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Decolonising international research collaboration requires us to go beyound the ‘Ts and Cs’ apply approach

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In this blog, ISS alumnus Eyob Balcha Gebremariam, PhD, critiques the superficial ethical framing often used in Global North–Africa partnerships. Through reflections on a UK–Africa research network, he highlights persistent power imbalances, where African partners are relegated to the role of data collectors while institutions exploit student fees and metrics.
Image Credit: Bliss

In February 2024, I found myself at a pivotal moment in the academic landscape, attending a regional network launching event of “Africanist researchers” at one of the UK universities. The room was a microcosm of diverse academic, cultural, gender, and racial backgrounds, all converging with a common purpose to establish a network of researchers. The organisers set ambitious objectives, including partnering to co-develop research proposals, recruiting more African students to their respective regional universities, and providing capacity-building support for Africa-based partners. This was the backdrop against which I observed the dynamics of coloniality, power and privilege that underpin such collaborations.

As a passionate advocate for decolonial perspectives and a contributor to the development of the Africa Charter, I was not only unsurprised but deeply concerned by the dominant focus of the discussion. It seemed to orbit around how UK universities and their researchers could maintain and even amplify their benefits from the existing power imbalances with their African counterparts. This perspective is a symptom of the deeply ingrained colonial mindset that continues to shape our research collaborations.

The extractivist approach, a deeply ingrained issue, was never questioned. The mood in the room took for granted the colonially crafted relationship between African and UK higher education institutions, where empirical data and information are extracted from “Africa” using Western theories and concepts to be packaged as scientific knowledge. Not only on this occasion, but in most events like this meeting, “Africa” is approached as a supplier of international students. Africa-based researchers are often characterised as research assistants or primary data collectors for their UK-based counterparts.

During the plenary discussion, I shared my concern about the orientation of the discussion in the room. I underscored the urgent need for a more critical orientation that is acutely aware of the colonial designs and structures of research collaborations with African knowledge systems and Africa-based knowledge actors. I was determined to challenge the status quo and encourage my academic colleagues to transcend the normalised approaches to discussing “Africa.”

The subsequent parts of the discussion proceeded smoothly, and I gleaned valuable insights from the conversation with my fellow small group members. It was encouraging to see that everyone shared a deep concern about the issues I had raised. They also expressed their understanding of the challenges and commitment to addressing inequities in their respective capacities. However, the overall atmosphere remained somewhat conventional.

At the end of the inaugural session, concerns about the power imbalances in knowledge production and the need for a historically informed and conscious approach to forging new partnerships or strengthening existing ones were watered down to a mere mention of ‘ethics and ethical procedures’. The overall message was that we are good to go if we are sufficiently ethical in our dealings with “Africa” and Africa-based knowledge actors. There was insufficient time and space to delve into what ‘ethics’ truly entails. I gathered that my fellow participants were willing to move to the next step even though the ethical standards and procedures were not adequately clarified.

I call the above procedure the “Ts and Cs Apply” Approach. In this age of hyper-consumerism, we hear or see endless commercials for goods and services. After the main message, we often pay little attention to the so-called “terms and conditions.” I observed a tendency to approach the current drive of demanding equity, redressing power imbalances, and undoing colonial relations in knowledge production through international collaborations using the “Ts and Cs apply approach.”

In many events, the manifestations of coloniality at the idea, institutional, and individual levels will be raised. However, there is often limited or no time, space, or understanding to discuss them thoroughly. Such ideas and individuals who promote them are almost guaranteed to remain in the margins. The “Ts and Cs Apply” approach has just enough room to raise critical issues but is not good enough to make meaningful steps.

Normalised Coloniality in the UK Universities

Coloniality’s complex and deeply entrenched features in UK universities are too normalised. Hence, some genuine efforts to redress observed problems tend to become instruments of reinforcing injustice and inequities. One of the main reasons is that the strategy of most, if not all, UK universities is similar to the finance sector, where competing for resources through cutting-edge strategy for maximum gain and profitability is at the centre of their operation. In this regard, Africa offers an exciting opportunity.

Financially, the growing young population in Africa is a primary target for recruiting international students. “Overseas students” have already become UK universities’ primary income sources. The UK, in general, is in an advantageous position to benefit from the colonial legacy and the soft power it exerts in shaping peoples’ minds about higher education.

Even UK universities with socially responsible and justice-focused intentions reap unfair benefits from their operations in Africa. Most UK universities now have an “Africa Strategy” to manage their collaborations with the continent effectively. Their continent-wide footprints also count towards the new metrics of university Impact Ranking. The SDGs are the primary framework of the impact ranking. Since the SDGs define Africa through the deficit model, the abnormality of which needs fixing by external actors, UK universities are incentivised and well-placed to play this role. The universities can also benefit financially from the positive image they build from the impact ranking.

Since most quasi-solutions by the UK and other “Global North” universities adopt the “Ts and Cs Approach”, they become part of the problem rather than the solutions. UK universities are entrenched in the colonial game of extraction of data, intellectual labour and credibility. Now, there is a system in place that will reward and glorify them so that they can continue benefiting from their unfair position. Not paying enough attention to the terms and conditions of engagement and its colonial roots, we contribute to the problem.

Going beyond the “Ts and Cs apply” Approach

Redressing epistemic inequities and injustices should be the primary concern of efforts to redress the colonially designed power imbalances in international research collaborations. De-centring coloniality from our knowledge frameworks can be the primary step towards “dignified co-habitation” as human beings and societies. This is why the Africa Charter for Transformative Research Collaborations calls for de-centring Eurocentric epistemic orientations in scientific knowledge production concerning Africa.

Coloniality of knowledge normalised the hierarchisation of knowledge systems. In this hierarchy, non-European knowledges are often labelled as “Indigenous,” whereas Eurocentric epistemic orientations, values, and principles are universalised. The universalist claim by Eurocentric knowledge systems is an antithesis to the realisation of conviviality. Conviviality thrives by recognising the limitations of our knowledge frameworks and valuing other knowledge systems. Most UK and Global North universities are vectors of the universalist claim of Eurocentrism. If we are conscious of the incompleteness of our epistemic orientations, our transboundary research initiatives will have room for epistemic humility – the openness to learn from others.

In a system where the coloniality of being is normalised, non-Whites/non-Europeans have less value as humans and less credibility as knowers. They are often portrayed as faceless or nameless enslaved beings, captives, colonial subjects, drowning migrants, influx or wave of illegal aliens, collateral damages of imperial wars or terrorists, especially if they dare to resist colonisation and colonialism. A university system and a research collaboration that does not recognise the human and epistemic dignity of the ‘other’ reinforces coloniality.

Going beyond the “Ts and Cs Apply” approach requires intentionally disruptive actions, thought provocations and arguments that can bring the business-as-usual lifestyle to a grinding stop. Colonial relations sustain societies’ current affluent and luxurious lifestyles, mainly in the Global North. Coloniality of power conceals the blood, tears, and sweat of societies that produce our daily consumables (tech, food, cloth, oil, jewellery, etc). If our pursuit of knowledge through international research collaboration takes this for granted, we are culpable either by omission or commission.

This blog was first published by the Development Studies Association of the UK

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author

Eyob Gebremariam

Eyob Balcha Gebremariam is Research Associate at the Perivoli Africa Research Centre, University of Bristol, UK, Visiting Fellow at the University of Cape Town (2024-2025) and Member of the Council at the Development Studies Association, UK. He graduated from the International Institute of Social Studies in 2009.

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Scholars at risk: why the Dutch system for protecting persecuted scholars is failing and why the government urgently needs to get involved

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In the past, scholars facing persecution have regularly been received by Dutch universities, which have provided them with a safe space to continue conducting their research in times of adversity. In 2019, the Dutch system for providing a safe haven for such scholars collapsed – an event that went largely unnoticed at the time. Ever since, efforts to help scholars have been mostly futile, largely because the bureaucratic hurdles to providing a safe space are more or less insurmountable. In this article, Linda Johnson explains how and why the Dutch system for supporting refugee scholars has become ineffective and suggests what should be done about it.

