I (Angela Okune) began to conceptualize establishing an instance of PECE in the middle of 2018, about 6 months prior to beginning my fieldwork in Nairobi in January 2019. I conceptualized the development of the RDS qualitative data archive under three distinct rationales. First, I saw it as an elicitation device and grounds for collaborative discussion and engagement, imagining that the deliberations about the archive that I would have with those in the field would be a basis for my learning. Second, it was an attempt to produce something of value to informants and respond to ethical questions regarding feelings of being “over-researched” in Nairobi that I had started my project with. At the very least, I imagined I could give a transcript and/or audio recording from the research encounter back to my interlocutor. Third, I anticipated that key questions would emerge through my own process of building and studying that would be valuable.
Over the course of the research, I found research data provided scaffolding upon which I could investigate the politics of knowledge production in Africa at its many scales. By intentionally forming an ethnographic data platform to both study and use myself, I reconfigured my relationship with the topic as well as my relationship with interlocutors, enacting a new form of collaborative ethnography that took my own complicity in the structures of knowledge as a starting point for theorizing how researchers might better navigate, organize and re-mix existing collections of data. Focusing on an object – data – that resulted from but was not of the researcher/researched relationship opened up discussions beyond critique and set in motion a new set of social relations to study. It also situated me squarely as a participant in the production of the very things I was studying.
The archiving that RDS seeks to practice is not simply to “save” or “preserve” but primarily to provide grounds for further questions, working with people to take care of the data while also documenting to understand the processes, relations and considerations at play. The point of this kind of an archive is to scaffold a deutero capacity to think about the world and support a rethinking of habituated ways of understanding the world. Instead of worrying over the sharing of data for greater reproducibility or transparency, I echo Indigenous STS scholar Michelle Murphy who asks us to think about the infrastructures of relation that make some kinds of flourishing possible and other kinds of flourishing not possible (Kasdogan 2018). I see the technical scaffolding provided by RDS as offering continued ties across space and time. The archive does not promise to be comprehensive or representative. It is not expressly designed to focus on particular topics but rather, its contents will be determined by those who invest the time in working on it. For now that has been myself (depositing my own research data on social science research in Kenya), and other Kenya-based researchers who have been collaborating on a project archiving experiences of COVID-19 in Kenya.
Nairobi is and has been a city fragmented by race and class (Wanjiru and Matsubara 2017). This is not a coincidence but by design. The city emerged as a nexus for capital–the East African trading company preceded the development of the city--and Nairobi was established to help further its business. The city’s first colonial planners established the city not as a residence for Africans, but as a residence for themselves, white colonial bureaucrats. Housing was built for the clerks and other African men required to run the city but the housing was intentionally small and not meant for entire families but rather for individual men. This changed as the winds of decolonization began to sweep in the 1950s. Fed up with the excessive and degrading policies of the white settlers, the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) or popularly known as Mau Mau, Kenya’s independence movement led resistance against the colonial settlers. In 1963, Kenya gained national independence from Great Britain but the new African leaders also inherited a system of entrenched structural racism, embedded in national policies, the build environment, and alterity entrenched in internalized concepts such as “tribe”.
While many of the explicit aspects of these systems were dismantled, there remain traces of structural racism that scholars like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Shiraz Durrani, and other resistance writers have called out. The RDS archive is inspired by the long-standing tradition of Kenyan resistance (see Durrani’s work for more details) and intertwines this history to call for more conscious and careful contemporary research work that understands Kenya not just in terms of deficiency narratives but also with its long history of resistance and transnational entanglements. This kind of temporal contextualization is often missing from development work that is quickly done in the country and so a rich archive of materials that help to remind researchers of this recent past could help (continue) to intervene in narratives about the country. Here we see ourselves in alignment with a new cadre of Kenyan digital humanities specialists working in the Nairobi library and archives ecosystem such as the African Digital Heritage initiative (https://africandigitalheritage.com/), focusing on the application of technology in the preservation, engagement and dissemination of African heritage; the Museum of British Colonialism (https://www.museumofbritishcolonialism.org/) which has digitally recreated Mau Mau detention camps; Wer JoKenya (https://www.werjokenya.com/), an online journal that seeks to document, highlight, protect, and celebrate Kenya's diverse musical history; and Paukwa (https://paukwa.or.ke/), a counter-narrative online library of Kenya’s histories.
