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. 

Resistance in this essay begins by illustrating both intentional and unintentional processes through which postgraduate student voices are marginalised within formal university structures. These processes can be understood through a Foucauldian analysis of power, discourse and disciplinary systems that determine who speaks and who is heard. The essay then moves on to highlight Eider Africa as an emergent alternate re(imaginative) knowledge infrastructure that resists these marginalisation by nurturing peer to peer mentorship spaces and research journal clubs for African scholars. This initiative is inspired by works of De Sousa Santos (Santos 2014) on epistemic injustice and the work of Mbembe (2016) on hegemony in knowledge. The essay then highlights the tensions and challenges of sustaining these alternative knowledge infrastructures. Although they still operate and depend on the same contexts that are deeply rooted and rewarded by neoliberal and colonial knowledge systems of funding and legitimacy, they remain important spaces to maintain because they hold space to practice alternative, non-hierarchical ways of relating to each other and to knowledge itself.