INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH 1

DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.13303

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— EPISTEMIC JUSTICE AND THE UNIVERSITY: 2
3 Reclaiming the academy for emancipatory urban praxis 3
4 4
5 Stephanie Butcher, Tanzil Shafique, Redento Recio 5
6 and Ishita Chatterjee 6
7 7
8 8
Abstract
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This essay offers provocations on the possibilities and challenges of advancing
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‘epistemic justice’ in urban research, with particular care for the growing ‘academic
11 11
precariat’. We explore some of the institutional barriers and possibilities of doing
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collaborative justice-­oriented work within urban and built environment scholarship,
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especially for those fixed-­term, early career, casual academics, independent scholars or
14 14
those with career breaks. To do so, we refer to and reframe three concepts that are core
15 15
within academic institutions: ethics, engagement and excellence. We explore the potentials
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of the urban as a site of political struggles, the projective potential of urban disciplines
17 17
and the university as an urban actor to offer our intentionalities—alternative pathways—
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through which we can reclaim the radical role of the university towards an emancipatory
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urban praxis.
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Introduction: the multiplicities of epistemic justice
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‘The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be
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created … In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labour for
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freedom … to transgress.’
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bell hooks, 1994
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This essay offers provocations on the possibilities and challenges of advancing
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‘epistemic justice’ (Fricker, 2007) in the university, with particular care for the growing
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‘academic precariat’. It is borne of a long-­simmering preoccupation faced by the four
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authors over four years, reflective of our circular conversations and frustrations with
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institutional silences. We write as early career researchers (ECRs), based broadly within
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the disciplines of urban studies, architecture, urban planning and geography. At the
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time of thinking and writing together, we have moved through different institutional
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and personal positions: variously as PhD researchers and postdoctoral fellows based
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in Australia, who have moved to the UK (working as lecturers), the Philippines and
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India (working as associate professors), and/or as activists and practitioners who have
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joined (and moved away from) the academy. Across these shifting forms of scholarship,
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we share an interest in knowledge co-­production and action, working with activists,
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NGOs, grassroots groups and research institutions to advance research and practice
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that can support the lived struggles of marginalized, oppressed or excluded groups.
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While we speak primarily in reference to our situated experiences within Australian
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and UK academia, we also draw from our experiences across diverse geographical and
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educational backgrounds. As such, these provocations are written also in recognition
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of the ways similar processes manifest across diverse institutions and geographies,
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particularly within contexts of corporatized or neoliberal Anglophone institutions
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within both the global South and the global North.
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50 We would like to acknowledge the support and insights of the communities—inside and outside of the academy— 50
51 which we work alongside.
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52 © 2024 The Author(s). International Journal of Urban and Regional Research published by John Wiley & Sons 52
Ltd on behalf of Urban Research Publications Limited.
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This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution
and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
 EPISTEMIC JUSTICE AND THE UNIVERSITY 2

In framing this piece around the concept of epistemic justice, we echo

1 1
Byskov (2021: 116) in asserting that unfair and unjust knowledge institutions and
2 2
practices ‘have the potential to reproduce and further exacerbate existing socio-­
3 3
economic inequalities and injustices’, which we find even more apt when parsing out
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the intersection of the university, its discursive role in relation to urban knowledge
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production and the socio-­material implications of its urban presence. As scholars
6 6
moving within traditions of decolonial, Southern, poststructural and feminist theory,
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we ground our scholarship within the assumption that particular knowledge claims
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have been silenced, erased or marginalized over time—a product of intersecting global
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relations of colonialism, capitalism, racism, structuralism, patriarchy and casteism.
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Moreover, even within such critique of universities, their role as a key actor implicated
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within capitalist speculative urban production often remains unquestioned. We posit
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that centring such historical relations that shape knowledge production, theorization
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and its everyday impact on our cities is crucial to unpack the re-­production of global
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inequalities and processes of dispossession. This includes examining the ways in which
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the university as an institution has operated as a ‘knowledge enclosure’ (Hall and
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Tanden, 2017; Connell, 2019) which has produced theory from a place of European and
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North American centrality, legitimating particular kinds of knowledge and frameworks
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of understanding. Just as there is no neutral education, there is no neutral research, but
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we often feel constrained within a wider university discourse that positions ‘research
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excellence’ in terms that may not encourage longer-­term partnership and knowledge
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co-­production, ‘slow scholarship’ (Berg and Seeber, 2016) or the pursuit of impacts that
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are practice-­oriented, socially engaged, unmeasurable or intangible.
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While acknowledging the broader difficulty of engaging in scholarship which
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speaks to epistemic justice, we feel there are particular challenges for the (ever-­growing)
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‘academic precariat’, represented by fixed-­term, early career or casual academics,
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independent scholars or those with career breaks. Despite the strong critical scholarship
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dedicated to decolonizing urban theory and reflexive practice, academic precariats
28 28
face several barriers to practising engaged, decolonial, feminist or antiracist forms of
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scholarship. Those at the knife edge of precarious labour conditions may be subject
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to the very injustices they are fighting, the institutional risks for speaking out may be
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too high or there may be barriers to entering university spaces that are responsible
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for shaping knowledge production practices. Crucially, we fear that these issues have
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only been exacerbated by the growing market-­driven environment of higher education
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institutions, further heightened during post-­Covid restructuring.
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Yet this article comes out of our deep and enduring belief in the mandate of the
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university as an institution of public good, and of the value of academic scholarship
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in supporting the collective struggles of groups living in conditions of marginality or
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oppression. As such, while reflecting on the struggles we have faced as members of
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the ‘academic precariat’, we also believe that crucial to reorienting the university is to
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move beyond critique, towards the ‘active construction of the pluriverse’, as an antidote
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to scholarly traditions which reproduce unjust worlds (Reiter, 2018: 5). In particular,
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we posit that as ‘urban’ scholars we have a particular opportunity to reflect on three
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core issues: the urban as a site of political struggles; the projective potential of ‘critical’
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urban theory; and the role of the university itself as an urban actor. Within this context,
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we explore some of the institutional barriers and possibilities of doing justice-­oriented
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work, drawing on three concepts that are core within academic institutions: ethics,
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engagement and excellence. We highlight the challenges within ‘traditional’ academic
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structures, and the disproportionate impact on precariously employed or early-­stage
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academics. In doing so, we explore the radical and emancipatory potentialities of the
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university within its tensions: ‘as a site occupied by communities of resistance but also
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shaped by elitism’ (Sudbury and Okazawa-­Rey, 2015: 2).
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 INTERVENTIONS 3

