In this curated analysis, we aim to build a comparative, collaborative understanding of assumptions about “knowledge” in our different domain areas. These are not meant to sound like a cohesive “voice,” but rather punctuated snapshots from each of us. By anchoring our work in a shared analytic question, we create a common frame that allows differences and resonances to surface without forcing consensus. This approach reflects the value of “explanatory pluralism” embedded not only in the data publishing software we leverage (Poirier 2017), but also in our collaborative method itself.
We each answered the question first individually about our own cases and then we came together for a synchronous discussion to tease out the shared learnings and insights across domains. The summary below includes our collective summary of insights as well as our individual responses.
We did not arrive at the term “resistance” uncritically. In our discussion, we questioned whether what we are doing is resistance, subversion, appropriation, or something else entirely. Rather than abandoning the term, we chose to nuance it, to treat resistance not as heroic rupture but as situated, iterative infrastructuring. Across our examples, we found resistance is neither pure refusal nor total exit. It is co-dependent and situated – tuko ndani na pia tunatoka nje (Kiswahili for we are inside and also stepping outside).
Rather than positioning resistance as external to power, our examples show how it operates within and alongside dominant systems, leveraging their tools while refusing their inevitability. Resistance for us is iterative and processual and appears in the slow work of building archives, annotating collectively, writing graffiti in prohibited spaces, convening peer-led structures, and experimenting with versioned, open-ended publication formats.
We note resistance can become decolonial when it delinks from colonial logics of power and rebuilds alternative infrastructures, though not all resistance automatically meets this threshold. We believe critique of existing systems is not sufficient, and we are interested in how to construct alternative capacities that delink from colonial logics of power. The interrogation of the process of building something new then in itself serves as a contribution to decoloniality. In alternatives, we see space for fluidity, praxis, and collective consciousness-building. But today’s periphery could become tomorrow’s center so we agreed that attention to power structures and to the building of those structures needs to be embedded in all and any attempts to build a better otherwise.
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Wambui Wamunyu
In my case, I see resistance enacted through re-membering, not as recollection but as reconstitution. Drawing on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s framing, re-membering is the deliberate rebuilding of epistemic agency after dismemberment by institutional and state knowledge systems. In citizen-led spaces on the X platform during the 2024 maandamano (protests), ordinary participants refused to accept official narratives in conservation, mining, or education as authoritative simply because the narratives were from institutions. Instead, the citizens gathered to interpret events for themselves, reclaiming the right to define what counts as knowledge. This was not oppositional protest in a classical sense; it was infrastructural resistance. The X space became a temporary public epistemic infrastructure where citizens repossessed their agency. Resistance here was enacted through collective interpretation and rebuilding, dismembering official accounts in order to reassemble alternative knowledge formations.
Aurelia Munene
In my example, resistance operates within the university, a space that both produces knowledge and reproduces hierarchy. Kenyan students are positioned as future knowledge producers while being silenced in the present. Resistance takes the form of speaking back to this but it is not limited to actual speech. I have seen silence itself become a tactic, a strategic conformity that allows survival within rigid structures. For me, resistance is infrastructured through the organisation I’m developing, Eider, a peer-led space that creates conditions where students can first discover their voices so that they can speak back. Eider does not replace the university but it operates alongside it, exposing both the fragility and difficulty of building flatter learning infrastructures within enduring hierarchies.
Leonida Mutuku
I frame resistance through decoloniality. I understand resistance not as anti-colonial opposition but as delinking from the coloniality of power that persists beyond formal colonialism. Resistance begins with recognizing how Eurocentric norms continue to structure AI development. But I think it cannot stop at critique. Decoloniality is enacted through praxis: building AI models that do not just resist dominant paradigms but operate according to different logics. Rather than positioning African technoscience or knowledge practices as reactive and always in opposition to Western standards, resistance needs to be enacted through experiments and initiatives that are standing on their own terms. In other words, they are not counter-narratives but actually grown from alternative logics. I think this complicates resistance as a temporary phase preceding incorporation into a new status quo. Because if we look at the historical example of the Mau Mau freedom fighters in Kenya, what happens after such a resistance succeeds? How does one build society beyond opposition? Is it still considered “resistance” once it is successful? Resistance to me then is iterative and world-making. It is not only about building towards a rupture but about constructing enduring infrastructures capable of sustaining different futures.
Syokau Mutonga
Resistance in my argument is enacted aesthetically and spatially through graffiti. Writing in prohibited urban spaces is not merely expressive; it reclaims zones that certain bodies are excluded from. Graffiti’s ephemerality and incompleteness are not weaknesses but strengths because they resist stabilisation and co-optation. So graffiti is not an alternative form of knowledge seeking validation; it is knowledge in itself. It is a chorus of voices and infrastructure rooted in personal experiences, collective histories and collaborative contributions.
Angela Okune
I locate resistance in the politics of scholarly publishing infrastructures. Before resistance can occur, infrastructure must be made visible. We need to raise awareness and expose how standards like the DOI consolidate surveillance publishing and centralized control in the most powerful actors. But resistance to infrastructure does not take the form of simple refusal either. I think we need to appropriate hierarchical markers of legitimacy for example, by calling this project a “book,” adopting persistent identifiers but different ones, in order to remain legible within dominant systems while experimenting with alternatives.