Centering living knowledges in migration studies and community-centric praxis: A letter to students, accountability partners & future builders

• In Event: Part 1: Advancing peace, justice and human rights through community-engaged praxis in education

Proposal

Western education has perpetuated a perceived hierarchy of knowledge that positions Eurocentric knowledge as legitimate and others not. In this presentation, I highlight related harm that manifests in praxis and everyday lives within migrant communities. I introduce what I call living knowledges (author, in press) and explore possibilities for disruption and more just futures through community-engaged scholarship (CES) when we can listen and learn from those living knowledges.
Assumptions around knowledge legitimacy inform explicit/implicit biases in even the most well meaning researcher, practitioner, policymaker, funder, student, teacher, and others who may acknowledge someone’s ‘lived experiences' while simultaneously not seeing related knowledge. In mainstream refugee/migration studies and praxis, it seems that references to ‘lived experiences’ are often presented as time and/or experientially bound and trivialized to a dominant understanding of the ‘refugee experience’. However, human experiences span beyond time and place and are not necessarily time bound. Through memories and postmemories (Hirsch, 2012), they continue into the future as they also reach into the past. They are organic, evolving and living and contribute to future knowledge generation.
In this presentation, I argue for the critical importance of seeing and learning from these living knowledges (where appropriate) in community-engaged scholarship to better understand deeply-rooted and pervasive structural violences that show up in research, policies, praxis, and the everyday lives of migrant communities. Without this critical layer, we risk maintaining ‘inclusive practices’ at a superficial level masking the depth of oppressive practices that continue to harm communities.

Author

• Jane Pak, Refugee & Immigrant Transitions; University of San Francisco