This archive was designed against the growing commercial encroachment of public knowledge commons. I saw open research data (governance) as an incredibly important and time-sensitive issue while observing the growing interest by private corporate actors both on the academic side (Wiley digitized and took over management of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland archives in 2018) and Big Tech side (Google’s Arts and Culture program has been digitizing Kenyan cultural heritage). We need to pay attention to who owns (and is trying to own) these data and knowledge infrastructures and figure out how we can get out in front of what is a much bigger growing commercial encroachment on digital public spaces for civic knowledge work.
The main users are probably researchers who have collected data in/about Kenya. They may be based outside of Kenya but would like to “repatriate” their data to so that those in Kenya may be able to easily find and re-use it. However, in developing RDS content with other Nairobi-based researchers, I realized that the geographic boundaries of RDS quickly scale out. There are many researchers living and working in Kenya who collect data beyond the Kenyan borders (in East African countries, other African countries, and even beyond, including India, Fiji, and Mexico). For now, I have said that if people are interested in including data collected outside of Kenya that is okay but the primary intent is to share data that relates to Kenya, broadly construed.
Another potential user group are those who have participated in research studies who may be interested in understanding what research data has been captured. In this case, I imagine research participants approached by someone looking to study fintech in Kenya, for example, could direct them to view the transcript of an interview hosted on RDS that the interloctuor may have already been part of previously. “Please review this transcript prior to interviewing me again” is something I could imagine a potential interviewee telling an interviewer prior to meeting them for an interview. Of course this imagines a particular interviewee, but I don’t think, given the heavily saturated research topics and relatively small group of key stakeholder actors working on those topics in Nairobi, for example, that this imaginary use of RDS is a stretch. Most of the key actors working in Nairobi technology continue to be regularly contacted to participate in research and media interviews so I imagine uploaded transcripts to RDS would provide helpful hyperlinks that could be sent to a potential interviewer in advance.
Yes, definitely. The archive provides the technical scaffolding for articulating ourselves as a community of scholar activists / activist scholars interested in exploring what it might look like to decolonize knowledge infrastructure and create relations and systems that are regenerative rather than extractive. It’s not to say that the people who are part of the RDS archive were not already doing important work on these topics. But coming together to articulate a collective interest and goals is an attempt to create space for an ongoing conversation and experimentation for new ways to address what is seen as a long-standing issue.
As a research interlocutor (who is now an active member of RDS) mentioned in a recorded interview that we had prior to the establishment of the RDS working group: “I feel so...I feel so alone. Like I'm a solo voice. And I feel deeply I'm speaking something that makes sense. But I just feel because I'm solo. I'm not in an institution of higher learning, [or] in a very big institution, I feel my voice may not be heard. So I...it's either I use this [RDS digital platform] to, to sort of amplify my voice or see how I can create a community of... but it's kind of...feels so slowly... it feels so big for me. But so important. So I mean that... And maybe this is how...one way my voice as a solo person, interested in higher education...because normally people approached it as institutionally, let's solve this but as an individual, I still feel you can see a problem in...in an institution and want to do something but maybe this is one way…” (EA-KW-A-M-03 7:10).
Like Tim mentioned here when he reflected on this same set of questions in the context of his Formosa Archive, I don’t want to discount the important work already going on. In Kenya, critiques regarding asymmetric knowledge relations have been circulating (for quite some time now). For some recent examples, see this 2019 event, which I attended in person and this event which, under COVID-times was largely attended virtually. That said, although global knowledge asymmetries are familiar to the Kenyan public, the public that the RDS archive aspires to create is one that pulls in these various actors into a bigger heterogenous group that speaks across disciplinary differences and expertise. We are also walking the tight-rope between both critical study of and attempts at producing something different differently.
