Tracing knowledges for other possible worlds

This doctoral project investigates relational processes of knowledge production in urban sites of resistance. It examines co-production practices that bring together different knowledge systems and the agency of the nonhuman world as they shape spaces and guide collective action to both resist urban injustice and enact alternative ways of living in the city. The investigation aims at an articulation and (re)storying of sites of urban resistance in pluriversal ways, accounting for the sociomaterial encounters, knowledge dialogues, and more-than-human doings involved in their constitution and ongoing construction. This undertaking addresses the need to engage in research that challenges the oppressive ontologies and ways of knowing the world, which often guide theorising and spatial production by maintaining the hierarchical dualisms of human/nonhuman, city/nature, expert/non-expert, knowledge/non-knowledge, reason/emotion, subject/object, etc. To engage with alternative forms of researching knowledge production, the study links various ontological and epistemological perspectives from relational theories, urban political ecology, decolonial and postcolonial theory, more-than-human approaches, critical urban theories, and feminist epistemologies. This constitutes a theoretical basis and a conceptual-methodological approach based on principles that seek to decentre the researcher and, at the same time, draw attention to voices and ways of being often silenced and undervalued in knowledge production. Drawing on these theoretical-political sensibilities, the research traces and interweaves sociomaterial relations and knowledge practices in two case studies. The first focuses on the Brazilian urban occupation Solano Trindade in Duque de Caxias, a self-managed housing project led by a social movement and a community of residents working closely with local and international universities and research groups. The second case focuses on a community-university partnership that manages and cares for a community garden and an urban forest in the Capetillo Abajo neighbourhood of San Juan, Puerto Rico. These cases are approached through a combination of method/actions including participatory workshops, storytelling, reflective conversations, walking-with and doing-with, witnessing material encounters, and the analysis of documents and graphic/visual materials. The empirical chapters show that both contexts can be understood as epistemic sites that offer concrete examples for theorising urban knowledge production and the co-production of space in pluriversal ways. Through this research, urbanisms of resistance can be conceived as sites from which it is possible to resituate subalternised forms of knowing~being~doing and more-than-human relations in knowledge and spatial production. These are sites from which researchers can complicate dominant narratives around “expert” ways of knowing, the management of nature, and hegemonic urban production forms. By focusing on the ways relations between humans and nonhumans interweave to generate knowledge, this work contributes to reframings of collective action and knowledge production as processes that bring together multiple ways of acting and being in the world.