Epistemic (in)justice and the university

1 At the heart of ‘epistemic justice’ is the recognition and valuation of diverse 1
2 epistemologies, or underlying belief systems, which shape the production of knowledge. 2
3 As such, the pursuit of a just academy calls for examination of the power dynamics and 3
4 biases that shape knowledge production and hinder equitable access to knowledge. 4
5 Recognizing and addressing different forms of epistemic injustice is essential for 5
6 dismantling oppressive structures and challenging power imbalances. 6
7 Globally, deep inequalities within university structures across race, gender, 7
8 class and geography are well documented, shaping who is in leadership and secure 8
9 employment, what gets published, how and by whom theory is constituted, who gets 9
10 heard and who controls the narrative, and which languages are centred and silenced 10
11 (Rojo, 2021; Blell et al., 2023). These exclusions are reflective of barriers to doctoral 11
12 studies (and other levels)—relating to poverty, social class, age, geographic location, 12
13 language and societal pressures (Patterson-­Stephens et al., 2017). While grants, 13
14 scholarships and fellowships can help to address these challenges, they may equally 14
15 entrench gender, class, caste and racial inequalities where focused on narrow forms of 15
16 merit or academic achievement, which do not engage with the barriers to entry into 16
17 further studies. Likewise, for those who finish a PhD, this may be at the cost of a debt 17
18 cycle—conditioning job prospects, which are also often contingent upon a series of 18
19 (sometimes international) moves to generate financial stability. Upon entry into the 19
20 academy, numerous emergent scandals explicitly within our urban disciplines, including 20
21 sexual harassment, gatekeeping or a culture of bullying by powerful academics have 21
22 revealed the profound abuses especially impacting less established academics, women 22
23 and non-­binary people and/or scholars of colour (Fox Tree and Vaid, 2022). 23
24 Likewise, differential access to resources and recognition continue to proliferate 24
25 between ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ research foci, institutions, and scholars. Academic 25
26 scholarship remains overwhelmingly produced about and from institutions within Europe 26
27 and North America, even when supposedly ‘decolonizing’ (Táíwò, 2022). While there 27
28 has been a rise in research about the global South from within Western institutions, it 28
29 has been marked by criticisms of superficial engagement or treating the global South 29
30 as a metacategory (Haug et al., 2021). Echoing these epistemic disparities, we have 30
31 also observed the ways in which our wider built environment disciplines continue to 31
32 be informed by universalizing theories (see Brenner and Schmid, 2015), while within 32
33 international discourses, the predominance of ‘best practice’ notions (McFarlane, 2006) 33
34 or the ‘transnationalism of elites’ (Mbembe, 2016) can see the flattening of situated 34
35 knowledge as it travels. In this sense, we share Connell’s (2019) view on the role of 35
36 the university as a ‘knowledge enclosure’—historically unrepresentative, exclusive/ 36
37 exclusionary, extractive and reflective of privilege. Put in other words, the university has 37
38 a key role in (re)producing which social groups or issues are recognized as credible or 38
39 relevant, which methods are seen as valid, which research outputs or engagements are 39
40 considered impactful and who has ownership over this knowledge or models of theorizing. 40
41 These specific issues are overlaid onto longer-­standing trends which, as will be 41
42 discussed, challenge epistemic justice within the academy: performance-­based metrics 42
43 which reward certain outputs (especially single-­authored peer-­reviewed papers) over 43
44 collaborative writing and alternative (‘non-­academic’) outputs; institutional procedures 44
45 rooted in unconscious (racist) prejudices; research funding bodies that require strong 45
46 alignment with the national interest, and which can be unfunded;1 ethics procedures 46
47 which can discourage work with ‘vulnerable’ communities or issues related to injustice 47
48 48
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50 1 In the UK, for instance, represented by programme cuts and eventual dismantling of the UKRI ‘Global Challenges
50
51 Research Fund’, intended to operate as a part of the UK’s official development assistance (ODA); in Australia, 51
52 represented by at least six high-­profile cases in which Australian Research Council funding was awarded via a
rigorous peer review process, only for these to be unfunded by education ministers.
52
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 EPISTEMIC JUSTICE AND THE UNIVERSITY 4

and power structures; or incompatibilities in the long-­term timescales and relationship

1 1
building required for engaged scholarship, especially for those on short-­term contracts.
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A strategic disinvestment in the humanities and social sciences2 has been accompanied
3 3
by a push across neoliberal Anglophone universities towards research marketization—
4 4
with funding streams designed to support the translation of research outcomes into
5 5
commercial terms.3 Such trends raise key questions for epistemic justice, including what
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this means for researchers who wish to engage in non ‘commercially viable’ forms of
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research—such as those which speak to issues of racism, classism, casteism or other
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injustices—or how rising course fees in de-­prioritized subjects, such as the arts, will
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limit choice especially for students of low socio-­economic backgrounds, and those who
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have experienced intergenerational inequalities. We fear that the growing tendency to
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treat scholars as ‘academic entrepreneurs’—under pressure to attract external research
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grants to offset declining state funding (Sudbury and Okazawa-­Rey, 2015)—is likely to
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promote research supportive of industry or government agendas at the expense of
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generating incisive analysis critical of state and corporate interests, as well as any radical
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form of organizing with communities under oppression.
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— Precarious worlds
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Perhaps most concerning to us is how the increasingly neoliberal and
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corporatizing university context has generated additional barriers for reflexive practices
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and decolonial theory building which challenge ‘status quo’ practices for what we
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might deem the ‘academic precariat’. With this term, we reference four fundamental
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aspects: the precarity borne out through casual or short-­term hiring practices; barriers
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to equitable engagement arising from implicit or explicit forms of exclusion, related to
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identity; the formative period of scholarship, in which mentorship and modelling of
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ethical research practices are crucial; and the relative lack of authority to shape strategic
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decision-­making institutionally. The casualization of employment, wage theft and job
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precarity of contractual staff most often impact early career academics, who may not
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have the security and stability to engage in these more disruptive or non-­traditional
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forms of academic knowledge production (Cahill, 2021). In our experiences across UK
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and Australia, the university sector has undergone a series of transformations in the
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post-­Covid context, leading to widespread restructuring, the loss of staff (which may
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be unaccounted for, in the case of casual staff ) and strike actions linked to pension
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and workload disputes. As articulated by the Urban ECA Collective et al. (2022), these
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trends are likely to be felt most keenly by those precariously employed or at the ‘early’
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stages of their career, whether linked to budget cuts and diverted research flows, hiring
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freezes, postponement of fieldwork or border closures disproportionality impacting
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global South scholars. Taken together, we see the experience of epistemic injustice in the
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university both in a moment of acute crisis and embedded in longer-­standing trajectories
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of structural inequalities, dominated by shifts towards casualization, marketization and
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competitive ranking.
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— Urban praxis: spaces of hope?
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Despite these challenges, and speaking from our disciplinary positions, we also
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acknowledge the precise role of the university as an institution of critical urban thinking
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in challenging inequalities in urban knowledge production and itself as an urban actor.
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48 2 While not the primary focus of this essay, it is relevant to note that students have simultaneously been subject to
changes in higher education funding arrangements, designed to encourage ‘job-­ready graduates’. In Australia, this
48
49 comprises the provision of higher subsidies in subject areas such as STEM and IT that are aligned with key areas of 49
50 economic interest, and in the UK closures within humanities and critical social science disciplines—echoing the crisis in
education in the US linked with ‘critical race studies’ and the humanities in general (Reitter and Wellmon, 2023).
50
51 3 In Australia, for instance, there was an announcement from the central government in 2022 of a new investment 51
52 package designed to fund research which demonstrates commercial potential in key areas of national priority—
including defence, space and clean energy.
52
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 INTERVENTIONS 5