Photo Credit: Ron Lach

The Russian invasion of Ukraine early last year galvanized universities in the Netherlands into a brief flurry of solidarity and a frantic but largely ineffectual effort to provide a safe space for Ukrainian researchers to continue their work. Working parties were set up, web pages were designed and countless meetings were held. The consternation was immense. Sadly, none of this led to much concrete assistance for imperilled scholars and students. There was simply no system in place that would allow grants to be paid out to those in dire need. It became abundantly clear that the infrastructure for supporting scholars at risk is inadequate.

The lack of an infrastructure for organizing meaningful support was systematically exposed in January this year in a report issued by a prestigious group of critical scholars (The Young Academy), who for the first time showed the deficiencies of the current system in a rigorous report that describes and analyses the situation as it is today. They have made clear that the infrastructure for supporting scholars at risk from all over the globe (Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, Turkey, Iran and the list goes on…) is woefully inadequate. But how could this have happened and what needs to be done to remedy the situation?

The early days of Scholars At Risk NL

To answer this question, it is important to first take a look at what has happened in the past few years. In around 2010, the American organization Scholars at Risk (SAR) started approaching universities in Europe with a view to expanding global provision for at-risk scholars. I had been active in university internationalization circles globally for several decades; hence, I was one of the individuals approached for initial discussions on setting up a SAR provision in The Netherlands.

I was enthusiastic about the proposal and felt that the Netherlands should get involved in this important work. The aims of SAR and the mission of ISS were in alignment and it was not difficult to gain the approval of the then ISS rector (Professor Leo de Haan) to begin receiving students at ISS. Many ISS colleagues were in favour of creating a structural provision for scholars under threat. I set up an infrastructure and little by little extended the pilot so that the whole of the Erasmus University could participate.

We managed to place one or two scholars a year at ISS and occasional placements were found in other parts of the university. Mentoring a scholar who has had to flee for his/ her life is not easy work, but there were enough excellent colleagues willing to go above and beyond the call of duty to make the system work. Similar efforts took place at most universities in the Netherlands, largely based on solidarity and relying on colleagues who were willing to spend time and effort over and above their working hours to keep the system afloat.

Between 2010 and 2015, most European countries, including the Netherlands, set up programmes to help scholars at risk. The Dutch support organization for refugee students, the UAF, coordinated Dutch efforts and fulfilled the important task of disbursing the grants made available to scholars at risk. These grants came from a variety of sources (universities, private donations, local councils, SAR and others). For some time, things went well enough.

 

A turn for the worse

Sadly, in 2019 the UAF decided to end its partnership with the Dutch arm of Scholars at Risk. Worries had begun to surface about possible fines being imposed by the Dutch tax authorities because of the UAF’s role in the distribution of grants. The Dutch tax authorities had indicated that the modest bursaries could be construed as salary and would hence fall under the category of ‘notional’ employment on which the recipient would need to pay tax, and over which the employer would need to pay social insurance. This would multiply the costs involved and reduce the grants to a size too small to meet living costs for the scholar in question.

The financial risk was deemed too great by the UAF – in 2020, it withdrew entirely, effectively making it impossible for Dutch universities to offer financial assistance to at-risk scholars and also bringing to an end any structured coordination of support to at-risk scholars. Expertise on how best to support scholars at risk could no longer be shared and data could no longer be collected and collated on the numbers and origins of scholars seeking assistance from Dutch universities.

In short, since 2020, Dutch universities have no longer been able to make any provision to assist scholars at risk. This situation is in sharp contrast to the generous and well-organized support structures available in many European counties, such as Poland, Germany, the UK, and others.

 

Ripples of concern, but no comprehensive effort

In 2021, the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan led to a modest ripple of concern among Dutch universities. Small, but uncoordinated and largely unsuccessful efforts were made to offer a safe haven to a few Afghani scholars and their families. This proved to be impossible because of the lack of a grant distribution system. Very quickly, the concern ebbed away without any scholars being placed. A year later, in 2022, the onset of the war on Ukraine led to another ripple of concern within Dutch academia. The problem was closer to home this time. Most Dutch universities felt a moral imperative to get involved and to do something constructive to assist scholars and students from Ukraine. Nothing very concrete was achieved, in spite of the best efforts of some individuals.

 

Attempts to restart the system

A group of concerned university administrators from Dutch universities met several times throughout 2020-2022 to try finding a way to improve matters. I convened and chaired these meetings. It was agreed that Nuffic, the Dutch organization for internationalization and education, could perhaps take on the role previously fulfilled by the UAF. This seemed to be a good choice, as Nuffic has an extensive network within the Dutch higher education sector, is used to administering grants, and has considerable expertise that would be handy in helping to ensure that at risk scholars are placed in settings appropriate to their field of research.

Nuffic was keen to get involved but at the eleventh hour felt obliged to decline further involvement because of the risks involved in relation to tax authorities and the labour inspectorate. Back to square one…

 

An opportunity to turn the tide

At this point, the Dutch Young Academy decided to get involved. On 23 January of this year, the Young Academy’s report called ‘Support for at risk scholars in the Netherlands’ was launched. This was a tremendously important step: for the first time, a measured and reflective analysis of the support system was committed to paper in the form of a well-researched report. It showed that at-risk scholars are woefully underserved in the Netherlands. The main conclusion of the report is crystal clear: “There is currently no national infrastructure in the Netherlands for the registration and reception of at-risk scholars.”

The exposure of this embarrassing gap in provision for scholars at risk is important: it gives Dutch universities who wish to host scholars at risk the opportunity to do some repair work on a broken system. They need the assistance of the Dutch government in this endeavour. The question is whether this opportunity will be recognized and acted upon. The Young Academy has laid bare an uncomfortable truth. It is surely impossible for the government to ignore their plea for action……

I believe that the only way forward is for politicians to enter the arena to resolve the impasse. The tax authorities and the labour inspectorate understandably have little interest in ensuring that scholars at risk are supported within Dutch universities. It is hardly their core business. The ministers involved (Education, Culture & Science, and Finance) thus need to take the political initiative to remove the obstacles around the tax and labour regulations and to provide guarantees that will allow the universities in collaboration with Nuffic and UAF to fulfil their moral duty to support scholars who cannot practise their profession in freedom and/or whose very life is threatened.

“It is precisely scholars who are often the first people to pose a threat to repressive regimes, and they are therefore often among the first group who must take flight.’’ – ‘Support for scholars at risk in the Netherlands’, January 2023.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Linda Johnson was the executive secretary of ISS, but has now retired. She is particularly interested in the societal relevance of research. In addition, she has done recent work on the safety and security of researchers and co-developed a course on literature as a lens on development.

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I know what you did last summer: are destination conferences a problem?

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Year in and year out, academics send themselves halfway across the world to attend conferences. In an age in which flying for leisure is fast becoming a taboo, are such conferences in which academics and their universities pay large sums of money to converge for brief moments to present their research and to network also becoming impermissible? And are they even more concerning when they take place in ‘exotic’ places at convenient moments – are destination conferences a thing, and are they a problem?

Most of us have been invited to a destination wedding – one where you travel to an unusual location where your friends/colleagues/family members choose to get married. At a safari lodge, in a forest, on an island, on a holiday farm, in the snow, or even in a different country – Thailand, Scotland, Finland, the Maldives. Anywhere that seems romantic, really.

If you’re anything like me, such invitations make you grind your teeth: you would love to go, because the locations are often idyllic and a wedding will make them even more so, but the costs of attending a wedding half the world away are astronomical. It’s not just about a plane ticket and the accommodation: meals, excursions, wedding gifts, and outfits add up to make it an expensive few hours of celebrating someone’s matrimony. And then there’s the emissions – in an age where flying is the new smoking, we’re thinking twice before hopping on a plane to visit a friend, watch a concert, or explore a new city.

Over the years, I’ve missed quite a few weddings in the country in which I was born and raised because I simply couldn’t justify flying there just for that. These weren’t even destination weddings to the couples who organised them, but to me, living at least twelve hours away by plane, they were. Those weddings that I did manage to attend took place when I was home visiting my family – over the Christmas period mostly. But I don’t fly somewhere just to attend a wedding. No matter how close I am to the couple to be wed.

This brings me to the idea of a destination conference and whether this is a thing. Are academic conferences organised in far-away places to lure academics into attending? And should we be saying no to this form of external validation?

