Citizen knowledge

Who owns knowledge? We always have to understand that knowledge is related to power. Those who are powerful tend to be able to impose their ideas about what knowledge is on others. That means that the frameworks which underpin knowledge can also be imposed by one group on another group.

Does this matter? It does matter because, for example, we have one way of understanding the economy which has been imposed right across the world. And that way of understanding the economy has had a disastrous impact, for example, on African economies.

If we look back to the history of Africa—let's just take the 1980s as an example—many countries in sub-Saharan Africa were doing well. And at that point, it was decided that the World Bank and the IMF were going to impose what were called structural adjustment conditions, in order to reshape the economies of Africa according to a model which those institutions had created of how an economy should work. That was really to facilitate the expansion of European economies into Africa, and to control the investment conditions for that expansion. It was never really intended to improve African economies.

When we talk about decolonizing knowledge today, that is a very complex field of interaction. One of the important points here is the way in which scholars from the Global South have taken up this point that even the most obvious frameworks for understanding the world—social science frameworks, for example—what is the individual, what is a society, what is an appropriate method for research—these very basic underpinning assumptions in social research come from a particular kind of perspective, developed in a particular context.

They may be appropriate in that context, but they have almost certainly been imposed on other ways of thinking in ways that disconnect those alternatives from having any meaningful impact on broader academic discussions. And that is very important: understanding how that process has worked.

There have been lots of economists in Africa, for example, who have commented on the importance of decolonizing economics: moving away from this idea of the individual rational subject as the agent in economic systems, and instead understanding economic systems as animated by people's relationality, rather than by individual aspiration or agency. There can be many ways in which decolonizing knowledge works. Another is to understand how forms of advancement in academic life depend on how well you implement current and endorsed frameworks for understanding the world.

I always think, as a social anthropologist, that it is wise to remember that there are definite limits to your expertise as an academic. And I think that in many areas of life we have seen this. For example, people have done brilliant work showing that if you are a brain surgeon, part of the issue of whether your patients recover from the brain surgery you are able to offer them will depend on how well they are situated in networks of support and care. It will not just be about what you can do in the operation itself.

That is the case with academic frameworks in general. If you come from the outside and take a bird's-eye view of what is happening in any community, or on the ground, or in any society or country, what you are going to do is miss what is actually happening at the level of ordinary, everyday living.

Communities produce knowledge in very many different ways. Most communities are actually managing different knowledge frameworks simultaneously. You will be aware, for example, that if we are talking about the knowledge that exists about managing a herd of sheep in rural France, this is not what is being taught in local schools in France. Nobody ever talks about how to manage a herd of sheep in those circumstances—and they do not do so in any other country in the world either.

On the one hand, you are learning how to manage resources, you are learning how animals will do, you know what you are doing when you are farming. But on the other hand, you are also picking up other kinds of frameworks. You might be studying Aristotle, or studying how to organize economic systems, or studying how wavelengths work. There are many things you can learn in school which do not immediately overlap with what you are learning where you are living and operating in other spheres. And many humans are doing this. They do not just do it with knowledge systems, but do it on the interface between knowledge and belief systems.

Citizen science is a very powerful way of bringing residents in communities into discussion—not just with academics, but with local policymakers. For citizen scientists themselves, being trained to work as part of research teams gives them a kind of dual perspective on the circumstances they are in. It allows them to reflect on how things have arisen, what could be changed, and how things could happen differently. It also brings them into a more authoritative position in their reconnection with local authorities. This is hugely important because it allows people to develop their capacities and capabilities—their ability to do research. I strongly believe that most people, in most communities around the world, have the ability to do research.

The university of the 21st century is very different from the university of the 20th century. The university of the 20th century was a place that thought it understood what was happening in the world—that it understood the forces driving the world, that it understood what modernity was, and that there was an increase in rationalization and rational thinking. It supported, for the most part, individualism. The university of the 21st century realizes that it is operating in a different context. There are two key differences.

The first is that people themselves want to be part of expert knowledge. They do not expect simply to be told what expert knowledge is. They want not just to participate in it, but to be part of its construction and governance. When you look at alternative forms of democratic working—for example, citizen assemblies, where people come together to discuss issues such as how to tackle climate change or how to approach green energy transformation—you see the immense appetite people have to be involved in these processes.