Urban Invisibles: Feminist perspectives on marginalization and resistance in Nairobi and Addis Ababa through the lens of embodied research practices

This paper explores the embodied and politically charged nature of urban research through feminist and decolonial lenses, focusing on the invisibility of marginalized populations in Nairobi and Addis Ababa. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Nairobi and Addis Ababa, we demonstrate that the vulnerabilities and emotions inherent to research not only shape data collection but also illuminate the mechanisms that render certain populations systematically excluded. Through the concept of Urban Invisibles, we analyze how marginalized communities resist and adapt to exclusionary practices, highlighting collective strategies for survival and empowerment. We also reflect on the epistemic invisibilization inherent in research processes, stressing the need for feminist methodologies that confront these power structures. We compare how urban planning, resource struggles, and political discourses invisibilize marginalized communities in both cities and propose that embracing “dirty” fieldwork is essential for ethical and transformative knowledge production. Our approach not only documents exclusion but also resists it by foregrounding the interplay between lived experiences, resistance strategies, and the politics of presence.

keywords: Embodied Research, Feminist Practice, Urban Invisibles, Invisibalization, Reflexive Fieldwork, Nairobi, Addis Ababa

Introduction

Invisibilization is a multifaceted process that operates on spatial, institutional, and epistemological levels (Herzog, 2020). Within contexts of urban transformation and renewal, marginalized groups become spatially and institutionally excluded from public services, pushing them further to the periphery and erasing their lived experiences, historical presence, agency, and everyday practices (Margier, 2021; Sharma, 2023). On an epistemic level, invisibilization unfolds through power relations that determine whose knowledge is recognized and valued, erasing embodied experiences and emotions as dominant norms sanitize knowledge in line with (neo)positivist paradigms that prioritize detachment and objectivity (Haraway, 1988; Law, 2004). Our research in Nairobi and Addis Ababa revealed multiple forms of invisibilization, both empirically and epistemologically, which became enmeshed within and inseparable from the research process and analysis. Empirically, we exposed persistent social and spatial inequalities that determine which populations are included in urban development and which remain unseen. Simultaneously, the research process confronted us with systemic violence, extreme poverty, and structural injustices, evoking a range of embodied experiences and emotions that remained largely invisible in our analysis, as our academic socialization had internalized sanitized modes of knowledge production.

Grounded in these observations, this paper interrogates invisibilization through the notion of Urban Invisibles, building on the binary of “clean” versus “dirty” research, thereby challenging dominant modes of knowledge production through a feminist and decolonial-rooted research practice. By “clean,” we refer to dominant academic conventions rooted in (neo)positivist paradigms that prioritize detachment, objectivity, and methodological order. In contrast, we invoke “dirt” as a metaphor for the epistemic and methodological messiness that sanitized frameworks seek to expel, and link our work to previous and emerging scholarly engagements with impure, messy, and embodied discursive and representational practices that challenge conventional academic representation (Barbour, 2018; Douglas, 2003; Owen et al., 2022; Pickerill, 2024; Shafique, 2025). We co-analyze our research in Nairobi and Addis Ababa, both situated within contexts of rapid urban growth and neoliberal urban planning, to trace spatial, institutional, and epistemic forms of urban invisibilization. Employing qualitative and ethnographic methodologies to explore these issues, Annapia’s research in Addis Ababa examines the urban food system through a feminist political ecology lens and focuses on informal urban farming, marketing practices, and the political dimensions of greening initiatives that exacerbate gendered and classed marginalization. Meanwhile, Valentine’s work in Nairobi explores the political ecology of urban green spaces in informal settlements and investigates land governance, socio-spatial inequalities, and grassroots resistance to inequitable urban greening. Through this, we advocate for a post-positivist, socially engaged research practice rooted in commitments to social justice, one that uncovers the struggles of those marginalized by urban transformation while acknowledging researchers’ subjectivities and positionalities, and moves feminist practice from a tool for reflection (Folkes, 2023) to an active engagement that visibilizes power relations and embraces emotional, vulnerable, and embodied ways of knowing (Billo and Hiemstra, 2013; Boer Cueva et al., 2024; LaRocco et al., 2020; Sultana, 2007). Tracing this conceptual and empirical trajectory, we begin by grounding our analysis in scholarship on dirty and embodied research to develop our notion of Urban Invisibles. We then examine urban invisibilization empirically through spatial and institutional mechanisms on the ground in Nairobi and Addis Ababa before turning to its epistemological dimensions.