We are inspired by a diverse set of epistemologies, which have explored knowledge

1 1
production as fluid, multiple, situated in social contexts and historical trajectories,
2 2
emergent from lived experiences and deeply imbricated within the consolidation of
3 3
power. An example is Mignolo’s (2009) urge to critical scholars to embrace epistemic
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disobedience, a process of challenging a detached and neutral point of observation
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resulting from Euro-­A merican-­c entred epistemology and the idea of universal/
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universalizing knowledge. We take hope from critical pedagogical work situated within
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urban settings that pushes the role of the university as a facilitator of collaborative
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action (Patel et al., 2015; Ortiz and Millan, 2022). Concepts such as the ‘activist scholar’
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(Sudbury and Okazawa-­Rey, 2015) and ‘research as praxis’ (Lather, 1986) offer guidance
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on the messy and intertwined roles that academic scholarship can play in addressing
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deep injustices. Methodologically, traditions such as participatory action research and
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knowledge co-­production have generated important possibilities for collaboration across
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academia and practice, through which alternative forms of expertise might be recognized
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towards justice-­oriented goals (Latulippe and Klenk, 2020). Epistemologically, a rich
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discourse of theorization from ‘the South’ has been vital in uncovering the ways in
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which colonial processes delegitimized or erased indigenous or local understandings and
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knowledge, in favour of Euro-­centric beliefs and values, as an extension of colonial power
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(Roy, 2009; Watson, 2016), and has contributed to calls to ‘decolonize’ the curriculum,
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even if the process is incomplete (Le Grange, 2016).
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As such, we posit that these possibilities for reclaiming epistemic justice within
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the university are crucial for urban scholars for at least three reasons. The first is the
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acknowledgement of the urban as a crucial ‘site’—not just for our scholarly and practice-­
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oriented work, but also for broader political contestations. Analytical focus on the right
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to the city, uneven urban citizenship and urban protest has explored the particularities of
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the urban condition as a battleground through which broader claims to entitlements are
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staked, seeing the emergence of new political urban subjects (Holston, 2009; Roy, 2015;
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Yiftachel, 2015). The urbanization of inequalities—where we see enormous expansion
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of existing and new urban centres across especially Africa and Asia, accompanied by an
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ever growing chasm between elites and the urban poor—indicates the vital necessity
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of centring justice in the urban condition. Acknowledging that planning education
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and practice in much of the global South and North still reflect colonial legacies, urban
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scholars have called for the production of new urban praxis from the urban majorities
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where conventional planning theory and practice are, at best, irrelevant, and at worst,
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deepening inequalities (Watson, 2016; Butcher et al., 2022; Sami et al., 2022). Such
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recognition of ‘the urban as political terrain’ (Oldfield, 2015) opens up possibilities
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through which the co-­production of knowledge through and with urban struggles
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can enrich scholarship—as well as for scholarship to enrich urban struggles. If our
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scholarship is oriented towards political or strategic contributions (Nagar, 2002) within
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the urban sites in which we work, then epistemic justice is required both as a normative
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orientation for our research and as an intended outcome.
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Second, we argue that as a set of disciplines interested in spatial ordering, scalar
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interactions and material interventions, the analytical focus on the ‘urban’ holds a
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propositional or projective potential. This call has been taken up by ‘critical’ urban
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scholars—moving beyond critique and towards a ‘search for emancipatory alternatives’
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(Brenner, 2009; Marcuse, 2009). Yet as Roy (2016) reminds us, our urban disciplines hold
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long traditions of writing from a limited set of geographical reference points. A ‘Southern
47 47
turn’ in urban studies and planning theory has called for knowledge production that
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acknowledges the extensive global differences in cities and recognizes that ideas are
49 49
shaped by specific contexts, looking to ‘provincialize’ urban studies and planning
50 50
(Flyvbjerg, 2004; Rao, 2006; Lawhon and Truelove, 2020). This Southern turn has been
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crucial in calling for new ‘vocabularies’ (Bhan, 2019), practices and theorization from
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‘ordinary cities’ (Robinson, 2005) which acknowledge this particularity and contribute to
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 EPISTEMIC JUSTICE AND THE UNIVERSITY 6

