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This chapter offers an analysis of the power dynamics of practising epistemic justice in research, by examining the spaces created for collaborative knowledge production about Rwanda. Drawing on reflections on the Rwanda Diaspora Youth Partnership Programme (RDYPP), a one-year participatory study seeking to understand how British youth from Rwandese backgrounds experienced engagement with post-genocide reconstruction, we argue that co-created spaces can work towards producing scholarship that is ‘organic to the contexts’ (Nhemachena et al, 2016) while also centring multiple epistemic contributors as part of a critical and pluralized academic landscape. However, we also acknowledge the inherent tensions and tradeoffs associated with the influence of academic environments and the day-to-day spaces of collaborators’ lives. We conclude by emphasizing the potential of collaboration as a tool for intersubjective learning and un-learning within networks of differently positioned knowledge holders, and therefore as vital for disrupting the pre-existing frameworks that contribute to epistemic injustices in Rwandan research.
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