Disrupting Urban Research: Making Research ‘Dirty’ through Embodied Knowledge

Invisibilization refers to the active social, political, and epistemic processes through which certain individuals, groups, or experiences are rendered unseen, unheard, or disregarded within society and knowledge production. It goes beyond mere absence, functioning as an outcome of power inequalities that systematically ignore or erase marginalized populations. Critical urban research, rooted in a commitment to social justice, calls for making these populations visible. We argue that this requires engaging in “other” forms of urban knowledge-making, and seek to disrupt dominant epistemologies to enable more situated and ethical engagement with the dynamics of invisibilization. This aligns with recent departures from traditional urban research towards pluriversal movements that prioritize diverse epistemologies, ontologies, and practices (Bathla, 2024) and offers alternatives to dominant narratives and advocates for reframing research approaches through exploring processes of unlearning and relearning the urban (Bathla, 2024; Streule, 2024). This is particularly urgent in contexts marked by ongoing colonial continuities and violence (Radcliffe, 2017), where the conditions for being seen are obstructed for those living at the peripheries (Spivak, 1994).

In light of this, researchers have embraced “dirt,” representing what is overlooked but integral to urban realities and knowledge production (Connell, 2020; Recio and Shafique, 2022). Driving inspiration from Shafique’s (2025) recent call for decolonial urban knowledge production, we invoke dirt as a generative, if deliberately provocative, concept that opens space for embodying alternative epistemologies, extending Shafique’s intervention by integrating feminist approaches. Its disruptive potential draws attention to how ideas of cleanliness and hygiene have been mobilized as tools of (neo)colonial othering, historically used to delegitimize and invisibilize marginalized groups (Cornea et al., 2017; Jack et al., 2020). Broadening this notion, we frame dirty research as a disruption to (neo)positivist paradigms that prioritize detachment, objectivity, and methodological order, position researchers as “omnipotent experts” (England, 1994, p. 242) and disregard personal experience and emotion (McDowell, 1992; Rose, 1997). In contrast, dirt is not merely a physical residue, but a metaphor for the epistemic and methodological messiness that dominant frameworks seek to expel. Building on Douglas’s (2003) conception of dirt as “matter out of place” and feminist epistemologies of situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988), we conceptualize dirty research as an active refusal of sanitized detachment. It acknowledges that ethical and transformative knowledge often emerges through discomfort, tension, and unpredictability—particularly in fieldwork with marginalized communities in urban informal settlements, who are frequently rendered “out of place” within dominant urban imaginaries.

While sanitized modes of knowledge production erase researcher vulnerability, we embrace our vulnerabilities by acknowledging the limits of knowledge and the complexity of others’ lives (Page, 2017). We view this vulnerability not as regression, but as a feminist practice that embraces situated knowledge, challenges dominant epistemic frameworks, and confronts the uncertainties of urban life. In this sense, dirty research is inherently embodied, rejecting universality and embracing a “radical unknowability” (Simone and Castán Broto, 2022) grounded in principles of partiality (Haraway, 1988).

Our embodied and feminist research practice shaped how we understood invisibilization on the ground in Addis Ababa and Nairobi. Attuned to power relations and vulnerability within the so-called “Invisible Majority,” we rejected homogenous framings of marginalized communities by recognizing the internal differences, hierarchies, and uneven experiences that exist within them. This situated and nuanced approach reflects the ethos of dirty research, which embraces emotional engagement, rejects methodological detachment, and confronts internal complexity rather than smoothing it over. We elaborate on these dynamics in the following chapter.

