Co-producing just geographies: Resourcing,bridging,and critical crossings in engaged scholarship

Abstract

In this commentary, we argue for the continued importance of engaged scholarship to the futures of geographical thought and praxis. In drawing on our own situated research and teaching lives in Cape Town, we suggest three avenues to advance the future possibilities of this mode of work: ‘resourcing prefiguration’, ‘bridging incommensurability’, and ‘critical institutional praxis’. We offer these as our contribution to advancing scholarship committed to making knowledge more alive to the world and acting in support of socio-political struggle and emancipatory geographic futures.

Introduction

Our world is defined by immense inequality and growing precarity, resulting from the systemic crisis of (contemporary) capitalism. More often than not, spectacular and endemic crises are not neatly separatable, forcing an increasing number of people to engage in everyday practices of survival. This is the condition of the Black majority in Cape Town, South Africa, one of the most unequal and racially segregated cities in the world (Turok et al., 2021). In this city, which we call home, collective life-making is stepping in to fill the gaps produced by historical and ongoing exploitation and unequal provisioning. This everyday labor is foundational to life and survival, yet exhausting, unequally distributed, and perpetuates racialized and gendered relations of care and depletion. At the same time, political struggles toward the realization of more just geographic futures continue. In writing from this place, as privileged individuals working within academic institutions, ¹ we feel an ethical and embodied sense of responsibility to leverage our positions in solidarity with these struggles in Cape Town, and elsewhere in the world.

In agreement with Routledge and Derickson (2015) on the importance of ‘being moved’ as scholars, we register our own deep emotional responses to a world in crisis to act toward politically transformative effects. As such, we locate ourselves within wider efforts toward scholar-activism and engaged scholarship. We take specific inspiration from our South African colleagues, who have been central to advancing this commitment to reworking processes and relations of knowledge co-production (Oldfield and Patel, 2016; Patel, 2022; Parnell et al., 2009). These scholars have argued for modes of theory and praxis defined by active immersion in, rather than distant critical observation of, messy and complex life-worlds. The common imperative, despite varied forms, is to bridge gaps between researcher and researched as well as theory and praxis. As Patel (2022: 1) suggests, ‘[t]here is increasing acceptance that transformative change in cities must be shaped by the co-production of knowledge between diverse partners’. In agreement with Stephens and Bagelman (2023), we are interested in contributing to thinking about the limits, promises, and possibilities of pursuing engaged scholarship. Building on this literature and reflecting on our situated research and teaching lives, we offer three practices that have emerged as central to our own work. We offer these as our contribution to the future possibilities of engaged scholarship: ‘resourcing prefiguration’, ‘bridging incommensurability’, and ‘critical institutional praxis’.

Resourcing prefiguration

Over the last three years, we have converged within a larger project, ‘City Occupied’, that aims to bring into conversation the practices and possibilities of urban land/building occupations in Bogota, Cape Town, and São Paulo. The work in Cape Town, the inspiration for this reflection, has centered around Cissie Gool House (CGH), formerly the Woodstock Hospital. The largely vacant building was occupied in 2017 by the housing justice movement, Reclaim the City, in the context of gentrification and a housing affordability crisis (Cirolia et al., 2021). In focusing on the occupation, we have sought to co-produce knowledge outputs that enquire into, and serve as tools in supporting, the prefigurative potential of occupation as a transgressive act. Importantly, these prefigurative practices are already central to the ongoing endurance of the occupation. Our contribution has been to offer available resources in support of these. In this work, we have been careful to not romanticize occupation but equally concerned to not contribute to myopic narratives of Black suffering. Instead, we have sought to offer solidarity to unfolding political struggles that center an ethics of care, paying attention to their contribution to imagining and making alternative life-worlds. This approach has led us to a form of scholarship which values engagement, modesty, improvization, and experimentation. The notion of ‘situated solidarities’ (Routledge and Derickson, 2015) does well in capturing the ways in which we have sought to engage. Slow and steady and necessarily adaptive.

The initial focus of our engagement was on documenting personal histories and existing practices to contribute to shifting the discourse around occupations and occupiers. Occupiers wanted to counter criminalizing discourses by showing the humanity of and in the occupation. One output from this process is a ‘zine’ (mini magazine) that captures the histories and brief reflections from 14 residents, developed as a photographic portrait-style output (City Occupied Collective, 2021). A second output, developed in collaboration with filmmaker Sara Gouveia, has been a short documentary (City Occupied Collective, 2022), that offers a glimpse into three occupations located in Bogota, Cape Town, and São Paulo (both outputs are available at www.city-occupied.net).

With the zine and documentary, we co-produced outputs that circulate in multiple spaces, mobilized by multiple others, with the possibility of resourcing a material politics of change. As other geographers have shown, co-producing creative outputs like a zine or documentary presents us with powerful opportunities to support socio-political struggle (Bagelman and Bagelman, 2016; Stephens and Bagelman, 2023). These outputs have the potential to set in motion openings toward dialogue and counter-narratives. In our case, the utility of both the zine and documentary became most apparent when occupiers and social movements used these as tools for advocacy. The zine was quickly distributed, widely shared, and referred to in social media and newspaper articles. The documentary has been screened in CGH, and other activist and academic spaces in Cape Town, São Paulo, and Bogota. Both have become valuable in resourcing dialogues, counter-visions, and prefigurative politics.

