Weaving an alternative partnership: a collaborative autoethnography on ‘failing’ to research epistemic freedom

This collaborative autoethnography, written by two researchers, one from Italy and one from Chad, explores the possibilities of alternative pathways to development theory. Through the intersection of personal, emotional, professional and academic experiences, the paper identifies the opportunities and challenges conceptually and practically intertwined with understanding epistemic freedom in Africa. Consequently, it explores the material difficulties of building alternative partnerships while still practicing research in a precarious, neoliberal academic world. These challenges, which impede the attempts to reframe the experience of development and marginalise local knowledge, constitute forms of epistemic erasure. Therefore, resisting epistemic erasure also requires a visibilisation of these challenges related to the re-centring geographies of knowledge production.