Invisible Majority: Understanding Mechanisms of Invisibilization in Nairobi and Addis Ababa

Spatial and Institutional Dynamics of Invisibilization

Our research revealed stark evidence of spatial and institutional invisibilization that excludes communities from urban governance and marginalizes them in discourse. In Addis Ababa, for instance, government representatives, particularly from high level offices, during interviews denied or downplayed the existence of urban farmers despite historical records and ongoing activities. Relatedly, in Nairobi’s central business district (CBD), vulnerable groups are rarely seen or accommodated:

“When you visit Nairobi’s CBD, can you spot children, pregnant women, persons with disabilities, or elderly individuals? The stark reality is that you hardly see them… the authorities often overlook the needs of these other groups”

(Interview, September 2023).

Another form of invisibilization is seen in the marginalization of informal settlements, which are excluded from planning documents and labelled “illegal” despite being undeniable urban realities. This mechanism of spatial control is further underscored by the concealment of redevelopment plans and withholding of information. One female informal settler on a riverbank in central Addis Ababa explained:

“They [government representatives] are going around asking and investigating. […] We’re in a state of uncertainty. They haven’t told us it will be demolished on a specific day. It is about development, so there is rumour about demolition to make way for it, but it hasn’t happened yet”

(Interview, November 2024).

Visibility in such areas depends on external interventions and shifting political ideologies about urban futures. In Nairobi, a youth leader from Korogocho highlighted the fragility of support structures, noting that recognition relies more on political goodwill than on long-term structural change:

“We reached out to the wife of the Deputy President, who has supported our feeding program, providing beans, rice, and oil. However, the current funding is temporary, and we hope to find a more sustainable source in the future”

(Interview, June 2024).

A corresponding example from Addis Ababa is a government-supported community gardening initiative that was abruptly halted when the gardens were demolished for river beautification, despite significant contributions from local farmers. Initially promoted during the COVID-19 pandemic to enhance food security in low-income areas, the initiative quickly lost support due to broader neoliberal city development plans.

As cities expand, struggles over critical urban resources like land, water, and infrastructure intensify due to population pressure, competing interests, and differing political visions. Our research found that land tenure serves as a key tool for city governments to sustain the invisibilization of residents by designating certain communities as informal or dissolving legal housing structures for poorer populations. Without formal land rights, these residents remain vulnerable to eviction and resettlement, with authorities and developers justifying repossession under urban renewal projects. In Addis Ababa, for instance, the government is replacing affordable housing with new projects on the city’s outskirts and turning legal housing in central areas into vacant land for neoliberal development, pushing communities to the margins. Community-led activities remain invisible and are disrupted by displacement, as demonstrated by a women-led garden in Kebena. Living in government housing set for demolition, one woman said: 

 “We do not know when and where we will be relocated. Maybe our neighbors will be placed across the city. Even if I like the new house, our garden will be demolished as well. And even if they leave the garden, we won’t be able to travel here to grow food for our families and neighbors, or milk our cows”

(Interview, December 2024).

Legal ambiguity as a mechanism of invisibilization fuels land grabbing, speculation, and informal transactions, as seen in both research contexts. An example from Nairobi is the displacement of public water points, vital for female washer vendors, to make way for new developments, as described by a community member from Majengo:

“Public land, including water points used by washerwomen, is being privatized. Women are persuaded by land grabbers to move water points, making way for new buildings, while officials are bribed to facilitate the process”

(Interview, June 2024).

Furthermore, land cartels exploit the lack of clear legal frameworks to facilitate land transfers using fraudulent documents. As one resident in Pumwani area observed:

“[…] Due to corruption […] cartels have been grabbing land using false documents, leases, and title deeds. A lot of plots of land have been transferred in this manner to third persons. Valuation is not done by the government but by private individuals”

(Interview, July 2024). 