urban theory beyond ‘developmental’ framings (Recio et al., 2022). Yet such empirically
1 1
grounded work—from marginalized geographies—may lack the ‘buzz’ and broader
2 2
uptake of universalized theory, while citation metrics (still a measure of academic
3 3
success) remain the purview of ‘established authors, universities, topics and canons’
4 4
(Oswin, 2020: 13). More recently, if global development is increasingly conceived as
5 5
‘everywhere’ (Kumar et al., 2024), if the planet is urbanized (Brenner and Schmid, 2015),
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we might ask what possibilities this leaves for centring the specific materialities and
7 7
ongoing impacts of colonialism, violence and dispossession, highlighting the continued
8 8
necessity of articulating epistemic justice within our urban disciplines.
9 9
Finally, while the university as a ‘knowledge enclosure’ has been well discussed
10 10
(Hall and Tanden, 2017; Connell, 2019), important scholarship has turned to the
11 11
agentic role of the university in creating spatial enclosures—from acting as a real
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estate developer via investments in buildings, facilities and student accommodation
13 13
to discussions of ‘town and gown’ or ‘studentification’, to the transformation of urban
14 14
peripheries (Frediani, 2013; Goddard and Vallance, 2013; Bose, 2015; Prada, 2019; Oh
15 15
and Shin, 2023; Dovey and Recio, 2024). Echoing Derickson (2016), it is important
16 16
to foreground the ways in which knowledge production is analytically folded in—
17 17
temporally and geographically—to the ‘field’ that we study as scholars. This framing
18 18
of knowledge production rejects the idea that the ends (e.g. the knowledge produced,
19 19
journal articles published) justify the means (e.g. the ways and social fields in which
20 20
knowledge is produced). Rather, ‘this approach holds the processes, spaces, and
21 21
institutions where knowledge is made and theory is built to the same standards we use to
22 22
evaluate social justice “out there”’ (Derickson, 2016: 825). Taking this assertion seriously
23 23
requires careful attention to how broader trends within the neoliberal university,
24 24
especially as linked with metricization, commercialization or investment, may be
25 25
mirrored within the university’s role in the reorganization of urban resources and space.
26 26
The question of epistemic justice and the university has a distinctly urban materiality,
27 27
asking what responsibilities of care (near and far) we have for the urban communities
28 28
with/in which we labour.
29 29
The discussion that follows reflects the contradictions, limitations and
30 30
possibilities of the university as an institution of knowledge production, which can
31 31
be both complicit in and contest the kind of knowledge(s) that are recognized and
32 32
valued. It reflects first and foremost our ECR (postdoctoral and PhD) positioning
33 33
within Australian and UK academia from where these conversations originated.
34 34
However, it is also informed by more recent shifts—into more permanent positions
35 35
and different geographies—as well as our past histories of research based elsewhere.
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The international and interdisciplinary nature of our research engagements and our
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precarious employment status as contractual or untenured academic/research staff
38 38
has allowed (or compelled) us to be constantly mobile and to practise what Katz (1994)
39 39
has called ‘displacement’. In our individual and collective experiences, these practices
40 40
of displacement (and entanglement) afford us an opportunity to witness how various
41 41
forms/processes of neoliberal academia define the academic metrics system in both the
42 42
Northern and Southern contexts. Whether through the reduction of our scholarly work
43 43
to a form of ‘comatose scholarship’, dictated by checklists for promotions (especially
44 44
experienced in Dhaka), the imperatives of an ‘institutional home’ in collaborating with
45 45
grassroots organizations (especially experienced in Manila) or the collusion between
46 46
university and state (especially experienced in India), or through satisfying the narrow
47 47
forms of excellence (within the UK and Australia), only scholars with exceptional grit
48 48
remain truly productive (in terms that satisfy our own ethics as well as the demands
49 49
of academic worlds), and even then perhaps at the expense of personal and social
50 50
well-­being.
51 51
In collectively exploring these various challenges as well as inspirations
52 52
throughout the years, we have sought to build alternative networks to share and learn
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 INTERVENTIONS 7

how to navigate this complexity, through different pathways within the university.4 This
1 1
complexity foregrounds the important tensions we will engage with in the remainder of
2 2
this article, that is, on the one hand, recognizing academia as a system that has
3 3
reproduced knowledge hierarchies, inaccessibility and extractive practices, and on the
4 4
other, as an institution intended to stimulate critical thinking, imagine alternative
5 5
possibilities and act as an institution of public good to address pressing global challenges.
6 6
The following sections offer three areas for discussion through which we see
7 7
these tensions and opportunities manifesting: ethics, engagement and excellence.
8 8
We have selected these three not as all-­e ncompassing discussions or as part of a
9 9
comprehensive conceptual schema, but as entry points that have been significant in
10 10
our own praxis—that are drawn from our empirical registers and autoethnographic
11 11
reflections—and also where we see possibilities for alternatives.
12 12
13 13
From procedural ethics towards positionality
14 14
One particular concern that informs our work, engaging from ‘sites’ of the urban
15 15
peripheries, is the question of ethics, particularly when engaged in knowledge production
16 16
from marginalized spaces or groups. The dominant institutional arrangements for how
17 17
‘research ethics’ is conceived and practised within the academy is through the ethics
18 18
application process—operationalized through an abstract, standardized set of criteria.
19 19
This application may be unrelated to the ethics of academic knowledge production
20 20
itself—expressed through a checklist and routine review committee performance. In the
21 21
rationalistic and instrumentalist ontology of Anglophone/Western universities, which
22 22
prizes speed and efficiency, this may not allow for longer, slower and more situated and
23 23
ongoing reading of ethical dilemmas. In some instances, we have found that this process
24 24
conditions the possibilities of working with communities that may be deemed ‘too
25 25
risky’ or ‘too vulnerable’. In other cases, we find the requirements of ethics procedures
26 26
to conflict with practices on the ground—such as the call to anonymize data versus
27 27
the desire of some groups to be named and to claim the rights to their knowledge and
28 28
practices, or the framing of consent through a lens where the researcher’s responsibility
29 29
or ethical expectations are tied to the timelines of the project or institutional demands.
30 30
While acknowledging ethical reflection is an important precondition for any research,
31 31
and may indeed generate important procedural reflections, as Blee and Currier (2011:
32 32
402) note, ‘scholars face complex ethical issues that are not addressed by the procedures
33 33
and protocols of institutional reviews’.
34 34
Crucially, the abstract quality of the ethics application is acutely incapable
35 35
of preparing the researcher for the ethical anxiety and trepidation encountered in
36 36
the field and processing ‘data’ afterwards, leaving individual researchers responsible
37 37
for navigating inevitable tensions that emerge when engaging with complex urban
38 38
struggles. Seldom do we find institutional structures that actively generate these
39 39
conversations, with ethics coming into play only as part of the university requirement
40 40
to get approval before ‘collecting data’. Such absences for collective reflection and
41 41
institutional learning throughout research are particularly challenging for ‘new’
42 42
researchers (doctoral students or ECRs), operating within moments of possibility when
43 43
patterns and trajectories are being established. While we have each experimented
44 44
with forms of research co-­production, we also have been frustrated where limited
45 45
by timelines, framings, priorities and risk management as set by the university or our
46 46
funders, particularly where dictated by the structures of the PhD (with institutions
47 47
increasingly pushing for funding completion within three years). Likewise, we have
48 48
found that even with shared agenda setting, research can become extremely problematic
49 49
50 50
51 4 One example, for instance, was the establishment of the ‘Space for Engagement and Epistemic Diversity’ (https://​ 51
52 infur.​msd.​unime​lb.​edu.​au/​proje​cts/​engag​ement/​​seed-​fello​ws/​) by some of our authors from within the University
of Melbourne, entailing over 80 members that cross-­cut geographies, hierarchies, and disciplines.
52
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 EPISTEMIC JUSTICE AND THE UNIVERSITY 8