Two things made me ponder this. First, I recall a conversation I had with a colleague some years back. We were discussing the conferences that we’d like to attend that year. Our university makes available money so that we (PhD researchers) can travel to and present our research at one or two conferences per year. My colleague suggested attending a conference in Hawaii. I was enthusiastic, of course, because who doesn’t want the chance to explore a major travel destination, mixing business with pleasure? When I asked him what the conference was on, he told me, and I realised that I in no way could attend. My research was in a totally different field and I could not adjust my proposal to fit the conference theme.

That got me thinking about why we as academics attend academic conferences and which of them are actually directly relevant to our research. If we present our work at these conferences, is it because it is good practice for becoming future academics? Are we presenting our research in area-specific sessions attended by peers that we respect and possibly want to collaborate with? Or are we presenting something vague in panels with general titles without the aim of actually using the conference to put forth new ideas and start with ground-breaking interdisciplinary work?

The second occurrence is more recent. I recently decided not to attend a large biennial conference set to take place in Portugal during this year’s summer holidays in person, even though I am co-convening a panel with a senior researcher. Fortunately, the conference is hybrid, which gives participants the option of attending online. Before the covid pandemic, this was not even an option, so we have come a long way. Meeting online is now just as acceptable, although not quite as desirable, as meeting in person. But hundreds, if not thousands, of conference participants will flock to the southern European country in July for the conference, which takes place over the course of a few days.

The decision not to attend the conference is based on the unwillingness both to fly within Europe, for whatever reason, and to attend a conference in an ‘exotic’ location just for the sake of doing so. I’d already sworn off flying within Europe for leisure – my partner and I had driven 2,000 kilometres over two days during the December holidays to visit his parents in Italy and had returned in the same way – and now I was doing the same for work. I’d always disliked conferences because of the massive expenses that have to be incurred to deliver half-hour presentations (registration fees, accommodation, travelling) and the purpose, which I sometimes feel is seldom more than ‘showing face’ and trying to remain relevant in a certain academic field.

Nevertheless, you’d think that I’d be attending a conference where I was co-convening a panel. My hesitance to do so, even with funding available to send me there, is interesting to me. It makes me wonder whether my aversion for academic conferences in general has turned into an aversion for ‘destination conferences’. Would I be just as hesitant if the conference were to take place in Portugal in the middle of the winter, or if it were to take place in a cold and dreary country, for example Ireland or Germany?

And is there anything wrong with academics going places for conferences? Is it still an unfortunate necessity if you as academic want to make your voice heard or make it in this cut-throat academic world?

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Lize Swartz is a PhD researcher studying how changes in urban water availability affect human-water relations. She has co-authored a book called Bron on how residents of Cape Town navigated the near-collapse of the city’s water system. She has been editor of Bliss since 2017.

 

Are you looking for more content about Global Development and Social Justice? Subscribe to Bliss, the official blog of the International Institute of Social Studies, and stay updated about interesting topics our researchers are working on.

 

In praise of flatness. On campus protest and academic community

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[The response to the OccupyEUR protest and an invitation to a survey on the university as a ‘brand’ are provocations, writes professor of Social Theory; Willem Schinkel. They flatten what a university actually is.

Source: Femke Legué

Two recent events afford a clear view of what the administrative leadership of Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) thinks a university really is. More precisely, these were two provocations. They made me think of Edwin Abbott’s novella Flatland. A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), that tells the story of A. Square, who lives in Flatland, a world in 2D in which he can only experience a 3D-shape like a sphere as circle. Analogously, at this university the capacity to see in more dimensions seems missing, and everything that does not fit in the ‘strategy’ of administrators and their bureaucratic squares is rendered flat.

 

First provocation: protest versus ‘academic community’

First there was the response of the university board to the occupation of the space in front of the university’s auditorium by students of OccupyEUR on February 7 and 8. They demanded an end to the university’s ties with the fossil fuel industry, to precarious labour, to student debt, and to the lack of campus accessibility. During a previous occupation in November 2022 the board immediately called the police. This time they did so after one day. This response testifies to an utter incomprehension of campus protest, and to a kind of housekeeping reflex, a neurosis of security and hygiene. When students were unwilling to, on day one, dilute their protest to a ‘dialogue’ on the administrators’ terms, the administrators’ response was, entirely in keeping with the corporate identity of the university: get the fuck out of hEUR with your attempts to make of this place something more than a factory for credentialization and a lobby lounge for suits and ties intent on doing what their daddies did before them: cashing on the planetary plunder called capitalism.

This response testifies to an utter incomprehension of campus protest, and to a kind of housekeeping reflex, a neurosis of security and hygiene

 

Whoever seeks to return to normal this quickly, rests on shaky foundations. In a decretal dripping with childish frustration, the occupation was dubbed ‘illegal’, and not a protest. What is more, it was declared not befitting an ‘academic community’, which, after all, cannot be disturbed ‘just because a small group has a certain opinion’. As the board said: “In no way have you shown an openness to dialogue. This attitude does not suit an academic community and Erasmian values, nor does it contribute to real solutions.” What a spoiled habituation to being found important. And what a pathetic impatience when, for once, you don’t immediately get your way. Apparently, administrators fail to recognize protest unless it is flattened to ‘having a certain opinion’ and expressing it in a format they determine (a ‘dialogue’). And with a historical and political-theoretical amateurism that is almost touching, they believe a protest is something that doesn’t disturb anything. Finally, and this is an important yield, it turns out they cannot conceive of the climate catastrophe in anything but technocratic terms, as if it were a ‘problem’ requiring a ‘solution’. Of course, that solution could never be anything that changes existing relations of power. Anything else would be ‘a certain opinion’. ‘Leadership’ is a generous concept if all roads automatically lead to the same order-hugging technocracy.

 

Second provocation: the university as ‘brand’

And then came the question, by email, to partake in a ‘reputation survey’. That went as follows:

Give your opinion on Erasmus University Rotterdam

 

What is already going well? What could be better? We are curious about your vision. This will help us further develop our brand and better meet the wishes and needs of future and current students and staff.”

Right. So this is the kind of opinion about the university we are encouraged to express: what do we think of the university as ‘brand’? There’s a flattening going on here as well. As a brand the university is reduced to an image of the university, a marketing image, flat like a 2D-picture. Despite the anti-intellectual stink such invitations give off, here too there is a housekeeping neurosis at work. In replacing the university by a branding image, the university in all its complexity, multiplicity and beautiful messiness is ironed out, whitewashed like so often. And nobody seems to have figured out that such a message – the university as brand – is a provocation and an insult to anyone with some inkling of the history of universities.

These two provocations – the reduction to ‘opinion’ and to ‘brand’ – deserve an answer. Actually, they really don’t, but there is a certain need to answer them for whoever advocates another idea of the university. Or rather for whoever has an idea of the university at all. How to understand the buzz about ‘Erasmian values’ and ‘positive societal impact’ in light of these two provocations? If administrators feel free to unload their anti-intellectual bullshit on students and staff, then it is time to face the flatness of their favorite kind of newspeak.

 

‘Erasmian values’ and the academic community

Let’s first note that the history of academic communities is not written by vice-deans coordinating a new procedure for exam evaluation with program directors and exam administration. That history is written by precisely the thing administrators think is incompatible with it: protest. Feel free to mail me if you want reading tips (but not for a ‘dialogue’!).

The history of academic communities is written by precisely the thing administrators think is incompatible with it: protest.

 

The values a university has are better uncovered by looking at its actions than at what it decides to print in glossy magazines and flyers. And it would seem that Erasmus University’s actions bespeak the following ‘Erasmian value’: whatever isn’t recognized as ‘academic community’ in the anti-intellectual and ahistorical narrow-mindedness of the administrative frames is repressed by police violence.