An example from Addis Ababa shows how urban farmers are increasingly invisibilized due to contested land tenure. Inherited farmland, legalized by previous governments, is being questioned. While farmers receive small compensation, land is fenced off until prices rise and sold to private investors. Farmers in the Jemo area, where real estate development has surged, highlighted this issue. One of them said:

“The government said the land was needed, so they paid us a small compensation and took it. Now the land is just being held [fenced]”

(Interview, November 2024).

Invisibilization also occurs through the exclusion of marginalized communities from essential state services like infrastructure and water access. This forces reliance on informal networks, which are prone to bribery, disruption, and uncertainty, where access is often tied to social status. In Nairobi’s informal settlements, state neglect enables water cartels to control supply, inflating costs and limiting availability. In Addis Ababa, we documented how costly and restricted access to clean water from public wells forces residents in informal settlements to use self-built ponds for home gardens, essential for family sustenance and women’s income, which leads to health risks, as a female home garden owner expressed:

“There are [health] concerns, but you convince yourself, and you use it. Even if you wash the produce with clean water, you still convince yourself”  

(Interview, May 2022).

State interventions often deepen inequities. In Pumwani-Majengo in Nairobi, community-led water kiosks offer alternatives but are frequently shut down as “illegal.” This paradox, where the state denies services yet criminalizes local solutions, enforces invisibilization through selective governance and legal exclusion.

Resisting Invisibilization: Collective Strategies and Adaptation

Despite the exclusion and invisibilization of marginalized groups in Nairobi and Addis Ababa, we observed strong resistance and adaptation. In Nairobi’s informal settlements, community-based organizations have emerged as critical actors, offering women alternative economic opportunities through carpentry, tailoring, and interior design. These spaces not only provide income but also foster collective agency, self-expression, and a sense of belonging. Similarly, in Pumwani-Majengo, grassroots groups have transformed degraded and neglected spaces along the Nairobi River into community-managed green areas that incorporate hydroponic farms, tree planting, and social gathering areas. However, these efforts often struggle with sustainability due to their reliance on self-organization, as a community youth leader explained during an interview:

            “We take green space governance into our own hands. Many self-organized          community parks, urban farming initiatives, and tree-planting projects exist without government support.”

Resistance also manifests in more subtle forms. For instance, in Addis Ababa, community garden initiatives persist on vacant lands, and farming practices shift from vegetable cultivation to small-scale livestock rearing even after demolitions, pushing back against state-led development agendas and articulating a quiet yet powerful claim to the “right to farming land.” Moreover, invisibility itself becomes a tactic of resistance in the city, as urban farming continues to flourish through informal networks of harvesters, distributors, and vendors who operate outside of state regulation. One example is street vendors who maintain invisibility by avoiding the use of official ID badges required for sellers. While such tactics do not obscure the precarious living and working conditions faced by marginalized communities, invisibility here acts as a buffer that offers a degree of protection and autonomy within hostile urban environments, as exemplified by a group of female sellers who explained:

“No, we don’t [wear ID badges]. If the law enforcement sees them, they displace us. The government doesn’t know us. We’re poor… and if they see us, it gets worse.”

Manifestations of Epistemic (In)Visibilization

Epistemic invisibilization takes various forms, as knowledge production is embedded within situated local contexts where broader power structures, such as the state, operate and where positionalities, emotions, and subjectivities shift and entangle. Dirty research refers not simply to physically challenging fieldwork, but to an epistemological and ethical stance that embraces vulnerability and affective entanglements inherent in working with marginalized communities. It refuses to conceal the emotional labor and power asymmetries of fieldwork, in contrast to “clean” research that reproduces hierarchies by upholding ideals of neutrality and methodological order. Navigating these “politics of presence” (Shafique, 2025, p. 10)  requires confronting the risk of reproducing inequalities, exacerbating state-led urban violence, or causing harm to others and ourselves. When we engage with the “dirty” side of our research, emotionality becomes a way to connect, practice solidarity, confront urban violence, and help visibilize those rendered invisible, as our own experiences show.