in contexts of violence or dispossession where the interviewees have lost their home,
1 1
family, livelihood or land, or are shaped by complex politics. As researchers engaged
2 2
with such everyday and often violent struggles to live with dignity, we may encounter
3 3
scenarios in which we are unsure how to act. Working in an informal settlement, should
4 4
we continue our research interviews when we know of an imminent eviction? Should we
5 5
expose experiences of exclusion or extractive practices within social movements? How
6 6
do we engage/disengage when bodily or emotional harm is in question—whether for our
7 7
partners or ourselves? As argued by Sudbury and Okazawa-­Rey (2015), ‘research with
8 8
emancipatory intentions is inevitably troubled by unequal power relations’, highlighting
9 9
the inevitability of such ethical and political dilemmas and (potentially) conflicting
10 10
interests. Such encounters, particularly in the early stages of doctoral research, left many
11 11
of us feeling inadequately prepared for the ethical repercussions of working alongside
12 12
vulnerable people, and lacking institutional support when such issues were raised.
13 13
This gap between ‘procedural ethics vs being ethical’ (Shiraani et al., 2022) is
14 14
symptomatic of the structural issues of injustices embedded in knowledge production.
15 15
Yet as Hunt and Godard (2013) point out, this need not be so, as research ethics training
16 16
is the ‘natural venue’ to draw linkages to issues of justice and equity in knowledge
17 17
production and our embeddedness. Perhaps what can move ethics beyond a procedural
18 18
requirement is to claim positionality as a ‘research tool’ (Jacobson and Mustafa, 2019:
19 19
2)—both individually and collectively—in all aspects of research environments (from
20 20
research conception to investigation, from the formulation of findings to dissemination).
21 21
As informed by our Southern, feminist, action-­oriented approaches within the urban
22 22
discipline (Kobayashi, 2003; Robinson, 2003; Cahill, 2007), we see the world from our
23 23
individuated situations, bodies, senses, affects, histories, desires and narratives, and
24 24
this impacts how we interpret the world, and how the world sees and presents itself to
25 25
us. Understanding our position and privileges, particularly in relation to those we work
26 26
alongside, allows us to see the field of difference across which we conduct research,
27 27
interpret and use ‘data’ and generate ‘theories’. Moreover, the power dynamics revealed
28 28
by examining our positions is not just related to our individual selves, but also allows
29 29
us to see the illusion of neutrality of our academic institutions, as complicit in the
30 30
production of knowledge and spatial enclosures. How we incorporate modalities of
31 31
positionality in our research at all levels raises new questions that act as resistance to the
32 32
reductive tendencies of the institution and becomes a prerequisite to ethical practice.
33 33
We call for a radical reflexivity that allows us to move beyond ‘academic production’,
34 34
being simply a value in itself, and places a reflexive ethic with the communities and
35 35
societies—both those within which we are spatially located, as those ‘afar’, and with
36 36
whom we co-­produce knowledge—at the centre of what a university does.
37 37
38 38
Engagement and relationship-­building
39 39
A focus on ‘engagement’ with diverse stakeholders is increasingly found in
40 40
the mandate of the public institutions in which we work, formalized through explicit
41 41
university strategies and tactics. The language within such documents is often framed
42 42
through partnership and collaboration (across public, private, academic or third sector
43 43
organizations and industry players), implying mutual benefit whether through shared
44 44
access to ‘world class’ facilities, drawing from ‘talent pools’ of staff or students, engaging in
45 45
‘research innovation’. Engagement may be framed in ‘global’ terms or might be articulated
46 46
in relation to specific ‘strategic’ geographies. Such aspirations may be aligned with the
47 47
history of public institutions in contributing to civic life or articulated as connecting
48 48
universities with non-­academic partners to multiply alternative funding streams. Yet there
49 49
are multiple modalities and intentions through which such partnerships might be framed,
50 50
with different possibilities for reciprocity or solidarity. Likewise, there are questions
51 51
on how to negotiate different demands, interests and requirements between academic
52 52
research and methodologies and between partner communities and organizations.
53 53
 INTERVENTIONS 9

Recognizing such multiplicity amplifies the need for scholars to engage with
1 1
the following questions: in whose interests are research partnerships pursued; and
2 2
does the partnership create avenues for empowerment and facilitate the questioning of
3 3
oppressive structures in contexts of power imbalances? On the one hand, our positions
4 4
within ‘critical’ urban scholarship—focused on the propositional and the projective—
5 5
leave us well placed to leverage and reorient the resources of the academy as framed
6 6
around engagement towards different struggles. A rich literature on collaboration and
7 7
co-­production, within urban disciplines and beyond, has opened up discussions on
8 8
the processes through which meaningful engagement can happen across university
9 9
researchers and diverse communities (Janes, 2016; Temper and Del Bene, 2016; Mitlin
10 10
et al., 2020). On the other hand, we also wonder if it is possible to conduct research
11 11
that genuinely values ‘solidarity’ (Butcher, 2021) or ‘allyship’ (Yomantas 2020), given
12 12
the uneven political economy of knowledge within the university. Such concepts imply
13 13
taking concrete steps towards dismantling systemic barriers, and yet research agendas,
14 14
when framed by concepts such as academic neutrality and non-­participant observation,
15 15
can generate a form of ‘political apathy’ and undermine the principles of genuine
16 16
allyship. Engagement implies collaborative action towards complex global challenges,
17 17
but what might it mean to research dispossession(s) within the walls of institutes which
18 18
(re)produced unjust spatial practices? We wonder how our research collaborators see
19 19
us when we are not around, when we exit, and where the imagination of ‘engagement’
20 20
may be limited to academic publications, media articles, films and websites which
21 21
have a wider and quicker international reach. Too often the slow and persistent policy
22 22
change, advocacy work, care-­full community engagement or production and translation
23 23
of findings into alternative languages and instruments of change is left to the activists,
24 24
communities fighting their struggles or research assistants based in global South cities.
25 25
We have also found that engagement that falls outside the ‘norm’ has been discouraged,
26 26
for instance, at the PhD level being discouraged by senior academics from returning
27 27
to the research location to discuss the theorization and findings, as it was feared that
28 28
this would hamper the research progression. We have also encountered challenges as
29 29
we have moved into positions of greater authority, for instance, in a recent struggle
30 30
to engage a researcher without an institutional affiliation, who would be required to
31 31
‘relocate’ to a UK-­based university even to conduct engaged work in their home country.
32 32
We have found that such efforts at partnership may be framed as ‘extra’ to the ‘real
33 33
work’ of knowledge production, or at worst, dismissed as ‘activism’, external to the
34 34
rigours of academia. As Benson and Nagar (2006: 589) remind us, ‘we deliberately need
35 35
to give more formal recognition to non-­academic products (e.g. pamphlets, primers,
36 36
performances) as works that enable and enhance the quality of academic knowledge,
37 37
rather than as peripheral byproducts of academic research’. Yet such limitations are
38 38
particularly risky for the academic precariat, who may feel increased pressure to
39 39
conform to more traditional expectations of progress.
40 40
Despite these challenges, we observe that some of the more significant moments
41 41
of insight emerge from micro-­scalar everyday engagements without an intentional
42 42
research purpose: running external seminars and workshops, collaborating in local
43 43
meetings/events, aiding with organizational tasks or engaging with local media or
44 44
advocacy strategies (Recio and Shafique, 2022). Perhaps more explicitly, we have found
45 45
that the authority conferred by universities can be a valuable resource, a convening tool
46 46
that can support urban poor groups to determine the most critical issues and articulate
47 47
policy, planning or programming demands, for instance, in an experience during a
48 48
dialogue with the mayor of a city in the Philippines, in which community leaders used
49 49
the convening power of an academic researcher to pose questions pertaining to
50 50
necessary local policy reforms in the post-­r esettlement housing context. Such
51 51
experiences help us think about important questions about who is driving research
52 52
priorities and the possibilities of orienting academic partnerships explicitly towards
53 53
 EPISTEMIC JUSTICE AND THE UNIVERSITY 10