In terms of its intellectual contribution to the history of campus protest and the conceptual development of the concept of ‘academic community’, this administrative Flatland reflex has the quality of a fart. The scattered whining that the students did something illegal because university buildings are ‘private property’ is part of one and the same genre of anti-intellectual ghastliness. But that is saying too little. For this anti-intellectualism has a reason, and it produces something. In We Demand. The University and Student Protests (2017), the American scholar Roderick Ferguson illustrates that universities have been a crucial site for social struggle and change throughout the 20th century, and that university administrators have simultaneously worked hard to trivialize and securitize student protests, and to surround them with suspicion rather than to see them as chances for change. As he says:

“(…) anti-intellectualism, not an accident but the intention of certain social projects, is the mature and defensive expression of dominant institutions, one that retaliates against past and present political and intellectual uprisings.” (p. 87)

Historian Howard Zinn already spoke of the ‘danger’ of students for university administrators: students disturb things and make connections that cannot be registered as valuable in bureaucratic academic accounting logics. This, in the case of Erasmus University, despite the Erasmian value ‘connecting’ (marketing icon in the Strategy 2024 document: four puzzle pieces).

What happens in Rotterdam is thus not at all unique, and its predictability makes it exhausting, but also makes it possible to differentiate between person and position, between the administrator and the academic that can be more than administrative executive of a script elaborately recorded in research on campus protest.

Meanwhile, there appear to be suggestions of making it mandatory to announce campus protest, and to then allocate a designated room for it, rendering it part of the logistics of the academic business corporation rather than a disruption and an actual protest. Protest then becomes flattened to every other lecture on ‘fiscal economics’, ‘law and finance’ or ‘art and market’. I suggest the Erasmian value of ‘no protest’ here (icon: muzzle).

Erasmian values appear to be the latest form of flattening the university. Last year I and many others were asked to participate in the process of drafting a new ‘educational strategy’. The idea was that the previous one was not yet informed by ‘Erasmian values’, as it was five years old and the world has changed, according to Creating the Education vision 2023. Working together on world-class education. Makes sense to then takes one’s cue from the ‘values’ of someone who lived five hundred years ago. By the way, in what relevant respects had the world changed in the last five years? Well, the document makes clear that that change mainly lies in the normalization of ‘online education’ (posh name for bullshit on a screen that is conveniently cheap, flexible and – not unimportant – hygienic). Teaching on a screen, nicely flat. Let’s no longer talk about ‘online’ and ‘on campus’ education, but about 2D and 3D. To miss an entire dimension and call it teaching; you don’t survive in the university without a heavy dose of resistance to the absurd.

Talk of ‘values’ is, in fact, always a poor substitute for something substantial, at most it’s the pinning of marketing labels after the fact. The real question is what happens in the case of value conflict. Erasmian value ‘engaged with society’ (icon: three people with their heads in the clouds) doesn’t necessarily go well with ‘entrepreneurial’ (icon: light bulb). Read: OccupyEUR doesn’t go together with Shell. And that was precisely the point. And don’t be fooled by the board’s claim that its ideas aren’t that far apart from those of OccupyEUR. The strategy documents for the ‘convergence’ with the Technical University Delft mention as first future corporate connection (icon: four puzzle pieces): Shell.

Thankfully, the values of the antisemite Desiderius Erasmus were never the reason this university got ‘Erasmus’ as semiofficial name. How that did go about is recounted in the book Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam 1973-1993 [Erasmus University Rotterdam 1973-1993] (1993) by the historians Davids and van Herwaarden. If you open it, you will see in the colophon on page IV a brand logo at least as strong as that of the university, namely a shell, with the caption: “This publication is made possible in part by the financial support of Shell Netherlands Ltd.” Two years later financial support by Shell helped make the hanging of the Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa possible. He led the nonviolent  ‘Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People’ (MOSOP), but his protest disrupted the Erasmian value ‘entrepreneurial’ (icon: light bulb).

 

‘Positive societal impact’

It is clear that university administrators want the university to be an integral part of the contemporary order, the order of the planetary plunder euphemistically called ‘climate change’ – indeed, that euphemism, which comes out of the climate skeptical lobby, issues from the infrastructure of that plunder. ‘Positive societal impact’ is a name for the compulsive desire to do whatever the established order expects and deems proper. The yardstick for ‘positive’ lies with that order. The possibility that this established order itself – including the university – is a case of catastrophic impact cannot be registered in the repertoire of ‘positive societal impact’. But whoever sends the police to students connecting their engagement with the earth with their bodies, makes clear that ‘positive societal impact’ is an all-too fluffy name for nihilism.

The possibility that the established order itself – including the university – is a case of catastrophic impact cannot be registered in the repertoire of ‘positive societal impact’.

 

Strategies such as Creating Positive Societal Impact: The Erasmian Way assume consensus about the state of the world – there are ‘complex challenges’ – but they forego the fact that ideally, as Julia Schleck writes in Dirty Knowledge. Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism (2022), universities themselves are arenas of struggle. Struggle over what the world looks like, and struggle about change and about the language we use to position ourselves. That struggle is hygienically removed in flattened notions of ‘positive societal impact, the Erasmian way’. The fancy flyer of that strategy can sell this with a picture of – oh, the irony – a climate protest, but the entire thing is an exercise in anti-intellectualism exemplary for the structure of complicity that the university is for its administrators.

Someone taking a critical look at EUR might just surmise that it is an institution in which young people are mostly taught to manage, pathologize, and exploit other people. A production machine with minds as raw material, graduates as semi-finished products and as end product their participation in a thanatological order. Thank god for activist students falsifying such a horrendous image of the university!

Source: Femke Legué

The hollow phrase ‘impact’ appears by now to have replaced the tautologous ‘excellence’. Last year an invitation came to take part in ‘A dialogue on a vision of impact learning’. Another dialogue. This time, significantly, at the Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship (icon: light bulb). Those who wanted to go there from campus could take the ‘Impact Tour Bus’. You would have to go to the ‘Student Wellbeing Tent’ to assemble under the banner ‘World Class Education’. I heard afterwards that you could have speed date conversations with an ‘impact coach’ on board the bus (they wore vests saying so). But if it looks like satire, sounds like satire, and behaves like satire, it’s got to be satire, right? Yet as the Strategy 2024 document mentions: “Dialogue at all levels will be a vital part of measuring our success.” Vertical measurement dialogues is one I’m throwing in for free for the consideration of the strategic strategy strategists.

 

Hierarchy

In at least one respect the university cannot be reproached for its flatness: it is indeed a vertically oriented organization. An extremely hierarchical bureaucracy, based largely on autocratic government, delegated or not, in which self-government by students and staff is a joke no one finds funny. The Dutch university is archaically hierarchical, were it not for the fact that the differentiation in assistant professors, associate professors and professors in the Netherlands dates back to the early 1960s. What was then a temporary measure to deal with rising student numbers became permanent, and is taken seriously down to the most ridiculous details by means of what is fittingly called ‘UFO profiles’: detailed descriptions (in fact mostly lists) of what professors can do more than assistant and associate professors. Of course it is clear to anyone that’s been in a room with a professor for more than a few minutes that this is a fiction (UFO’s: these professors fly so high it cannot be identified what makes them so brilliant). This was the reason for a recent plea to abolish this hierarchy by the dean of law in Maastricht.

Once more, rising student numbers have been the reason for creating a new category of laborer at the bottom of the hierarchy: tutors and other flexible staff in precarious positions

 

But what happened in the sixties is being repeated. Once more, rising student numbers have been the reason for creating a new category of laborer at the bottom of the hierarchy: tutors and other flexible staff in precarious positions. A reserve army of academic laborers has been created to lower the production costs of teaching even further by way of exploitation and an even more uneven distribution of protections and privileges. As serious scholars in the field of academic freedom show (mail for references, not for dialogue), this Uberfication of teaching is the greatest threat to academic freedom.

Guess who are the only ones in this university, apart from tutors themselves, to have recently spoken up for this cause? The activists of OccupyEUR, who demanded abolishment of precarious positions. The fact that their protest was thus also a fundamental defense of academic freedom is entirely lost on the bureaucratic squares who believe the university is first and foremost a ‘brand’. Yet that protest can be of peripheral interest to no one who thinks academic freedom matters. Next time, look up from your tenth paper this year, walk out on your meeting.

 

Walking tall

On the second day of the occupation by OccupyEUR I read an article by Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux in Le Monde diplomatique, titled ‘Walking tall again’. She describes how the French 1995 strikes and protests against neoliberalization ignited her enthusiasm and made her proud, despite her working-class background, to walk tall again. I envisage the administrators of Erasmus University Rotterdam writing her a letter to teach her that such protest is illegal because it disrupts things, and that she’d be better off engaging in a ‘dialogue’. Walking tall? Flatten it down, madame Ernaux!

