Building Resistance through Peer-Led, Community Learning Infrastructures

The experiences of students pursuing their postgraduate education in Kenya mirror the broader struggles of post-colonial Africa concerning identity, epistemic justice, liberation, ideological tensions, anti-intellectualism (both generally and in universities), and feelings of displacement or resistance. Some examples of these include;  (Mamdani 2007) on neoliberalism, commercialisation and higher education; Waninga 2025 knowledge production , power and epistemic hegemony; Daley 2023 defiant scholarship; (Omedi et, al 2025) delayed completion in graduate studies; (Muthiani et,al 2023) research skills and completion rates in postgraduate education. These struggles manifest at the intersection of historical, ideological, political knowledge concerns (Munene 2024).

Through selected artifacts, rather than focus on the widely discussed challenges in postgraduate education in Kenya, like delays, supervision gaps, financial and workload barriers, I focus on discussing how, by carefully assembling a postgraduate peer-led collective learning community outside the university, we are opening space for knowledge production in ways that are more dignifying, affirming and supportive. Infrastructuring this community of practice is an act of resistance to the existing hierarchical knowledge structures present in postgraduate education in Kenya. The motivation for this work has been interactions with postgraduate students in Kenya whose voices have been systematically silenced by existing knowledge infrastructures within universities. Knowledge infrastructure in the context of this essay represents the institutional, social, political and cultural systems and structures that shape how knowledge is understood, produced, used and whose voice counts.