Knowledge as a Commons and Reciprocal and Participatory Flow 

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics for dismantling the cliché of the “tragedy of the commons.” She showed empirically that communities all over the world successfully manage shared resources (like irrigation systems, fisheries, forests) without either privatization or heavy-handed state control. Ostrom’s principles (clear boundaries, participatory rule-making, local enforcement, conflict-resolution mechanisms, nested governance) apply not just to natural resources but also to knowledge.
Knowledge is non-rivalrous (my knowing doesn’t prevent you from knowing), but institutions artificially introduce scarcity. To treat knowledge as a commons is to steward it collectively. Make circulation reciprocal don't just “let them speak.” This is Spivak’s critique in Can the Subaltern Speak? — the problem isn’t only that marginalized groups are silenced, it’s that when they do speak, their voices are filtered, mistranslated, or ignored because dominant structures don’t know how (or refuse) to listen, side-lining local epistemologies that could transform the conversation. Consider disability activism: activists like Mia Mingus critique “the medical-industrial complex” by centering lived experience. Yet institutional knowledge systems discount those (empirical) insights as anecdotal or “soft” compared to clinical data. A reciprocal model means knowledge doesn’t just flow downward from universities, states, and corporations. It moves horizontally and upward, with infrastructures designed to carry and validate marginalized perspectives. Take Participatory Action Research (PAR) for example, where communities set research agendas themselves, instead of being mere “subjects” of study. Circulation isn’t just about more voices in the room. It’s about restructuring the architecture of listening so that those voices shape decisions, norms, and truths. So if Ostrom is about the infrastructure (commons vs. enclosure), Spivak is about the ethics of circulation (reciprocity, not token inclusion). Together, they say: knowledge should move like a commons and be structured to ensure marginalized knowledge actually transforms what counts as “truth.”

LLM