Democratic Capabilities Research: Exploring contextual challenges and contributions of participatory research towards epistemic justice

Epistemic justice is central for participatory practices; indeed, social justice is not possible without considering epistemic inequalities in knowledge generation. Nevertheless, although this debate is theoretically clear, we still have little literature exploring and reflecting on how this can be achieved. Thus, this chapter draws on findings from a South African case study called “Democratic Capabilities Research”. Using extensive and rich qualitative data collected during the space of one year, the analysis of the findings shows that epistemic justice is not an end for higher education practitioners but rather a way of applying research practices in non-ideal settings, where colonial conversion factors are in place. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the contribution of this DCR project, towards epistemic justice, lies in its impact minimising the adverse consequences of colonial conversion factors in the research participants and the use of different multi-epistemic strategies as a way to balance knowledge inequalities instead of achieving epistemic justice as an end.