Challenging Epistemic Inequalities: Feminist Action Research and Decolonizing Urban Futures in the Majority World

This paper explores the transformative potential of feminist action research in addressing epistemic inequalities, decolonizing knowledge, and rethinking the purposes of knowledge production. To do so, we collectively reflect on our ongoing feminist action project, Building Feminist Urban Futures in the Majority World. The project's primary goal is to cultivate feminist urban scholarship aimed at understanding urban dispossessions in the context of intersecting crises affecting cities. It seeks to build a feminist urban community across the Mediterranean and Latin America, fostering regional and intergenerational learning through a series of “traveling urban labs.”

These labs focus on feminist urban planning in Chile, Morocco, and Turkey and aim to address vulnerabilities and inequalities exacerbated by recent disasters in these countries. Our project addresses how decolonial feminist urban imaginaries interrogate twenty-first-century urban life fostering feminist praxis from Majority Worlds. As part of our reflexive process, we pose several key questions for discussion in this roundtable: How can feminist action research foster South-to-South collaborations that challenge, without reproducing, epistemic inequalities? Whose knowledge is valued, and why? How can decolonial feminist praxis nurture cultures of care, solidarity, and safe spaces for co-creation and feminist interventions? Finally, how do we decolonize feminist urban imaginaries in the face of ongoing economic and social insecurities? The aim of this presentation is not to provide definitive answers to these questions, but rather to provoke collective learning and reflection among feminist urban scholars.