Thankfully the university still provides space for much more than the square suits and ties on its boards would have us believe. Space for activist students, for instance, despite everything. If you weren’t there: you should have seen the books they brought with them. Inspiration is what you get from students that refuse to waste time in chatter sessions with university power a brand. I am thankful to these students for the reminder that the knowledge we produce and the relations we engage in are inseparable from the struggle for our lives. They may be, in the words of the university board, ‘a small group’, but they are walking tall. And they lead the way in the experimentation with what an ‘academic community’ can be beyond the brand of an anti-intellectual impact rental shack.

 

This article was first published in Erasmus Magazine.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Willem Schinkel is Professor of Social Theory at Erasmus University Rotterdam and a member of the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

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Transformative Methodologies | Using a caring approach to equalise research relationships

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Collaboration between researchers and those they engage with for their research is increasingly promoted as a way to address some of the epistemic injustices arising from the process of producing knowledge. Stepping back and allowing those we work with to shape research agendas and become intimately involved in the research process is an act of care, and the effects and benefits are tangible, writes Marina Cadaval Narezo. Care can be a thread that weaves together multiple and diverse actors, helping create a dense fabric of experiences through which researchers and those they work with can collectively, and in more equitable ways, make sense of the creative process.

Uncomfortable questions

Before starting my PhD at the ISS, I was working in Mexico for an initiative that provided grant scholarships to indigenous people to pursue graduate studies. During the 15 years I was involved in operational and executive activities for this initiative, I got to know many inspiring women whose stories to obtain a university degree filled me with uncomfortable questions. Most of them were the first in their families or in their communities to go to university; most of them had attended boarding schools since they were children or had to migrate as teenagers to continue their education. Most of them had full-time jobs to cover their university expenses; those who did not face these challenges were considered privileged. Their academic trajectories were at times the result of collective efforts and at others that of solitary struggles. Nevertheless, they were generally painful, complex processes.

I felt that a better understanding of their paths was needed, so I decided to explore and highlight their stories through my PhD research. I wanted to know what had happened to some of the women who received a scholarship after they graduated and how their master’s or doctorate degrees affected their professional – and personal – development. I was puzzled about what changed and what remained in their lives as women, as indigenous people, and as professionals. Given my closeness to many of them due the long journeys together at the scholarships program called IFP-Probepi[1] but also as a researcher committed to anti-oppressive (Brown and Strega 2005), feminist (Haraway 1988; Harding 1991), and indigenous methodologies (Wilson 2008; Smith 2012), I thought that the most appropriate thing to do was to ask them directly. To talk it over.

‘Reflective conversations’: bridging times and spaces[2]

At the end of 2019, I contacted 36 indigenous women who had obtained master’s or PhD degrees between 2004 and 2014. Of those I contacted, 17 participated in the research. They were from different indigenous groups, states, ages, and areas of specialisation. Diversity was intentionally considered in order to identify those changes and continuities I was looking for, as well as the intersections of gender, race, and class that inform educational policies in Mexico. Originally, I was exclusively paying attention to their exclusion in terms of racism, sexism, classism, and tokenism.

I went to the towns or cities where they lived, including Yucatán, Chihuahua, Oaxaca, Mexico City, Chiapas, and Veracruz. We had long talks, or what I call ‘reflective conversations’, which I understand as dialogues that start from previous common and mutual understandings – such as the IFP-Probepi scholarship, the graduate courses, our feminisms, our families, and our health – that allowed us to meet and examine ourselves across multiple times and spaces. While sharing a meal, a drink, or a walk, we conversed, reflecting on the experience of studying abroad, on our current jobs, on how much or how little life had changed. We connected those we were when we first met through IFP-Probepi with those we had become.

Shifting centers – from ‘victims’ to social and political change agents

After organising, systematising and analysing the information obtained, in the summer of 2020 I shared the preliminary findings with them. The meetings were online which allowed us to connect our multiple geographies: Oaxaca, Chiapas, Yucatán, Veracruz, Chihuahua, Mexico City, The Hague (The Netherlands). Sharing and discussing these findings and listening to their responses led me to shift the focus of my research -initially centered in their exclusion of the education system- to their processes and strategies of resistance. “We do not want to be the victims nor being seen only as beneficiaries of educational programs and social schemes,” some stated. “We must be recognised as the social and political actors that we are.”

Our encounters allowed me personally to understand in a much clearer way their paths and to address my research questions considering their gazes, but also to build networks and take action that goes beyond the very objective of writing a doctoral thesis and is more closely linked to the reality we want to transform. Thus, in 2020, we participated in a campaign to help eradicate racism in higher education promoted by Cátedra UNESCO Educación Superior y Pueblos Indígenas y Afrodescendientes en América Latina (UNESCO Chair in Higher Education and Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples in Latin America). Through the ISS Research Innovation Facility (RIF), we then set up an independent and collective blog called ‘Resistencias y Mujeres Profesionistas Indígenas’ (Resistances and Indigenous Professional Women) that we are using to share our stories of racism and the strategies that each of us has developed to face it.

A transformative methodology?

Was the methodology I developed and used transformative? For the way academia produces knowledge, I think so. I am doing research showing how collaboration, reciprocity, and recognition can work together to create caring processes in which different voices can be woven together into one fabric of experiences. For the women I am working with, I think it also does. It has created synergies and coalitions necessary to challenge stereotypes and transform not just how knowledge is produced, but how we want to walk in this world. For me, for sure. It has allowed me to reconnect with those women who have made me confront my own privileges and prompted me to use my position to continue exposing some of the still-existing structural exclusions. The way is long, but it is important to keep sharing, discussing, and resisting.

REFERENCES

Brown L. and S. Strega (2005), Research as Resistance. Critical, indigenous and anti-oppressive approaches, Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.

Cadaval Narezo, M. (2022), “Methodologies for collaborative, respectful and caring research. Conversations with professional indigenous women from Mexico”, in W. Harcourt, C. Dupuis, J. Gaybor & K. van den Berg (eds.), Experiments and Reflections in Feminist Methodologies, Series: Gender, Development and Social Change. Switzerland: Palgrave.

Haraway, D. (1988) “Situated knowledges: The Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, Feminist Studies, 14(3): 575-599.

Harding, S. (1991), Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

Smith, L. T. (2012), Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous Peoples, New Zealand: Zed Books/Otago University Press.

Wilson S. (2008), Research Is Ceremony Indigenous Research Methods, Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing.

[1] The initiative was financed from 2001 to 2012 by the Ford Foundation as the International Fellowships Program (IFP), and from 2013 until present (2022) by the Mexican government through the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) as the Fellowships Program for Indigenous People (Probepi). In both cases, it has been administered by the Center for Research and Higher Education in Social Anthropology (CIESAS).

[2] For a more in-depth discussion of the methodology I used, see Cadaval Narezo (2022).

 

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Marina Cadaval Narezo is a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies.

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Transformative Methodologies | On ‘being with’ and ‘holding space’ as transformative research tools in anthropology

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[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1592900783478{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;}”][vc_column css=”.vc_custom_1592900766479{margin-right: 10px !important;margin-left: -10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]Despite advances made in the field of anthropology to address some of its problematic practices, anthropologists still conduct research in the same ways as they always have, their comings and goings based on the amount of data they have acquired. The decolonisation of anthropological studies may benefit from a different approach in which researchers spend time ‘being with’ studied groups, hold space for their stories, and are responsible for the stories they as researchers then put forth, writes Aminata Cairo.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_single_image image=”21547″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]Helicopter anthropologists

“For every Indian, there was an anthropologist.” So joked the Native population with me as I was visiting the Navajo reservation to conduct research. There were plenty more jokes about the scientists who, in the name of science, came and went and excavated their stories, only to misrepresent them and never be heard from again. Similarly, when I went to my first national anthropological conference in the US as a graduate student, I attended a session with the Native American cohort where I learned about the concept of ‘helicopter anthropologist’ – those who come and ‘hover’ to extract what they need and then leave without a trace.

Those jokes and lessons have stayed with me. As an anthropologist, I have always felt strongly that in order to do right, we should heed the guidance of those that have been affected the most by these practices. In American anthropology, that would be the Native American population.