impact-­oriented goals. However, such efforts are reliant upon the individual to nurture
1 1
trusted and ongoing relationships—exceeding the traditional academic demands and
2 2
expectations and increasingly incompatible with a precarious labour market. Such
3 3
challenges can be acutely felt at the doctoral level, where practices are heavily shaped
4 4
by supervisory committees and institutional oversight. Even when contracted as full-­
5 5
time staff, these forms of engagement make it difficult to safeguard in formally negotiated
6 6
terms. In a neoliberal atmosphere of keeping track of every hour,5 the essential value of
7 7
such engagement is beyond the usual apparatus of value capture. For us, then,
8 8
engagement is perhaps better reframed as a process of relationship building—which
9 9
requires revisiting formal institutional and professional protocols—beyond the labour
10 10
of particular individuals, as well as informal norms that guide the conduct of academic
11 11
research. It entails revisiting existing approaches and promising ideas that enable
12 12
researchers to embrace a ‘praxis of the present’ (Gramsci, quoted in Salamini, 1981: 73)
13 13
in which both the researcher and the researched become more conscious of their
14 14
situations, actions and relations with the wider society.
15 15
16 16
Research excellence beyond market-­driven values
17 17
Finally, we reflect upon the traditional mechanisms for defining ‘research
18 18
excellence’, and how this is reflected in structures of recognition and advancement. On
19 19
the one hand, the growing recognition of engaged research, as above, creates possibilities
20 20
for the kinds of engaged scholarship that we aim to practice. Such shifts offer up space
21 21
for how we define our own role within the academy, as well as the role of academic
22 22
institutions more broadly. Emerging infrastructures of knowledge translation, exchange
23 23
and impact—articulated through different funding streams within the university—offer
24 24
different pathways to activate research success. On the other hand, the monitoring and
25 25
measurement of impact continue to be underpinned by a limited set of technologies
26 26
and epistemologies, including Research Excellence Frameworks, ‘high quality’ research
27 27
articles (often still driven by citation metrics, Scopus or other databases that inform
28 28
about QS rankings and H-­Index scores), patents and collaborations with industry, which
29 29
generates tensions in ‘advancing’ epistemic justice in the university.
30 30
The focus on performance evaluation metrics—via the race to produce
31 31
publications, win grants and be ‘relevant’ on the global stage—fundamentally shapes the
32 32
boundaries of what success looks like in the university. In Australia, for instance, ‘single
33 33
authored’ articles, particularly when in ‘high-­ranking’ ISI-­indexed journals, are granted
34 34
more ‘points’ in promotion criteria compared with collaborative, multiauthored pieces,
35 35
which we feel are the most horizontal forms of knowledge production that truly foster
36 36
transdisciplinarity. Similarly, in our experience within global South universities, Scopus-­
37 37
indexed publications are encouraged through an award system to keep up with their
38 38
Western counterparts, creating a competitive, stressful and toxic environment where
39 39
researchers may be incentivized to engage in questionable and extractive research
40 40
practices in order to enhance productivity. Indeed, here we could question whether the
41 41
peer-­reviewed article—pay-­walled, inaccessibly written—is the highest form of research
42 42
rigour at all. Even the idea that writing constitutes the ‘labour’ of knowledge production
43 43
feels inadequate to capture the multifaceted nature of contributions, which may not
44 44
acknowledge the work of research assistants, translators, activists and community
45 45
members who bear the greatest risks in navigating community dynamics, cultural
46 46
practices or ethical questions. Producing the valuable commodity of peer-­reviewed
47 47
journal articles at the fastest pace is not necessarily in our best interests if we aim for a
48 48
deeper engagement with these collaborative or ethical questions.
49 49
As such, we have sometimes found ourselves in the unsavoury position that it
50 50
would be easier to thrive in the university if we abandoned some of the practices we
51 51
52 52
5 In the UK, expressed via complex negotiations around ‘Workload Allocation Models’.
53 53
 INTERVENTIONS 11

have sought to cultivate as a part of reflexive ethical practice. Such epistemic exclusions
1 1
are not just linked with the production of knowledge artefacts, but also experienced by
2 2
those trained within different intellectual traditions or geographies, who may struggle
3 3
to prove their credibility within the elite system. Such a reality has been well discussed
4 4
within the urban studies disciplines in relation to how research focused on/in the global
5 5
South has historically been relegated to ‘area studies’ or seen as ‘case studies’ rather
6 6
than theory production (Jazeel, 2016). Likewise, while impact infrastructures (e.g.
7 7
via REF impact case studies in the UK) raise the visibility of engaged research, they
8 8
require onerous processes of ‘evidencing’—validation and verification—which may
9 9
often exist in parallel to the work of ‘doing impact’. The desire to gain recognition on the
10 10
international stage may divert attention from the local, indigenous and historical social
11 11
issues to those that are ‘current’, ‘international’ or ‘generalisable’—those which emanate
12 12
from dominant epistemic viewpoints, or which engage the latest ‘buzzwords’ to generate
13 13
high citation possibilities (Oswin, 2020; Kirchherr, 2023). While calls for ‘slow research’
14 14
(Kuus, 2015) ‘collective theorising’ (Kushner and Norris, 1980–1981) or ‘chaotic theory’
15 15
(McLean, 2018) offer alternative mechanisms of collaborative engaging with knowledge
16 16
production and challenging the boundaries or what is considered ‘productive’ research,
17 17
ECR and precarious staff do not always have the luxury of engaging in these practices.
18 18
Despite such challenges, we continue to believe in the value of research that
19 19
activates and ‘drives intellectual advances and address[es] global challenges’ (UK
20 20
Research Excellence Framework), but which may not always fit neatly within the existing
21 21
structures of recognition. This aspiration would require universities and research funding
22 22
bodies to prioritize research that has social impact and supports researchers to engage
23 23
in critical inquiry, rather than focusing on immediate market and traditional research
24 24
outcomes. This might lie, for instance, in using oral histories to support legal casework
25 25
to contest evictions; designing outputs (scholarly and otherwise) to support community
26 26
groups in enhancing their own political campaign and policy advocacy for a more humane
27 27
and inclusive city; encouraging public hearings and community consultancy meetings as
28 28
alternatives to interviews and focus group discussions, which might otherwise be seen
29 29
as a tool for knowledge extraction; or bearing witness to and documenting systematic
30 30
exclusions or violence. However, successful engagement with impact and excellence
31 31
infrastructures requires delicate manoeuvres and efforts at translation to ensure that
32 32
the ethical core and interests remain while fitting the wider narratives through which
33 33
research achievement is framed. Thus, we ask what would it look like to develop a set
34 34
of criteria that recognize the quality of research and its contribution to social impact,
35 35
without resorting to market-­driven promotion and publication of research outputs? What
36 36
would it mean if ‘excellence’ can be re-­defined around reclaiming the university as a site
37 37
of public good, a space for emancipatory engagement? This would entail a rethink of
38 38
interdisciplinary research that places social justice at the core, ensuring that it is firmly
39 39
grounded in addressing systemic inequities and pushing for change.
40 40
41 41
A call to reclaim the university through emancipatory urban praxis
42 42
43 43
‘One can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its
44 44
hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment,
45 45
to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern
46 46
university … Another university is possible, and it’s already here somewhere,
47 47
its cover creased from being passed back and forth, from being held until long
48 48
overdue.’
49 49
Harney and Moten (2013: 26)
50 50
51 51
The challenges to the university in supporting practices of ‘epistemic justice’
52 52
appear vast. As we write, the higher education sector in the UK remains locked into
53 53
 EPISTEMIC JUSTICE AND THE UNIVERSITY 12

