Relational Praxis Art: Confronting Epistemic Injustice In Lumpen Community

Abstract

In a gentrifying Toronto neighbourhood, unwaged/unhoused community members work to maintain their access to a small park that is the heart of their cultural, economic and spiritual practices. Besieged by institutional violence and medicalization, the violences of colonial-capitalism, ageism, ableism, stigmatization and ongoing trauma, their inhabitation of the park is seen to make it “sketchy.” The Friends of Watkinson Park (FoWP) was formed to resist exclusion by gentrification. In working with FoWP I have generated a method called relational praxis art (rpa). With rpa, I engage local materially-based exchange relations and social reproduction practices that build low-income community as a basis for resisting symbolic violence and epistemic injustice: blaming and shaming low-income peoples for the conditions of their lives and the denial of their truths and knowledge contributions. Rpa prioritizes political agency, knowledge production, culture and creativity to generate interventions that assert low-income inhabitation of urban space towards a liberatory future.