After sharing a collaboration agreement (Okune 2019a) with the three research groups within the first few months of fieldwork (January through March 2019), I was given access to a variety of qualitative data, especially digital transcripts of one-on-one interviews and group discussions; photographs; coded summaries of data; final reports; and interview guides. Of this data, I selected one sample from each of the three organizations, anonymized the text (if it was not already), and uploaded it to the RDS platform with any available context as meta-data. I then used this data sample as an elicitation device for initial interviews (Okune 2019b) and found the exercise helpful to ground what can often end up as an abstract conversation about morals and ethics. Here is an example of such a “data interview.”
While I initially intended to start organizational archives for each of the research groups I worked with in Nairobi, I quickly came to realize that doing so was outside of the scope of what I could achieve during my limited time. There was also significant risk that, unless the work was done by those within the research organization itself, upon being handed over to the organization, such archival collections would quickly become static and unused. Thus, I did not focus my efforts on doing this but rather on engaging in dialogue and beginning to create a cross-organizational community of practice who could engage on these issues. One of the research groups I did fieldwork with did in fact become interested in running their own PECE instance and established it in the second half of 2019. However, it appears to have been hard for them to maintain their instance.
The RDS archive includes
Photos and Visuals (jpegs, pngs): photos from events; field snapshots taken by RDS members; found photos online
Video (mp4): video recordings of virtual RDS calls; links to youtube videos of Nov 2019 event; video recordings of tutorials for how to use RDS/PECE.
Audio (m4a): recordings of RDS working group calls; recordings from public events
PDFs: newspaper articles; blog posts; research reports
Text: fieldnotes from public events; anonymized transcripts of in-person research interviews; transcripts of online discussions of the RDS working group
While the archive was initially imagined as digitally storing ethnographic data that is relevant for researchers in Nairobi/Kenya, the archive has been thus far used less for this and more as an analytic workspace for the working group. This includes archiving our conversations, and allowing for collaborative analysis and sharing of particular artifacts. Workflows are definitely experiential in this regard and not efficient (time-wise). The technical learning curve and also investment of time to upload materials makes the archive less about comprehensiveness (or being easily searchable…) and more about putting diverse materials together and creating a digital trail that others might (eventually) be able to discover and build new connections to.
For RDS, the most helpful part of the archive might be the persistence of a particular essay (our COVID-19 essay, for example) so that even if we don’t work on it for a while, we know it is there and we can easily jump back in and keep contributing into it again. So it is durable over time (whereas documents in Google are easily lost in the flood of materials in a google drive and seem less obviously permanent and public-facing).
RDS working group members as well as other researchers who have been enrolled at various points in time (for example, a research assistant working with me during my fieldwork; a collaborator who conducted participant observation during the Nov 2019 event; a collaborative co-creator of a digital exhibit for 4S 2019) have primarily used the uploading of data function and annotation function, what I think of as the “bread and butter” of PECE. Most of the “assembling” of a PECE essay has been done by me (interesting to think about why… is it a technical issue?). A core part of working in/on RDS PECE has been the synchronous meeting and discussions, both in-person in Nairobi and virtually. I don’t think the technical infrastructure could have solely held the social group together otherwise. (And similarly, I don't know that the social group would have held together without the technical PECE infrastructure/object).
The archive has connected users through synchronous discussion facilitated on Zoom. This is a small group of self-selected 5 people or so. Most of these people did not know each other but through working together over the past 18 months or so, have gotten to know each other and have now even met in person at events in Nairobi, for example. There is also a broader email list serv that links about 20 members but is mostly blast emails out (rather than conversation). Finally, at the Nov. 2019 event from which the RDS working group emerged, about 50 people were connected, most who did not know each other. We seek to continue building these kinds of connections with a forthcoming event series that we are in the process of conceptualizing/organizing (see draft write-up here).