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Funding Social Change or: How to most successfully derail a social movement?

by Julia Schöneberg

Development has failed. Given the many shortcomings and failures we witness after decades of development intervention and myriads of development projects this claim seems to hold true. Development projects are prone to pitfalls of paternalism and cooptation, perpetuating dependency and are often ill-fitted to local needs and imaginaries. On the other hand, Escobar (1995) argues that social movement actors have the greatest potential to shape development alternatives in response these failings.

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Call for Participation: Critical academic perspectives on scholarship in the social sciences – How do we “know” the world?

In the last few years we have witnessed a ‘postcolonial turn’ in relation to questions about the historical bases for how we approach issues of knowledge (co-)production, expertise and representation and which have gained significant momentum in academic discussions. Whilst debates about ‘whose knowledge counts’ have and continue to rage in areas such as Development or Gender Studies (which in themselves are diverse academic fields rather than homogenous disciplines), questions about prevailing power and knowledge divides, represented by their respective ‘canons’, have only recently come to the fore in the wider social sciences. Disciplines such as International Relations, Cultural and Regional Studies and Politics are being challenged by movements such as ‘Why is my curriculum white?’ to confront rather than overlook colonial genealogies of contemporary politics, society and economy and thus acknowledge the way hegemonic discourses create only particular types of knowledge.

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The “objectivity” of knowledge(s)

by Aftab Nasir

Objective knowledge or objectivity in producing knowledge and the elements of method, both are myths. It is mythological in the literal sense of the word. Before we untangle this concept, let’s revisit what a myth is. Myth is something non-real, imaginary yet authentic or authoritative. Myth has an intrinsic value that makes it appealing and relevant. It contains an aesthetic core, something of a sort that makes it attractive, and an inner logic that is mostly relatable, due to the fixity in its meaning and utility for everyday praxis. Take the myth of Sisyphus as an example. The structure of the tale provides a strong imagery, the aesthetic part, that is combined or embodied beautifully in the figure of Sisyphus, or more abstractly, in the dialectical forces represented by the body of the man, the stone, the uphill and the top. This story has a direct message, regardless of the fact that it is created as a metaphor. The message is clear, that of defiance, and is relatable for two reasons; first it shows the structure and agency in most discernable way, second it has a utilitarian value. As a thinking being, one can relate to it because it offers respite in the conundrum of fixities one encounters at every second of one’s life. In short, myth has both aesthetic and utilitarian value.

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The challenge of epistemic poverty and how to think beyond what we know

by Sruti Bala

Researchers face the challenge of engaging with the topic of epistemic diversity. We know that we should consider diverse knowledges in our research, but how can this be operationalised? This blog post engages with this question and shows us that it first of all means calling into question what we hold dear—the very ground on which we stand as researchers and the means by which we distinguish knowledge from non-knowledge.
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Why I refuse to rethink development – again (and again, and again…)

This summer I attended several academic conferences, and while I was initially extremely enthusiastic to be given the chance to put my work out for discussion, exchange with and learn from colleagues, by early autumn I am fatigued and disenchanted.

Maybe the reason for this is that several of these events where claiming to be “rethinking development”, yet by the end I fail to recognize what was essentially new in the arguments exchanged and the discussions led and what will move us forward.[1]

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A call for resistance

Republished from Decolonize | Politics, art, decoloniality, autonomous health & feminism | Many thanks to Sat Trejo for sharing this with us here.

In this post I want to share a poem that is a call for collective healing and resistance against the violence of dehumanization racialized and gendered bodies have been experiencing as a consequence of colonization. I wrote this poem as a way to express the essence of my research that focuses on resistance to the erasure of ways of knowing-being and the peoples that embody these in a context of feminicide (erasure of specific bodies) in Chiapas, Mexico. My work looks at the politics of knowledge within the field of development studies. I understand development as a project of coloniality. The latter a form of erasure. Coloniality entails erasure of everything that has its roots outside modern logics-ways. The poem is entitled:

“You don’t break our spirits by breaking our bones”

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Multi-layered Selves: Colonialism, Decolonization and Counter-Intuitive Learning Spaces

Republished from artseverywhere | musagetes  by Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti

As I wondered about the best way to write this text, two related events caught my attention. First, I received a call for publications with the title “After De-colonizing…What?” issued after an extremely productive (albeit difficult) 2015 gathering in Portugal on the theme of ‘Eco-versities’. In the same week, in a different context, I was gifted a wooden USB stick with the word ‘decolonized’ hand stamped on it. Both events attest to the fact that the word decolonization is becoming a popular way to describe changes people want to see in society.

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Solidarity as Development Practice? – Insights from Volunteering Practices in Global South Communities

by Christopher Millora

The tendency to frame ‘poor’ and ‘vulnerable’ populations as subjects and recipients of development programmes continues to persist today. In international volunteering, so-called ‘global south’ nations seems to be often framed as ‘beneficiaries’ and ‘hosts’ of services delivered by volunteers from the so-called ‘global north’ nations. There is also the widely known “dominant status model” which suggests that those with higher socio-economic status tend to volunteer more as they have a surplus in money, time and expertise. While these narratives do not argue that volunteering is only the domain of the rich, their persistence seems to eclipse the valuable role of volunteering and helping activities by ‘vulnerable’ populations, for instance, within the global south.

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Development Requires (Epistemic) Justice

This statement is a result of discussions among members of the EADI Working Group on “Post-/Decolonial Perspectives on Development”

As researchers within the realms of development we strife to unify research, practice and the production of knowledges in general to jointly contribute to political, economic, ecologic and social change worldwide. This cannot be neutral: research and exchange, contestation and debate must be value-oriented. Especially in times when in an increasing number of countries academic freedom is under attack, we need to be vocal about injustices and inequalities and defend civil and civic liberties.

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