from the conventions of the single-authored academic text, this project introduces Collective Knowledge Making and Infrastructuring as an Act of Resistance in Kenya. It is a deliberately non-linear collection built around curated artifacts—including images, social media threads, and metadata schemas—rather than traditional thematic chapters. By allowing difference, dissent, and multiple voices to persist without forcing a synthesized narrative, the book’s very architecture and collaborative methodology serve as powerful acts of decolonial resistance.

In postcolonial contexts such as Kenya, research histories and funding structures often orient legitimacy toward foreign institutions and extractive global data regimes. This book shifts the decolonial conversation from purely theoretical critique to material, infrastructural intervention. It contributes a profound understanding of “epistemic decentralizing”, demonstrating how Kenyan scholars, youth, and technologists are actively delinking from Euro-American corporate infrastructures to experiment with alternative modes of design, governance, and scholarly circulation. Ultimately, this groundbreaking work proves that how we produce knowledge in the Global South matters just as much as what we produce.