Information privilege is defined as “the ability of people to access information that others cannot”. This definition is based on individuals’ access to information. We expand this definition to also consider how marginalized communities and community knowledges are systematically devalued and excluded from particular knowledge environments. We ask what information is privileged in a given context and what knowledge and expertise is minimized or disregarded? In our experience, what sex workers know about their lives and communities is essential to understanding research about sex work, yet these experts of their own experiences are often excluded and not viewed as credible within post-secondary research environments. The term knowledge justice is defined as “the principle that each person has the equal capacity to be knowledgeable, yet this right is often denied to individuals based on the social identities they hold. It also involves recognizing that some knowledge systems, particularly those of Indigenous peoples, have been purposefully ignored, eliminated, or silenced.” Thinking about the absence of sex worker community information and knowledge in post-secondary institutions as a problem of knowledge justice encourages us to take action.

While there is an important academic focus on knowledge mobilization that intends to move research findings into communities that would benefit from them, we think there needs to be an equal emphasis on moving and legitimating community knowledges into academic spaces. In order for this to be possible, post-secondary institutions must acknowledge the power that they hold and share it. They must work with marginalized communities to co-design inclusive, respectful, and social justice-oriented policies and institutional reforms that support meaningful community engagement. They must also prioritize equitable and accessible publishing practices in a wide array of formats. We share three examples of practices that our projects have developed specifically to do this work:

• Community researcher position – Because it was very challenging to hire a non-student, non-post-doctoral researcher into a research position on our community oriented research project, project lead Ferris worked with an ad-hoc group of researchers at her institution who successfully proposed a hiring category for non-academic researchers. The hiring category of “Community Researcher,” supports hiring persons without formal graduate-level academic training whose lived experience in a given community makes them a valuable expert on a research team. This structural intervention is necessary because until community researchers can sustainably contribute to research projects, their expertise is at risk of being marginalized on a given research project.
• Knowledge Symbiosis Article series – We developed a series of scholarly articles designed to include community knowledge into traditionally academic spaces. With the intention of broadening and encouraging knowledge exchange within and between academics and community groups, this series moves beyond the unidirectional flow of scholarly knowledge into marginalized communities. So far we have published one article in this series and submitted another for publication. We use a transcript format where each co-author is identified separately in their article sections in order to spotlight the distinct voices of academics, archivists, and community members on the projects.
• Roundtable series – In addition to rethinking how we can use scholarly publishing to highlight community voices, we have also organized a series of public presentations or “roundtables” held on Zoom that facilitate community researcher and activist presentations to the public. We work to create space for community and academic co-learning and knowledge transfer through workshops, roundtables, and community training provided by both academic and community researchers. For example, our Spring 2023 roundtable features our research team alongside drug-user and sex work researchers from the United States discussing the importance of community-driven research. Our Winter 2024 roundtable features long-time sex work advocates from across Canada sharing strategies they have used to protect and empower sex workers in research. Our Fall 2024 roundtable includes Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers at Ferris’s institution discussing the importance of the Community Researcher hiring category for community-engaged research projects. Using our institutional Zoom subscriptions, these events are fairly low-tech, livestreamed, and the recordings are made available on the ECRR website.

Thinking about information privilege through a knowledge justice lens means considering whose information is excluded and ignored within academic knowledge environments. Recognizing that this is a large structural problem that needs multiple interventions and many folks intervening, we have shared three approaches from our own work that we use to mitigate the exclusion of community knowledges and expertise from university settings. We share these practices here to encourage other researchers to think about how they might support and share community knowledges in their research projects and institutions.