exhaustive rounds of strike action, our employers committing to ever-­more punitive

1 1
measures in response to calls for more equitable working conditions, acknowledgement
2 2
of racial and gender pay gaps and precarious and zero-­hour contracts. In Australia, high-­
3 3
profile cases have recently revealed and made important financial claims on the extent
4 4
and devastating impacts of casualization and underpayment on the sector.6 This
5 5
precarity and unsustainability of working conditions more generally, with the invisibility
6 6
or lack of recognition of the work involved in justice-­oriented research, and operational
7 7
constraints in university systems and procedures create interlocking challenges. Deeper
8 8
still are the tensions linked with the commodification of knowledge and ongoing imagery
9 9
of the university as the producer of ‘expert’ knowledge, and the (im)possibilities of
10 10
activating equitable partnerships within such legacies.
11 11
However, here we take inspiration from Liboiron (2021), who in turn draws
12 12
upon the words of Schuurman and Pratt (2002), in calling for a critique of the broader
13 13
paradigms and systems which structure the academy: ‘To be constructive, critique must
14 14
care for the subject’. So, with this sense of care, how can institutions make epistemic
15 15
justice the core of how they function? How can academic precariats be better supported
16 16
so that knowledge from disenfranchized and marginalized groups are not silenced? How
17 17
can we, individually and collectively, extend criticality to care for/with our research
18 18
partners, particularly those operating on the urban margins? How can we reclaim the
19 19
university?
20 20
We do not see this as a point to declare a manifesto, a grand gesture of a
21 21
revolution, of overturning academia. Yet rather, following from the notion of inhabiting
22 22
and subverting through everyday actions, tactics and heuristics, we, as academics
23 23
embedded in the ‘system’, see multiple opportunities to extend critique to care in
24 24
our lived entanglements in the academy. Perhaps, a useful imaginary to hold these
25 25
subversions, stealings and squattings—various modes of resisting what academia has
26 26
become—is the notion of an ‘everyday rebellion’, drawn from the recent work of Simone
27 27
(Shrestha et al., 2023). Reclaiming urban praxis, through a thousand cuts, then does not
28 28
offer a teleological vantage point to aim for, but rather is a call for all of us to actively
29 29
seek ways to transcend the traps we have captured in this essay. This allows an opening
30 30
up, an activation of the agencies that we do possess even within our limited precariat
31 31
conditions, rather than lamenting the lack of just structures in universities. Our granular
32 32
‘otherwise’ actions (Escobar, 2007) over time sediment an alternative performative
33 33
ground for future precariats to further the rebellion.
34 34
As such, given the intrinsically democratic and participatory nature of our call
35 35
to actions, we refrain from setting their terms—rather trusting that the reader can use
36 36
this piece as a reflective device for their own everyday entanglements. However, we
37 37
end with three ‘intentionalities’—reflecting again from our positions as urban scholars
38 38
to offer hints as to the pathways for emancipatory urban praxis. We return to the three
39 39
calls of the urban as a site of intervention, the propositional potential of the urban
40 40
discipline and the university as an urban actor to give direction to our collective efforts
41 41
as researchers—desires that act as a commoning apparatus—and the actions that they
42 42
may encourage. We leave them open:
43 43
44 44
1. The urban as a site of emancipatory intervention—to engage in our urban sites
45 45
with an orientation towards emancipatory praxis is to commit the role of our
46 46
research in going beyond knowledge production, to engage with politics on
47 47
the ground (Benson and Nagar, 2006). As urban researchers, this means close
48 48
attention to the spatial—material groundedness of our research in urban settings
49 49
and how we may build ‘situated solidarities’ (Nagar and Geiger, 2007) with those
50 50
51 51
52 6 For example, see: https://​www.​afr.​com/​work-​and-​caree​rs/​workp​lace/​wage-​theft-​rife-​in-​unive​rsity-​sector-​report-​ 52
20230​217-​p5cld3.
53 53
 INTERVENTIONS 13

