raï - Convivial Thinking

Gender Studies Under Threat: Why It Matters to Everyone

by Rabbia Aslam and Shaqiaz Khan

In this blog, we are discussing how scholars and students within the field of gender studies are targeted, discredited and treated as if they are not part of objective knowledge production processes within academia. The objection is that Women and Gender Studies (WGS) is not a ‘real’ discipline because it allegedly lacks objectivity and facts. In this blog, our focus is on two recent examples within one of the provinces of Pakistan, Khyber Pakhtoon Khawa (KPK), where efforts have been made to scrutinize or halt degree programs in Gender Studies and silence researchers, lecturers and activists.

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Rooted Futures: Building from Within, Not Above

by Zdena Middernacht

Rapid shifts are reshaping the international development sector. The lingering effects of Trump-era policies are still unfolding, a notable recent example including Botswana, whose national health crisis is also contributed to by USAID’s cutting away a third of the country’s HIV response funding, which the latter was providing. At the same time, aid’s strong trade and political conditionalities, once unspoken truths, are now openly declared and unapologetically enforced. Across Europe, anti-migration rhetoric and the advance of far-right policies accelerate at a pace that outstrips meaningful analysis. NGOs and other actors in the development space find themselves in a constant state of asking, “What now?”, but in a world moving this quickly, even the most thoughtful answers risk irrelevance almost as soon as they are formed.

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Taming a capitalist EU, socialist ‚development‘ and Post-Development

by Aram Ziai

In their text, Tough questions for new EU ‚development‘ commissioner‘, Sarah Delputte, Jan Orbie and Julia Schöneberg are criticising EU development policy from a Post-Development perspective. Appreciating the renaming of the EU development commissioner as one responsible for international partnerships only as a first step in a long series of necessary changes, they suggest to ‘fundamentally reconsider the EU‘s engagement with the rest of the world‘. They criticise that Van der Leyen expects ‚value for money‘, wants to pursue ‘investment opportunities in Africa‘, and intends to leverage aid for private investment. And they castigate the focus on ‘countries of migration origin and transit‘ and the corresponding adaptation of funding as the ‘instrumentalisation of EU aid for geopolitical and migration management purposes‘. Instead, the EU should reflect its growth-centered model of ‘development‘ and tackle ‘global structural injustices and inequalities‘ through abandoning the free trade orthodoxy of the EPAs and establishing a ‘truly fair‘ global trading system, ending tax evasion, promoting climate justice and engaging in reparative action for the crimes and robberies committed during colonialism.

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Is an appreciative appropriation of culture possible?

by Bruni Sonne

(This post is also available to read in German and French)

I am white[1], German, female and by and large quite privileged[2], in Germany – and even more so globally. I wore dreadlocks for six years, and very often clothes made from African fabrics. Now you can basically stop reading and immediately label me racist. My sin: Cultural Appropriation[3].

Or you can read on and get to know me as a person first.

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Journey Without An Answer – Part III: Use of language

by Jane Robb, Arinola Adefila, José Pablo Prado Córdova

In this series of essays, we use stories from the life experiences of the three international authors to air the pitfalls we come across while sharing knowledge and discuss how this can influence practice in higher education and what this might mean for life outside academia.

Use of language

José Pablo Prado Córdova, Tenured Professor, Department of Social Sciences and Rural Development, Faculty of Agronomy, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala

At the risk of committing an act of discursive funambulism, I’d say that knowing that we don’t know something, opens up a crack in the mechanical obsession with certainty. The realisation of a knowledge void triggers curiosity and sets our mind in a state of enquiry. We grasp reality, concepts and even socially sanctioned ways of being in a socialisation process starting from scratch. Ignoring falseability, for instance, brings about intellectual stiffness and, in the most extreme cases, sheer fundamentalism.

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Journey Without An Answer – Part II: Use of Cultural Norms

by Jane Robb, Arinola Adefila, José Pablo Prado Córdova

Part II: Use of cultural norms

Arinola Adefila, Deputy Director, Staffordshire Centre for Learning and Pedagogic Practice, Staffordshire University. Now based at Buckinghamshire New University.

Knowledge is a very powerful human tool, in many cultures knowing is understood to be continuous and lifelong, associated with a sacred respect for the elderly who have accumulated a treasure trove of knowledge through experience.

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Journey Without An Answer: A postcolonial look at epistemic challenges for (un)learning in higher education

by Jane Robb, Arinola Adefila, José Pablo Prado Córdova

Part I

In modern day higher education institutions, we too often arrive at an understanding of the world around us through repetition of learnt facts and exposure to the same (Meissner, 1974). There is little room for generating new knowledge until what are considered the ‘higher tiers’ of learning (McGregor, 2020), and often this is bounded within strict academic and organisational standards: ways of finding and expressing knowledge that relies on other commonly accepted knowledge (Bagga-Gupta, 2023).

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LATIN AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATION SERIES: Part IV – Seasonality-Cycles of Life

by Macarena Montero Lobos

This is PART IV of the “Exploring Latin American contributions to education” series. All parts consist of a blog conversation and a video intervention. This part starts off with a conversation between Macarena and Vanessa Andreotti.

If you haven’t read the other parts start here.

Vanessa Andreotti is the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria in Canada. She holds a PhD in Education and Critical Theory and Cultural Studies from the University of Nottingham, UK, a Master’s in Educational Technology from the University of Manchester, UK, and a Bachelor’s in Education from the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil. Dr. Andreotti is a former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change as well as a former David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education. She is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism (2021) and one of the co-founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) Arts/Research Collective. Most of her published articles and OpEds are available at academia.edu.

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LATIN AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATION SERIES: Part III – Community (vs. individuality)

by Macarena Montero Lobos

This is PART III of the “Exploring Latin American contributions to education” series. All parts consist of a blog conversation and a video intervention. This part starts off with a conversation between Macarena and Stephen McCloskey.

If you haven’t read Part I and II and the introduction, start here.

Stephen McCloskey has been the Director of the Centre for Global Education in Belfast since 1995 and serves as the editor of the journal Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review. Educator, writer, editor, project manager, and activist, Stephen works in the international development sector in various fields, including youth, community, minority ethnic, and formal education sectors in Europe. Since 2011, he has been involved in developing educational projects in the Gaza Strip and Palestine. In 2015, he co-edited the book “From the Local to the Global: Key Issues in Development Studies”. Currently, Stephen is researching Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Syria. See more at Stephen McCloskey | openDemocracy.

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LATIN AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATION SERIES: Part II – Diversity (vs. uniformity)

by Macarena Montero Lobos

This is PART II of the “Exploring Latin American contributions to education” series. All parts consist of a blog conversation and a video intervention. This part starts off with a conversation between Macarena and Mayara Floss.

If you haven’t read Part I and the introduction, start here.

Mayara Floss is a family and community doctor who graduated from the Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG) in Brazil. She is an activist dedicated to rural, indigenous, and planetary health in her country. In 2014, she received a scholarship from the Brazilian Government to participate in the Science Without Borders program at the University of Galway in Ireland. Mayara has developed various health education projects and was co-author of the Lancet Countdown policy brief recommendations for Brazil in 2018 and 2019. She also spoke on women’s health at the United Nations in 2018 and has a TED Talk titled “Why Rural Health?”. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD at the University of São Paulo (USP) and works as a Family Doctor in a favela in Florianópolis, Brazil.

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