More recently, we have begun to work with leadership structures of CGH and other occupations, social movements, and NGOs to support the construction of a counter-vision for the house in response to the city's more exclusionary vision of third-party managed social housing. Our engagement continues to evolve but is cohering around producing knowledge outputs that support community dialogues, capturing the material and affective labor of residents in the repairing and remaking of the occupation as a home, and conducting comparative research in support of a more inclusive future imagination for the house.

Bridging incommensurable regimes

Engaged scholarship can unfold in varied forms with multiple sites and actors. Alongside collaboration with sites of activism and political struggle (central to our work with CGH), engagement can also include knowledge co-production with local authorities in sites of policy-making (Oldfield and Patel, 2016). These varied forms of engagement assume distinct configurations of partner relations, priorities, and politics. Inspired by our own research practice in working across ‘community’ and policy spaces in Cape Town, we argue that these sites of engagements can feel incommensurable. While policy spaces can be important avenues for achieving societal change, ² their constitutive nature and mode of operation also limit their transformative potential. Here we refer to our engagements in public policy fora and discussions, but also meetings with city officials, policy-focused stakeholder workshops, and informal conversations.

One fundamental reason for this dissonance relates to the politics and erasures enacted through expertise. The landscape of policy-making is predominantly defined by expertise that remains impenetrable to the majority, with these interventions potentially functioning to both invisibilize and de-legitimize the insurgent planning practices and knowledges of the majority (Miraftab, 2009; Nagar, 2019). At the same time, policy-focused discussions bring in a certain type of ‘language’ that rarely questions hegemonic norms, hierarchies, and deep-seated historical structural processes. Instead, problem-oriented conversations remain within the constrained realms of what is deemed possible, ideally identifying solutions with immediate impact and results. This narrowing of imagination is deeply problematic. Nonetheless, we contend that these spaces remain vital for engagement, intervention, and transformation. Policy and state are too important to be left alone. In adopting this position, we recognize that this raises foundational questions for the boundary-crossing scholar. Moving between spaces of insurgency and official imaginations, is it possible to converse within and across apparently incommensurable landscapes? Is there room for policy co-production to contribute to embodied solidarities? What role and responsibility does the boundary-crossing scholar have?

In response, we suggest that there remains potential for bridging activist and policy-centered modes of co-production into a generative dialogue. We have begun this work in partnership with Cape Town-based housing justice organizations (e.g. Reclaim the City, Ndifuna Ukwazi, Development Action Group), which contribute to reshaping narratives and shifting policies in the city. At the same time, we acknowledge that this is exhausting, slow, and complex work. In reflecting on our own positionality, we believe that mobilizing scholarly efforts in support of bridging and translating across these sites is politically significant, and a meaningful expression of solidarity and commitment to social justice. In advancing this position, we borrow from Nagar's (2019) notion of translation, asking: ‘What might it take to re-imagine translation as a dynamic, multidirectional process of ethical and politically aware mediation among otherwise impermeable local diversities – a process that always hungers for new political possibilities that we may never have imagined before?’

We suggest that an important responsibility of the scholar, afforded the privilege of moving across spaces of co-production, is to commit to being disruptive in expert spaces, continuously asking, ‘whose tones and accents remain unheard and unacknowledged in our scripts?’ (Nagar, 2019: 3). To act in solidarity, we should continuously struggle to mobilize privilege, tools, and an assumed authority to make knowledge claims, to carefully destabilize institutionalized logics of expertise that may oppress the majority. There is room to undertake this work, through collaboration with each other and sympathetic authorities, if guided by a commitment to justice, and a bravery to enact necessary agitation. This near impossible and exhausting labor of bridging across incommensurable regimes remains important as a space for composing alternative worlds.

Critical institutional praxis

Finally, in the current moment, engaged scholarship is unfolding in the neoliberalized academy where politically engaged research is either discouraged or channeled through carefully constructed impact matrices. In this context, to engage within and across the university is to equally engage in the daily practice and struggle of ‘enacting the university as we want it to be’ (Rasch et al., 2022). Patel (2022) argues that to effectively leverage the potential of collaboration, multiple shifts are needed. These include systems change within and across academic and partner institutions, funding shifts, and a re-conceptualization of the form of engagement across institutional domains. Aligning ourselves with struggles against systems of oppression, as well as against the ways in which these power asymmetries are reproduced within our institutions, are key to transformations in the university and beyond (Chari et al., 2022). This includes carefully planning and pursuing practices of research, teaching, writing, and collaboration beyond the institution. It also includes conscious citational practices, and solidarity with local colleagues and collaborators. This is work that demands care, modesty, and time in shaping institutional relations, and hopefully more emancipatory geographies.

Conclusion

In this commentary, we have sought to make visible our scholarly labor, struggles, and philosophical commitments that have come to shape our engaged scholarship. We offer and reflect on three tenets – ‘resourcing prefiguration’, ‘bridging incommensurability’, and ‘critical institutional praxis’ – as central research avenues in contributing to the making of more just future geographies. We locate them within a scholarship that is guided by a commitment to care and love as radical acts in the academy (Daya, 2022). Importantly, there are existing examples of these shifts, concerned to enact situated solidarities and re-envision institutional praxis and relations, with effect (see Benson and Karunananthan, 2022, for one powerful illustration). These are the practices we should valorize in geography as a discipline and in the composition of emancipatory presents and futures.