Navigating the “Politics of Presence” in Nairobi and Addis Ababa

Reflecting on our research, epistemic invisibilization operating through state power often emerged in interactions with high-ranking respondents, such as government representatives, who downplayed our topics as irrelevant or dismissed qualitative and ethnographic methods as “not scientific enough.” In Addis Ababa, for example, survey-based research was repeatedly encouraged as the preferred approach instead. Our identity as female doctoral researchers also shaped these experiences, as we were excluded from male-dominated discussions where our leadership was ignored and our knowledge silenced, which was only disrupted when we stood up to assert our presence. Here, power is exercised to control knowledge production, yet through our research, we learned to adapt by withholding certain information and thus strategically “staying invisible.”

The “politics of presence” also became strikingly visible in our community-based research, particularly through gendered power imbalances, exposing how epistemic invisibilization is reproduced at the micro level and showing that oppression is enacted not only from the top down but also through everyday interactions. In Addis Ababa, researching through a gender lens made it possible to highlight women who are often rendered invisible within their own communities by creating space for their expressions. Conducting interviews with these women, often in spontaneous “in-between” situations, frequently involved encounters with men who interfered — either through their mere presence, denying us privacy, or by actively disrupting the interview and questioning the women’s accounts. Relatedly, in Nairobi, female respondents were often excluded from green space governance discussions, requiring intentional strategies to ensure their participation. This connects to the spirit of “empathetic allyship” within dirty research, which centers the oppressed (Williams and Drew, 2020). Similarly, our data collection not only provided opportunities for us researchers to learn about conditions of marginalization and resistance, but also to engage marginalized groups in collective imagination, expressing care and hope for their communities. These moments — often unplanned, emotionally charged, and situated outside of conventional data frames — illustrate what we identify as radical empathy through the in-betweens. Capturing subtle yet profound concerns for safety and dignity, participants in focus group discussions (FGD) remarked:

“I would recommend the creation of a field for football because most people in my area, including girls, love playing football”

(FGD, January 2024).

Another respondent expanded:

“If I held a leadership position, I would involve the youth in cleaning up the river, involve them in planting vegetables, and the street children, I would grant them access to free education and build homes that they can stay in”

(FGD, November 2024).

Finally, a child noted:  

 “I would set up a secure play area for children, free of stones that might pose a risk to their toes”

(Focus Group Discussion, November 2024).

These affective exchanges are not peripheral anecdotes but examples of the emotional, relational “dirt” that clean research often excludes. However, “empathetic allyship” also involves navigating risks, as visibilization can result in harmful exposure. In Addis Ababa, to avoid police surveillance, interviews with resettled farmers often required changing the time or location for safety. Likewise, interviewing small-scale street vendors meant ensuring they remained alert to law enforcement officers who might evict them.

