Dismantling the Colonial Politics of Knowledge Production from Tamale to Toronto

Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed (PhD, The Pennsylvania State University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. She is co-editor of the book, African Women in Digital Spaces: Redefining Social Movements on the Continent and in the Diaspora (2023). She is an activist-scholar whose research focuses on feminisms, decolonization, and social movements. Her scholarship has appeared in Communication Theory, the International Journal of Communication, the Howard Journal of Communications and various media and communications journals. She has done organizing work around ethnicity, gender and sexuality in the feminist space in Ghana. She serves on the editorial boards of Feminist Media Studies and Communication, Culture and Critique. She is the book review editor for Cultural Studies. She has won top paper awards at various media and communications conferences. She has worked as a radio journalist in Ghana for several years and has done some public scholarship on Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Global Voices and several Ghanaian media platforms including the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation.

In this talk, she presents critical reflections on working in qualitative research to co-create knowledge with her community. She argues that scholars need to intimately understand the social, political, and historical context of marginalized communities if they are to co-create knowledge that truly represents these communities while safeguarding the dignity of interlocutors. She highlights the importance of engaging interlocutors with an ethic of care, navigating language politics and grounding knowledge production in the values of community engaged scholarship. I present practical tools on how qualitative research can be designed paying attention to preserving the dignity and supporting the self-determination of marginalized communities.