Exploring Critical Tacit Knowledge through Dialectical and Arts-Based Knowledge Synthesis: An Intersectional, Anti-Oppressive Approach

A team of scholars, students, and community organizers engaged in a dialectical and arts-based knowledge synthesis focused on community organizing by and with immigrant and other marginalized communities. Using an intersectional, feminist-of-colour approach, the group explored what we call critical tacit knowledge (CTK)—the implicit, experiential wisdom necessary for organizing against structural oppression but often unspoken and learned only through practice.

Social work education typically emphasizes “core knowledge,” which often overlooks the process-oriented wisdoms embedded in grassroots organizing, especially at the margins. These community-based insights are difficult to codify or teach outside their contexts. To address this knowledge gap and to inform anti-oppressive practice (AOP), our interdisciplinary team—composed of cis and trans women of colour from various countries of origin—conducted a creative qualitative synthesis (Saini & Shlonsky, 2014). Drawing from community-based research and social movement efforts, we focused not on project findings or outcomes, but on the everyday organizing processes behind movements involving immigrant communities of colour, trans Latina women, disability activists, and precariously employed public service workers.

Over two years of regular steering committee meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic, we cultivated a collaborative ethos grounded in feminist-of-colour organizing principles (cf. Beltrán & Mehrotra, 2015; Gutiérrez & Lewis, 1999; Lorde, 1984/2007; Mehrotra, 2010). We privileged lived experience—our own and those of our community partners—as a valid and vital source of knowledge, while remaining attentive to power differentials shaped by social location. This process led us to articulate the concept of critical tacit knowledge.

While traditional theories of tacit knowledge (TK) emphasize unspoken know-how that underpins business innovation or professional expertise (Polanyi, 1966; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995), they do not distinguish between TK used to sustain dominant power structures and TK that emerges from efforts to resist them. We conceptualize critical tacit knowledge as the latter: a form of collective, experiential knowledge developed by organizers and allies as they navigate and resist systemic injustices—knowledge that cannot be fully understood without engaging in the work itself.

We also drew upon the literature on anti-oppressive practice, a key framework in social work education, particularly in Canada, the UK, and Australia (Dominelli, 2002; Sakamoto & Pitner, 2005; Mullaly & Dupré, 2018), and increasingly in the U.S. (Morgaine & Capous-Desyllas, 2020). AOP calls attention to structural oppressions and power relations that shape service users’ experiences, while promoting practices that foster empowerment, collaboration, collective action, and the integration of Indigenous and community-based knowledge (Bains, 2017).

Our research contributes to social work by advancing AOP theory through the lens of CTK. In our presentation, we will share both the collaborative process of our synthesis and the insights generated, offering a deeper understanding of the embodied and situated knowledge required for transformative community organizing at the margins.