on the margins of urban struggles. Such efforts require attention and investment
1 1
in practices which can build and sustain allyships: recognizing our own privilege,
2 2
supporting and amplifying the voices of the groups we work alongside, making
3 3
space for our allies to drive research agendas and outputs, and continuous self-­
4 4
reflection and learning from those outside academia to actively challenge our
5 5
own biases and engage in transformative research. While recognizing that it
6 6
may not be pragmatic to sustain traditional forms of direct involvement over a
7 7
longer period, we may still explore more feasible, yet more meaningful, forms
8 8
of engagements that may use universities as a site of a shared ground to foster
9 9
allyship. Concretely, forms of emancipatory praxis to build and sustain allyships
10 10
might entail engaging in ethical collective writing and theorizing that help
11 11
ongoing struggles in our sites of scholarship, producing diverse outputs beyond
12 12
traditional academic writing that are accessible and actionable and can support
13 13
the ongoing struggles, keeping the writing grounded by allowing our allies to
14 14
review, setting up protocols for accountability, making visible the different
15 15
forms of labour that underpin knowledge production, rewiring the resources of
16 16
the university by engaging local partners as active collaborators, representing
17 17
allies in networks otherwise outside of their reach, allocating sufficient time for
18 18
working on joint funding and designing our research agendas around desired
19 19
grounded impact. We propose that such practices can move beyond parachute
20 20
scholarship and extractive knowledge relations towards imagining the university
21 21
as undercommons that channels resources towards the allies (Harney and
22 22
Moten, 2013). However, allyship also needs to take root and grow within the
23 23
academy—across disciplines, across departments, across committees, across
24 24
generations of scholars, with particular care for ECRs. It means creating a work
25 25
environment that values collaboration, collegiality and solidarity, a space where
26 26
creative and critical thinking is encouraged, with institutional support to engage
27 27
in such ‘non-­traditional’ forms of research and action. Preaching and practising
28 28
allyship can easily thrive in a healthy and supportive intellectual community. Such
29 29
strategies require revisiting (and recommitting to) the fundamental role of the
30 30
university as a site that cultivates independent scholarship for public good and
31 31
produces knowledge that helps to confront the broader forms of social injustice.
32 32
2. The emancipatory potential of the urban discipline—re-­asserting the projective
33 33
potential of the urban planning discipline requires moving beyond Anglophone
34 34
and Northern hegemonic worldviews, to embrace pluriversal possibilities. This
35 35
involves asking if our research can enable the different worlds to come into
36 36
relations of ontologies and epistemologies otherwise, allowing for a decolonial
37 37
agency to take hold and allow developing their own terms of reference. We
38 38
heed Benson and Nagar’s (2006: 584) call for collaboration as resistance, where
39 39
‘meaning forged through dialogue is not necessarily arrived at through agreement
40 40
and shared perspective but can evolve from constructive disagreements’. If we can
41 41
imagine a broader and more diverse set of audiences for our research intentions,
42 42
impacts and outputs, then our research also becomes more diverse. In the sense
43 43
of everyday rebellions, embracing pluriversal possibilities might take the shape
44 44
of actively citing and using references that highlight marginalized discourses
45 45
and voices, framing research questions not from a singular set of prevalent
46 46
values, publishing in other languages, privileging the local by using their own
47 47
terms and building theory from spaces outside the academy. Underpinning these
48 48
approaches is the insistence on resisting universalizing urban theory, centring
49 49
the particularities of the postcolonial condition in an institutional and global
50 50
environment that feels it is increasingly narrowing its commitments to the
51 51
majority world. Here we can take cues from urban researchers who have enquired
52 52
what is shared and what is specific across worlds—as in the interrogation from
53 53
 EPISTEMIC JUSTICE AND THE UNIVERSITY 14

the ‘East’ in framings of the ‘South’ (Shin, 2021), exploring shared exchange,
1 1
but also holding space for difference. We call for universities to become sites for
2 2
many different urban worlds and to move beyond a re-­circulation of Northern
3 3
urban theories produced in a few cities towards a future of hosting suppressed
4 4
ontologies and histories from urban majority worlds, past and present.
5 5
3. The university as an emancipatory urban actor—acknowledging that our
6 6
universities are made through our research, reclaiming the university as an
7 7
emancipatory actor requires re-­examination of not just the institution, but also
8 8
ourselves. Beyond the engagement in a set of ethical tick-­boxes for us to fill,
9 9
at the core of our call is a desire to interrogate our own praxis, cultivating a
10 10
reflexive ethos of inquiry. Articulating such an epistemic standpoint echoes Bhan
11 11
et al.’s (2018) reminder to interrogate how personal geographies shape the way
12 12
we understand and frame the geographies of knowledge and resonates with a long
13 13
tradition of feminist research that asks the researcher to sit with ‘relationality,
14 14
discomfort, vulnerability, and encounter’ (Kern and McLean, 2017). To articulate
15 15
a reflexive ethos of inquiry involves situating one’s epistemic entanglement with
16 16
our sites of scholarship. This might entail alternative research protocols built
17 17
with communities, nurturing spaces for mentorship and sharing on complex
18 18
ethical challenges, making visible in our writing and our sharing of the ethically
19 19
important moments in our research, exploring the politics of knowledge in
20 20
our research and teaching and embracing our research biases, activisms and
21 21
positionalities. Such practices, as urban researchers, act as ethical benchmarking
22 22
even when we do engage across pluriversal worlds and with many different allies.
23 23
Yet beyond our individual or collective research practices, emancipatory praxis
24 24
also requires interrogation of the kinds of spatial interventions, communities
25 25
or agendas our universities align with. That is, while our own research may
26 26
undergo operational forms of ethical scrutiny, the practices of our university
27 27
may not. Institutionally, this includes moving beyond tokenistic diversity and
28 28
inclusion regimes and critically examining curricula to include diverse voices
29 29
and perspectives, ensuring fair representation in leadership and decision-­making
30 30
processes, dismantling systemic barriers and implementing policies that support
31 31
underrepresented groups. Spatially, it requires attention to ongoing processes
32 32
of displacement, gentrification and enclosure that continue in spite of (or sit
33 33
comfortably alongside) anti-­or decolonial scholarship, and crucially, critically
34 34
examining the investments and endowments of our universities, pushing for
35 35
transparency and accountability to ensure divestment from partners whose
36 36
practices lead to environmental degradation, social inequality and exploitative
37 37
labour practices and who are complicit in ongoing colonial extraction and
38 38
genocide. Such contradictions remind us that we operate from within bureaucratic
39 39
knowledge institutions that may reduce or limit emancipatory intentions, and
40 40
therefore, we need to be cautious with espousing values of pluriversality and
41 41
allyships, even while committing to urban struggles. Yet it is also necessary to
42 42
recognize that even as we labour under different metrics of excellence, there is
43 43
always space to intervene in and re-­orient the political economy of knowledge of
44 44
the university.
45 45
46 46
We hope that these provocations can help us in making visible and making
47 47
possible the commitments that sustain us in our scholarship, and which can reclaim
48 48
the university for its radical potential as a site of emancipatory urban praxis, as space
49 49
to practice, examine and challenge our ideas of epistemic justice. Ultimately, beyond
50 50
protocols and regimens, beyond prescriptions of action, we end with the questions
51 51
that remain at the core of our call, that we hope reverberate across academia toward
52 52
emancipatory ends: for and with whom do we produce knowledge; how do we measure
53 53
 INTERVENTIONS 15

our own impact; why do we pursue certain forms of academic engagement; what lies
1 1
behind our inquiry; what keeps us loving what we do; and as urban scholars, how and to
2 2
what extent do we advance calls for justice within and outside our universities?
3 3
4 4
Stephanie Butcher, School of Geography and Planning, Sheffield University,
5 5
Sheffield S3 7ND, UK, [email protected]
6 6
7 7
Tanzil Shafique, School of Architecture and Landscape, Sheffield University,
8 8
Sheffield S10 2TN, UK, [email protected]
9 9
10 10
Redento Recio, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City 1101, Metro
11 11
Manila, Philippines, [email protected]
12 12
13 13
Ishita Chatterjee, OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana 131001, India,
14 14
[email protected]
15 15
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