Confronting Urban Violence: Politics of Emotional Field Work

In our research, we are confronting different forms of violence, which are often “out of sight” (Nixon, 2011) as they target invisibilized marginal population groups. We use confronting in a double sense: witnessing violence and using our research to challenge oppressive systems. We have observed countless instances of urban violence—from the everyday impacts of poverty, precariousness, and environmental hazards to deep-seated political tensions—as well as violence linked directly to urban transformation efforts, such as house and field demolitions. These experiences not only deeply shaped our research, often leaving us in discomfort, “messy overthinking,” and emotional overload, but also produced both connections and disconnections with the “invisibilized.” In our research, for instance, it was not only structured interviews or observations that revealed exclusionary dynamics. Emotional and interpersonal encounters—sharing moments of laughter, discomfort, or frustration—also made visible the everyday effects of invisibilization. These “in-between” moments, which often fall outside of formal research categories, were central to understanding how people navigate marginalization. In Nairobi, for example, an informal conversation after a focus group, where a participant offered advice about safety and shared a personal story of eviction, provided critical context that formal methods would have missed. These exchanges demonstrate how emotions and affect can serve as forms of insight, revealing aspects of urban life that are often rendered invisible by institutional narratives. Practicing radical empathy with marginalized communities, particularly through such “in-betweens”—moments of laughter, sadness, or shared silence—creates emotional bonds where privilege often obstructs them. These connections not only humanize the research encounter while also channeling our emotions in a politically meaningful way, reinforcing the ethical imperative of dirty research. Embodied research becomes dirty research when it recognizes that knowledge is always situated, emotional, and shaped by power relations. Rather than seeing these factors as obstacles, we treat them as essential to ethical and feminist research. Dirty research not only documents the lives of marginalized communities but also challenges the very structures that render them invisible. It offers a way to engage with the political and emotional complexities of fieldwork while remaining accountable to those with whom we conduct research.

Yet, while we place solidarity and empathy at the core of our research practice, we must embrace its limitations to prevent it from turning into “romanticized saviorism.” The principles of partiality and situatedness of knowledge, along with our vulnerabilities, guide us in navigating these critical issues. As Page (2017, p. 18) reminds us, researching from a position of vulnerability involves acknowledging not only the limits of knowing and the limitations in understanding and narrating the lives of others. Adding to this, we must acknowledge that even when we recognize our emotional vulnerabilities, privilege and power continue to shape our relationships as researchers with marginalized communities, especially as we are often unable to drive structural change — even though such change is frequently expected from us by those we work with. Acknowledging these tensions reveals not only the politics of emotional fieldwork and the ethics of “dirty” research, but also demonstrates how power and privilege operate within non-linear and situated contexts. Illustrating this, we often find ourselves in precarious positions as researchers, for instance through funding insecurities. As women, patriarchal mechanisms connect us to broader global gendered structures, albeit in differentiated ways. Yet, despite these shared vulnerabilities, we are usually perceived as powerful within the local contexts, as seen in Nairobi, where being called “Boss yangu” (my boss) highlights perceived power in the community, or in Addis Ababa, where we were advised against visiting impoverished areas by higher officials, reflecting the intersection of poverty stigmatization and privilege. Simultaneously, making our emotionality and vulnerability visible can negatively expose us, as these traits can be dismissed as weaknesses or used to silence our research, requiring us to adapt our roles depending on the context. Ultimately, access to our emotions remains within our control, allowing us to re-channel power by choosing when to reveal or withhold them.

Conclusion

In this paper, we critically examined urban invisibilization in Nairobi and Addis Ababa. We call for broadening and embodying dirty research (Shafique, 2025) as a critical lens through which to rethink both urban life and urban research. This call aligns with pluriversal approaches in urban scholarship that disrupt conventional research paradigms, acknowledge the limitations and partiality of knowledge production, and reflect multiform urban living (Simone and Castán Broto, 2022). Through our notion of Urban Invisibles, we explored conditions of invisibilization both empirically and epistemologically. While clean and sanitized modes of research may promise objectivity, their disavowal of emotion, positionality, and complexity often render injustice invisible. By contrast, dirty research foregrounds these elements as necessary for ethical and situated scholarship. In embracing the “mess”—whether in disrupted interviews, emotional overwhelm, or unstable field conditions—we argue that researchers can more responsibly document and resist the structures that sustain marginalization.

A key contribution of this study is a shift from simply making the invisible visible to dismantling the structures that necessitate invisibilization in the first place. Traditional frameworks often assume that rendering marginalized populations visible is inherently empowering (Bjarnesen and Turner, 2018), yet our findings suggest that visibility remains contingent and conditional, often serving external interests. Our explorations offer pathways for resisting invisibilization, not merely by documenting exclusion but by actively confronting the structures that sustain it, ultimately contributing to a radical feminist urbanism that does not just seek inclusion but demands justice.

References