“You should be careful,” I remember well-intentioned American academics saying to us while sitting in a meeting about the new research department we were trying to build inside iHub, Nairobi’s first tech co-working space. They were telling us to think twice about including the word research in our name. If we called it research, they said, we would have to do a certain quality of work. What they meant (though they did not say it outright) was that four young women with undergraduate degrees were not going to produce what research was supposed to be. We should name it something else to spare ourselves the comparison.

We named it iHub Research anyway.

I have thought about that conversation for over a decade, and what stays with me is what the advice revealed about how the category of legitimate knowledge production is policed. The message was not about methodology, or even about our specific proposal. It was about who is assumed to belong inside the boundary of the word research, and who is expected to find a softer, less claiming word. What gave the advice its particular force was that it came from people who thought they were protecting us.

A few months later, we were decorating our new office. We agreed on a quote from Zora Neale Hurston to put on the wall: “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” [1] At the time I did not know her work well, but I found out later that she was one of the first Black women trained as an anthropologist in the United States, trained by Franz Boas at Columbia during a period when the academy had very settled views about who could produce valid knowledge about Black communities and in what form. She wrote, published, and collected data in defiance of those views, and I suspect she wrote that definition from inside that defiance.

I did not know any of this when we chose the quote. The quote became our flag, not a justification to the people who doubted us, but a defiant statement about the kind of knowledge-making we thought was important.

What those academics did not see, and what I think is still routinely missed in conversations about research and who gets to do it, is that our location outside a university institution was not a liability. Being four young women inside the iHub community, embedded in Nairobi’s tech ecosystem at the moment it was forming, gave us access to something no visiting researcher could manufacture. We had relationships built over years, sitting with members over steaming mugs of Pete’s coffee (made by Rose). We had the kind of context that only comes from being inside a place, not studying it from the outside. That is not the same as what a PhD confers, but it is not lesser. It is a different kind of knowing, and it produces different questions. I still believe that research bodies embedded in the communities they work with see things outside observers cannot replicate. Those are the kinds of institutions I am most interested in supporting.

Ten years later, I have the credentials those academics expected as a prerequisite for the word research: the PhD, the publications, the committee seats. I have sat at the tables where those well-intentioned academics sit, and I have been welcomed there because I now match what the institution expects a knowledge producer to look like.

But I keep asking myself how those eight years of professionalization in American academia changed how I approach the work. I still believe in research as formalized curiosity.

What the credentialing process did change is my awareness of what the system is actually protecting. The bar that was gestured at in that meeting was not a neutral quality standard. It was a boundary around a particular way of knowing, one that values distance over proximity and formal training over the kind of depth that only comes from being inside a place for years. Institutional affiliation is treated as a proxy for trustworthiness in knowledge production. I believe that system is producing less interesting knowledge than it could. The most generative work I have encountered in the last decade has come consistently from people with deep roots outside university spaces, who are often not supported by their institutions to maintain those community ties.

My hope for the rest of my career is specific: to make more people feel like what they know counts. Not by pretending that standards do not exist, but by being honest about which ones we inherited and what kind of knowledge they were built to protect.

[1] Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Ch. 10, p. 143.