Can the Subaltern speak through WhatsApp?: Exploring Epistemic Resistance through Knowledge/Labour

• In Event: Challenges in qualitative research I

Abstract

‘This question is useless, because it’s obvious that discrimination and racism are very common in this country,’ one Syrian refugee told us. He was not the only one who felt that we were asking ‘useless’ questions. Reflecting on four qualitative WhatsApp surveys of Syrian refugees and Lebanese host communities that I conducted with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Lebanon between 2017 and 2021, this paper will show how asking ‘useless’ questions can nonetheless produce important insights into relations of knowledge production under colonial capitalist conditions. Rather than asking what knowledge production does to the subaltern – empower or disempower them – as much decolonial criminological scholarship does, this paper asks what the subaltern does in knowledge production, in other words, what is their role as knowledge labourers? Indeed, knowledge is not a thing that the powerful create, possess or steal. Neither is it merely a tool of governance that exists apart from those it governs. Instead, knowledge is always a co-production even if an exploitative one. By placing Marxist-Feminist standpoint theory in conversation with decolonial criminological scholarship, this paper argues that knowledge production is better understood as a form of social reproduction labour, more akin to the domestic labour women perform at home, some of which is visible and paid, but most of it is invisible and unpaid. By studying those relations of knowledge production, we also learn how they can be challenged and changed not necessarily through our conscious design choices as individual researchers but through the everyday resistance of our research participants. By illuminating the relationship between knowledge, work and resistance as it played out through the WhatsApp survey, the paper offers a conceptualization of epistemic resistance as knowledge/labour which could be useful for criminologists who are interested in moving beyond the predominantly normative debate of the decolonial turn.

Author

• Leila Ullrich, Leila.Ullrich@crim.ox.ac.uk