FAQs & Contact

This book examines knowledge-making as an act of resistance in Kenya. Five contributors, members of the Research Data Share (RDS) collective, explore how people push back against the systems that decide whose knowledge counts and where it circulates. The cases are deliberately varied: the June 2024 maandamano (citizen protests), Nairobi’s graffiti and street art scene, postgraduate peer-learning communities, AI development in Africa, and the politics of the digital object identifier (DOI) in scholarly publishing. What connects them is a shared concern with how infrastructures, technical, institutional, aesthetic, and social, shape who can be recognised as a knower, and how people intervene in those structures from within.

Rather than a single linear argument, this book assembles a collection of artefacts (documents, images, social media threads, platform screenshots, policies, and scholarly literature…) alongside individual essays and four shared analytical questions to which all contributors respond.

Readers can follow one author’s thread, trace a question across domains, or move between contributors in a nonlinear way. The authors call this a Database as Book: an appropriation of the books symbolic authority as a scholarly form, while reshaping its internal architecture. It is also a methodological claim that how knowledge is organised and stabilised is as political as what the knowledge says.

The book is published open access by African Minds and is freely available for download at www.africanminds.org.za. Printed copies can be ordered directly from African Minds (info@africanminds.org.za) or, for readers outside Africa, from African Books Collective: orders@africanbookscollective.com, P.O. Box 721, Oxford OX1 9EN, UK.

ISBNs:
978-0-6398913-9-2 (paper)
978-0-6398914-0-8 (eBook)
978-0-6398914-1-5 (ePub).

Yes. The RDS collective is available for panel discussions, public lectures, workshops, and podcast conversations. Areas of expertise include decolonial knowledge systems, open access and scholarly publishing reform, AI governance and data justice in Africa, urban art as cultural infrastructure, and experimental methods in collaborative research. Please reach out via African Minds (info@africanminds.org.za) or directly through the authors’ pages.