I have been trained as an American anthropologist, and as much as I love the discipline, something never felt right. I switched from clinical psychology to anthropology because it was a different way of dealing with people’s stories. Anthropology allowed me to help people give voice to their own stories.  And yet there was something about it…

Anthropology was born out of a very specific colonial history,[1] after all. Yes, it was about people’s stories, but those stories were studied so people could be dominated, exploited, or classified as ‘less than’ in support of white supremacy. I am well aware of its past. The approach has changed since its early beginnings, but the means to extract the stories have basically remained the same. We are still helicopter anthropologists.

Yet things could be different. At that same anthropology conference, I met a Native American elder who told me that “the community should be better off for the anthropologists having been there.” It is the teaching that has stayed with me and set me on my path to study indigenous approaches to knowledge.

Researchers as stewards of knowledge

After reading the work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith[2] and Shawn Wilson,[3] my approach to knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge changed forever. According to Wilson, we can never be owners of knowledge. Knowledge is all around us, and we stand in relationship to it. Ultimately, we can only be stewards of knowledge. This approach brings with it a certain humility, an understanding that engagement with indigenous peoples and the gaining of insights is a privilege, not an entitlement.  Tuhiwai Smith acknowledges the colonial foundation of research practices and advocates for an approach to research that is decolonising and treats research populations with respect.

Reliable accountability and holding space

My approach to research now is totally different from how I was initially trained. Now, I start with the premise that we are all connected and that for a short period of time, I would ‘be with’ and join a community in order to unearth a story or stories that can be a benefit for all of us. I follow Wilson’s mandate of ‘relational accountability’ represented in the three ‘R’s’: respect, responsibility, and reciprocity. In addition, I use my own concept of ‘holding space’ in which I am not entitled to the story or stories, but must earn the right to experience those stories through being with, displaying care, and building trust. Through joining and collectively being touched and transformed by the story or stories, they will come to light.

The key is that this journey is a respectful collaboration, rather than the standard data extraction pursuit of traditional research. Even in anthropology’s method of participant observation, the ultimate goal is for the researcher to walk away informed and enriched. In this endeavour, the goal is for the researcher and the (research) community to have learned something that will be of benefit to both and potentially useful to transform the space.

In our most recent research project, where we joined a marginalised community within The Hague to explore solidarity in the times of the COVID-19 pandemic, we engaged in a journey with the community. What started as a pursuit for counternarratives to the existing negative public stories shifted and became an exercise in holding space for all the stories that existed in this community, whether positive or negative. It was the community members, after all, that reminded us that they didn’t have anything to prove, and that in fact they had earned the right to just be. Through joining and ‘being with’, we then shifted course and learned about how people hold space for each other – a far more valuable lesson.

I understand that some of my colleagues might frown upon my approach to research. However, in my world of inclusion, there are many different approaches to knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge. My way of doing knowledge is just fine. What matters is that I can contribute to knowledge and communities and feel good about what I do. All of it. That is the best reward and my incentive to keep going.

[1] Lews, D. (1973) ‘Anthropology and Colonialism’, Current Anthropology 14(5): 581-602.

[2] Tuhiwai Smith, L. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London and New York: Zed Books Ltd.

[3] Wilson, S. (2008). Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Winnipeg: Fernwood.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1642552768504{margin-top: 0px !important;}”]About the author:

Aminata Cairo is the chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Team at the International Institute of Social Studies.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column css=”.vc_custom_1596795191151{margin-top: 5% !important;}”][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]

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17th Development Dialogue | A call to end the ‘social distancing’ of the sciences – in the COVID-19 era and beyond

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The chasm that separates the different scientific disciplines remains deep as ever despite the evident need to address pressing global problems through transdisciplinary collaboration. C. Sathyamala and Peter A.G. van Bergeijk in this article show how close and intensive cooperation across the artificial borders between the sciences can be made possible and argue for a methodology acknowledging that only a combination of qualitative and quantitative research can create the type of knowledge that’s required to move forward together.

Hans-Peter Gauster (unsplash)

We start with a proposition: that both social and natural sciences are good at boxing, but not as good at wrestling. They ‘box’ by telling themselves stories about where they and researchers in the respective fields ‘fit’ into the scaffolding erected around the supposedly chiasmic divide of natural and social sciences. We all seem to know what side of this divide we want to be on, and a lot of time is invested in delineation, often drawing distinctions without differences. For too long, specialisation and deeper knowledge, both applied and theoretical, have been seen as the royal road to academic success.

But there are limits to what any science can do on its own. We’ve seen this during the current pandemic. As in any context, COVID-19-related health problems cannot be tackled from a purely medical angle; the exploitative social and economic structures that make people sick must also be challenged. Indeed, the validity of medical solutions to a large extent depends on social and economic conditions of time and place. The pandemic does not provide a new insight – it simply makes it clearer.

The COVID-19 pandemic taught us that by boxing in the disciplines and keeping them apart, we fail in a monumental way to ‘wrestle’ with multi-faceted problems, like global pandemics. We avoid the intellectual battle inherent in engaging with what the other side thinks. To deal with COVID-19 or to understand what is happening, we need less boxing and more wrestling! A mono-disciplinary perspective, however sophisticated, cannot help us design and evaluate policy interventions, or grasp the wider meaning and significance of COVID-19 in specific contexts. A lot of time is now being invested in delineation with other strands and lines of thought based on high principles of epistemology and ontology. Our point is that that energy would be better spend on truly working together.

A physician and an economist…

We write from different sides of a supposedly chiasmic divide, a divide we each try to bridge and straddle in our own ways. C. Sathyamala is a public health physician with a Master’s degree in Epidemiology who opted to do her PhD in development studies at the ISS. In the process, she developed a strong interest in class and state power and in the history of the biopolitics of food and hunger. As a medical doctor concerned with action for social justice, the Bhopal gas leak disaster proved a crucial turning point in her life as corporate interests in collusion with the state effaced people’s lives. The COVID-19 pandemic created similar tendency, displacing the migrant working class across India and subjecting them to what Giorgio Agamben has called ‘bare life’.

As an agnostic Dutch economist, Peter van Bergeijk is the first academic in a family of South Holland-based bakers, carpenters, and farmers. As a policy maker at the OECD, he was frustrated by the impossibility to engage major developing countries in discussions on environment and health. This motivated his move to the ISS, where he is equally happy to employ a neo-Marxist or a ‘empiricist’ framework as a toolkit, depending on what analytical toolbox is most suitable for the problem at hand.

…together critically examining the COVID-19 pandemic

Each of us has written on COVID-19 – on the urgency of communicating our concerns – in the form of  books or a range of Working Papers. Writing from different social and professional positions, we now also write…together. A common interest around COVID-19 has bridged our science-social science divide.

Primarily, we agree that if at all a silver lining is to be found in the COVID-19 situation, it is that we can learn a great deal, especially with mixed disciplinary backgrounds, with science, social sciences, and the arts (we have also worked together artistically: you will find Sathya’s poetry and Peter’s lithography alongside at the exhibition Broken Links).

And we both agree that we will only truly understand pandemics and their consequences, and what to do about protecting human societies from their fallout once social scientists and natural scientists stop practicing social and intellectual distancing by boxing themselves into their own disciplines.

This is more urgent than often recognised: the next pandemic is a certainty, only its timing is uncertain.

The WHO hopes to forge solidarity and encourage the sharing of knowledge across disciplinary and global divides. The purpose is to generate greater consensus around COVID-19.

But while lip service is paid to medical opinion, it is powerful political and economic elites that continue to call the shots.  State interventions provide selective care in the matter of making live and letting die, and even in making die in the Foucauldian biopolitical sense. Academics find themselves struggling to keep up in real time with the pace of the pandemic, with its spread, recurrence, changing pattern, and often its gross mismanagement.

