Resistance is often theorized through visible, confrontational practices such as protests, rebellions, or organized movements. However, less attention has been paid to epistemic forms of resistance embedded within everyday academic labour, particularly in marginalized Global South contexts. The paper states that the process of knowledge production in African academic spaces is a highly potent but under-theorised mode of resistance to Western epistemological hegemony, structural marginalisation and intellectual repression. The paper is conceptualised using Foucauldian ideas of power/knowledge, decolonial scholarship, the Subaltern Studies, and the idea of everyday resistance by James Scott as understanding the academic writing, learning, and knowledge circulation as a form of resistance practiced within epistemic inequality conditions. African learners and scholars in the early stages of their career development tend to work in academic institutions that are guided by colonial experiences, scarcity of resources, language hierarchies, and gateways to knowledge production that favor Western knowledge activities. Under such limitations, even academic research itself is a strategic survival, assertion and resistance. Instead of considering resistance as a form of overt political activity, the paper prefigures the micro-practices of epistemic persistence: the ongoing use of research in spite of infrastructural constraints, the re-invention of hegemonic theories in local conditions and the active creation of knowledge that disagrees with epistemic erasure. These practices align with Scott’s notion of “infrapolitics,” revealing how resistance can be enacted quietly yet meaningfully within institutions that reproduce global hierarchies.
Based on empirical and reflective research on African higher education and a literature review on epistemic injustice, the paper shows how marginalised scholars not only counter material exclusion but also symbolic violence, or devaluation of their knowledge, voices, and intellectual contributions. Such resistance is rarely recognised as political, yet it actively contests neoliberal academic norms, Western epistemological authority, and the unequal distribution of scholarly legitimacy.
This paper makes a contribution to the Resistance Studies by broadening its analytical focus on visible acts of defiance to the analytical focus on epistemic struggle in academic institutions. It argues for the legitimacy of epistemic resistance as a central concern of the field and calls for greater engagement between Resistance Studies, decolonial theory, and higher education scholarship. In an era of intensifying global inequality and intellectual repression, recognising epistemic resistance is crucial for building resilient, inclusive, and genuinely global resistance communities.