Huge as the problem is, we are pleased to have started our own dialogue, right here at the ISS, and based on our own published and ongoing research on the subject. How COVID-19 affects us now, and what kinds of ‘pandemic futures’ we face, are questions all of us can contribute to answering once we learn to wrestle across our disciplinary divides.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1625466035491{margin-top: 0px !important;}”]About the authors:

C. Sathyamala is a public health physician and epidemiologist with a PhD in Development Studies. She is currently a postdoc academic researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies, Den Haag, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her areas of interest include food security and politics of food, political economy of health, medical ethics, reproductive rights, and environmental justice. She has been active in both the health and women’s movement in India for some decades. She has authored and co-authored books and published in journals, peer-reviewed and otherwise, and in newspapers on wide-ranging topics. 

Peter van Bergeijk is professor of international economics and macroeconomics at the ISS.

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Positioning Academia | Decolonizing academic minds: reflecting on what academics are getting wrong (and right) by Ton Dietz

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When Linda Johnson and I shared responsibilities for the Prince Claus Chair in Development and Equity, we had many discussions that were close to the leading topic of the ongoing Africa Knows! Conference for which I am co-responsible, ‘It is time to decolonize minds’. In a recent email message to all conference participants, David Ehrhardt, Marieke van Winden and I shared some preliminary thoughts about lessons learned so far. I reflect on them here.

Through this series we are celebrating the legacy of Linda Johnson, former Executive Secretary of the ISS who retired in December last year. Having served the ISS in various capacities, Linda was also one of the founding editors of Bliss. She spearheaded many institutional partnerships, promoted collaboration, and organised numerous events, always unified in the theme of bringing people in conversation with each other across divides. This blog series about academics in the big world of politics, policy, and practice recognises and appreciates Linda’s contribution to the vitality of the ISS.

“Of course Africa knows. What a self-evident title for a conference. Why did they select this title?” Those remarks have often been made since the African Studies Centre in Leiden, and its many partners, including the ISS, started the preparations for what was meant to be a three-day conference about knowledge development in Africa, and that has become a three-month virtual meeting place between 8 December 2020 and 24 February 2021 (see www.africaknows.eu). But the conference title is ‘Africa Knows!’, with an exclamation mark.

When research, higher education, and education in general are being discussed, the focus in the past has often been on problems, on lack of quality, on a brain drain, on Africa lagging behind. With the exclamation mark, the conference organizers want to show that the focus will be on the many positive developments in Africa’s knowledge sector and the need to ‘decolonize’ our minds if we (Africans and Europeans alike) think and talk about Africa.

Africa Knows! is also a wink at earlier conferences that the African Studies Centre organized (together with the Netherlands African Business Council) in 2012 and 2014: ‘Africa Works!’, also with that exclamation mark. That title was meant as a counterpoint to the book ‘Africa Works’ (Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, with as its subtitle ‘Disorder as Political Instrument’, 1999) and an emphasis on problems and disasters that so often dominated debates in the 1980s and 1990s. Things are different now; we only need to see it with different eyes, with decolonized eyes.  So let me focus in this blog on the core issue of the conference Africa Knows!: how to decolonize minds.

‘Decolonization’ has elicited a wide range of responses from those conference participants that have attended the conference online thus far. For some, the issue was, and still is, regarded as odd so many decades after most African countries have become politically independent (and some parts of Africa, such as Ethiopia, have never been colonized). Others feel that the impact of colonialism and its institutions should not be overemphasized (it was said to be “just a scratch on the surface of the long history of Africa”), or that it is being regarded as “having taken place too long ago”, or that it takes away the agency (and blame) from African leaders for their policy mistakes and behaviour after independence and places blame on ‘the past’, or on ‘colonials’.

At the same time, many participants said that, even without ever having experienced colonial overlords, colonial mindsets can be influential and long lasting, and many conference participants are convinced that ‘decolonizing (academic) minds’ really is an issue, both for Africans and for Europeans – including from countries that have never been colonizers, or have not been engaged in slavery or supporting ‘Apartheid’. Moreover, it was also raised as an issue for Asians and Americans. So let us try to summarize some of the mindset issues that have been discussed during the Africa Knows! sessions that took place in December 2020.

First of all, we discussed colonial mindsets and practices in academia. We tried to become more aware of the implicit and explicit biases we hold and how they affect our attempts to decolonize our academic practices. The following were cited as some of the main issues we face in academia:

  • Framing the relationship between partners as ‘capacity development’, ‘training’, or ‘helping out’ rather than collaboration. Hierarchies are produced in academia by claiming that partners, particularly those in the Global North, collaborate with those in the Global South in the name of ‘capacity development’, for example.
  • Preferring leadership in research consortia and in project evaluations to be taken by partners from outside Africa. This is linked to the above hierarchization of partnerships that results in the undermining of the agency and capacity of African institutes forming part of research consortia.
  • Preferring to publish in non-African journals and with non-African publishers. This is done seemingly for the sake of ‘high-quality science’, but diminishes opportunities for African journals to rise to prominence.
  • Dependence on ideas, and funding from outside Africa, so evident in many publications about Africa, where indigenous knowledge hardly plays a role, where relevant African ideas are ignored, and where ‘who pays, decides’, so often seems to determine the hierarchies in knowledge production and use.
  • Disregarding scholarly work not written in English (or French). Some journals even refuse to incorporate other languages in the bibliography.
  • Prioritising (first) authorship of non-African scholars in publications. All too often, first authorship is given to the senior, Western scientist rather than to the author(s) who did most of the work.
  • Publishing about Africa without taking note of African contributions in the same field of related fields. Just check out bibliographies of papers you have recently reviewed, and you will see for yourself.
  • Publishing in journals for which others have to pay (behind paywalls). Open access will make a large difference to scholars in Africa and many other places.

We also discussed ways in which mindsets and practices in academia are already being decolonized. Our main conclusion is that we have some way to go in view of the problems listed above. Here are some of the main things we have done or can do to help decolonize academia:

  • Co-create research and innovation in teams with equals.
  • Make use of indigenous institutional strength and experiences, and don’t rely on people and funds from elsewhere.
  • Encourage African leadership in research teams and in project evaluations.
  • Encourage Africans to be first author in cases of joint research.
  • Be aware of available local contributions to studies about African affairs, and use it in teaching and in publications.
  • Make sure that libraries about Africa contain many publications published in Africa itself.
  • Encourage students and authors in African Studies to include many references from Africa.
  • Ensure that all partners contribute financially to research projects, conferences, publications, and other forms of collaboration.
  • Encourage teaching, conversations, and publications in other languages than English, and promote bridging the language divides.
  • Highlight indigenous/endogenous ideas and practices.
  • In teaching about Africa, include more pre-colonial history and more knowledge from and about marginal areas.
  • In African Studies, give recognition to the importance of North Africa and its linkages with Sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Put more emphasis on Africa’s linkages in past and present with Asia and Latin America, and within Africa.
  • In encouraging ‘African’ contributions, do not judge ‘Africans’ by their skin colour.

Although our discussions were focused on Africa, we anticipate that similar issues are faced in other contexts in the Global South. Intensified discussions are needed to ensure that no-one gets left behind, particularly as the current global COVID-19 pandemic continues.

About the author:

Ton Dietz (African Studies Centre Leiden, and former vice-chair of the Prince Claus Curatorium, with Linda Johnson as its secretary).

 

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Positioning Academia | Development must change in the face of injustice and inequality

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Inequality is growing in most countries and deep-seated injustices continue to pervade our world—from the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on minority ethnic groups and the tragic death of George Floyd in the US, to reports of the collapse of the health system in Yemen. In the face of such embedded inequalities and injustices, what must we, as engaged academics, do to make our commitment to a more equitable and sustainable world real?

Through this series we are celebrating the legacy of Linda Johnson, former Executive Secretary of the ISS who retired in December last year. Having served the ISS in various capacities, Linda was also one of the founding editors of Bliss. She spearheaded many institutional partnerships, promoted collaboration, and organised numerous events, always unified in the theme of bringing people in conversation with each other across divides. This blog series about academics in the big world of politics, policy, and practice recognises and appreciates Linda’s contribution to the vitality of the ISS.

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Changing how we ‘understand’ and ‘do’ development

As shown by contributors to the World Social Science Report on Challenging Inequalities, which the IDS led in 2016, multiple forms of inequality intersect to drive marginalisation and discrimination. In 2020, injustices and inequalities have been exposed and exacerbated in different ways through the disruptions and shocks that are shaping our era—from COVID-19, climate change and financial crises to conflicts, new technologies and closing political spaces.

These disruptions, which share many underlying causes, are both threatening collective futures and sharpening the vulnerabilities felt by particular people and groups. Long-dominant development models, such as those promoting economic growth, market liberalisation, globalisation, carbon-intensive industries and command-and-control planning regimes, are now under unprecedented challenge. But while these disruptions pose threats and challenges, they also offer opportunities to do things differently:  to ‘build forward differently’ and to rethink development as transformative change.

At IDS, we have identified three key areas in which a collective endeavour within, across and beyond the development sector is urgently needed. Each provides a valuable opportunity to develop our thinking with global partners, including colleagues at ISS, on how we can best collaborate to co-generate and mobilise evidence in ways that ultimately make a difference to people’s lives, and especially tackle the most extreme forms of inequity and injustice. We wish to:

1. Build and connect solidarities for collective action, locally and globally.

Responses to interlinked global challenges such as inequality, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate that knowledge, action, and leadership can emerge at local levels, as well as, or often in the absence of, action at state, national, and global levels. Neighbourhood quarantines, initiatives to provide food to the most vulnerable, community gardens, and local actions to eradicate plastic waste are just a few amongst myriad recent examples across the world.

More concerted efforts need to be undertaken to connect such local initiatives with national and global collective action, whether through building national and transnational alliances between social movements, encouraging government recognition and support, strengthening international financial, economic, health and environmental governance, or sharing science and data. For example, the World Health Organization’s repeated calls for global solidarity in relation to COVID-19 have been heeded by many, but international collaboration is still limited. Global partnership is an essential part of the equation in tackling global challenges—whether that’s finding treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, tackling climate and environmental vulnerabilities, or understanding and addressing institutional and systemic racism—and pressure needs to be applied to governments worldwide not to retreat behind borders.

ISS and IDS share a commitment to a universalist approach to development; we recognise that the time is right to look within Europe, to apply our frameworks, tools, and praxis of international development to new development trends in the Global North, including climate change, the global rise in populism, inequalities of many kinds, and health crises. A working group within IDS is developing partnerships and thinking around this through our European Engagement Approach.

2. Value diverse knowledge and expertise.

IDS and ISS are both committed to ensuring the representation of social sciences in responses to global shocks, and we advocate the need for expertise from across disciplines, countries, sectors and communities, and better ways of facilitating the collaborative generation and sharing of this knowledge and learning. Again, the COVID-19 response, and its interconnections with inequalities, is salutary. The mantra of ‘led by the science’ misleadingly presents science as a singular, uncontested, unbiased thing operating outside of politics and social norms. The range of disciplines drawn on in most national responses has been narrow, dominated by epidemiology and biomedicine.

Bringing wider forms of expertise to bear means, for example, challenging assumptions underpinning scientific modelling; drawing on social sciences to understand how the virus is spreading, between whom, and who is vulnerable and why; and complementing formal science with the knowledge and learning of local populations —as occurred so effectively in countries such as Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia during the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak.

But taking inequalities and injustices seriously means we also need to go further. We need to invest in equitable and sustainable research partnerships that value and strengthen the knowledge and expertise produced by institutions, universities, and communities in low- and middle-income countries, and to support moves to ‘decolonise’ development knowledge and practice, and foster cognitive justice.

3. Understand, address and challenge power imbalances.

Most important in changing the way we think about and do development is to understand, address, and challenge deep-seated power imbalances. Power relations underlie the causes of and vulnerabilities linked to health, climate, and economic disruptions. They lie at the heart of inequalities and injustices. Whether progressive economic, social, and environmental change takes place ultimately depends on political choice and mobilisation, involving citizens, states, and other actors in processes that will often be highly charged. Development can no longer be imagined as a technical matter, but must be treated as thoroughly political.

We must also move beyond limited applications of ‘thinking and working politically’ in aid programmes, to embedding understandings of politics and power, including the politics of knowledge, more widely and deeply in attempts to influence change and transformation. In doing so, we must look within our own organisations and institutions at how we create and prop up, consciously or sub-consciously, entrenched power relations, injustices, and inequalities.

And as academics and scholar-activists, we also need to reflect on and be humble about our own assumptions and positions. Whether through the ways in which we approach partnership, in relation to where and who we choose to engage with, in how we frame and teach development, or in how far we reflect equality and diversity across all that we do, it is time to match our commitments to a more equitable and sustainable external world with commitments to justice in our personal and institutional practices.

As academics and knowledge professionals committed to a more equal and sustainable world, staff at the Institute of Development Studies and the International Institute for Social Studies share the goal of collaborating across sciences, sectors, and communities to do research, learning and teaching that brings progressive change. Our institutes have a long history of collaboration, including through the Journal of Peasant Studies, the Land Deals Politics Initiative, the Wellbeing, Ecology, Gender and Community Innovation Training Network (WEGO-ITN), Robert Chambers’s and Richard Jolly’s Honorary Fellowships at ISS, and more. We look forward to collaborating with ISS and others in this vision of development. Read more about our commitments and priorities, and join us in solidarity around a search for social and cognitive justice in meeting challenges that affect us all.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Melissa Leach is Director of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS).

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Positioning Academia | Creating a safe haven at ISS for scholars at risk

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While most academics can conduct research freely, a number of scholars around the world have been threatened due to the nature of their critical, yet crucial work in the field of development studies. Over the past decade, the ISS has provided institutional support for the Scholars at Risk (SAR) network, helping create a safe haven for five scholars whose lives were in danger. We share here our experience of the value of this programme on the occasion of the retirement of Linda Johnson, who along with her work for the Prince Claus Chair coordinated ISS support for visiting scholars, infusing the link with a special quality.

“Solidarity Mural” by Atelier Teee is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Through this series we are celebrating the legacy of Linda Johnson, former Executive Secretary of the ISS who retired in December last year. Having served the ISS in various capacities, Linda was also one of the founding editors of Bliss. She spearheaded many institutional partnerships, promoted collaboration, and organised numerous events, always unified in the theme of bringing people in conversation with each other across divides. This blog series about academics in the big world of politics, policy, and practice recognises and appreciates Linda’s contribution to the vitality of the ISS.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Both of us first got to know Linda through her support for Sunila Abeysekera from Sri Lanka, a brilliant feminist scholar and internationally known women’s rights defender who was supported by the SAR programme between 2011 and 2013. She had been forced to flee following death threats and found refuge in her alma mater, the ISS. Since Sunila stayed with Amrita through the three years, it was possible to see at close quarters what Wendy immediately perceived when she visited Sunila: a feminist ally. As we sat down for tea, Linda appeared, bearing a large bouquet of flowers for Sunila. It was clear Linda was no ordinary administrator of a programme—Linda was there as a friend and as someone who was providing a rich connection to Dutch life for a woman in exile.

Providing sanctuary for an exiled person involved much more than the necessary organising of the visas, permits, and dealing with bureaucracy. As Edward Said so eloquently wrote, exile “… is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted” (Said, 2002:173). For these scholars who found their lives in limbo, Linda wove together a solidarity network among strangers based on respect, empathy, compassion, and care to create a sense of belonging and a home in another land. Most importantly, she became a friend and a confidant, engaging with their personal and professional lives. Rather than what could be a hierarchical relationship of charitable benevolence, Linda was able to forge deeper horizontal bonds of solidarity and shared responsibility for the wellbeing of others.

Reflecting on her work with SAR, Linda said, “ISS would not have been able to provide a haven for these scholars without the huge efforts of ISS colleagues and of Dutch politicians, diplomatic staff, and human rights lawyers. All of these scholars have become ‘honorary members’ of my own family, spending time at my home and becoming an integral part of the fabric of my life. My family is the richer for these friendships.” (personal communication, 2021)

It is through her generous giving of time and caring attention that it was possible to build a sanctuary at the ISS where, despite trauma and loss, the scholars could feel at home. Their overall wellbeing was paramount to her. She would not only meet them in The Hague for coffee or a glass of white wine, but also invited them to her home in Amsterdam for a quick supper or lunch before she would take them to an art gallery or a theatre. Her own travels and skills in languages made her an important conduit for the cultural and social differences the SAR scholars would encounter. Her ready ear and wide networks enabled her to connect them to services and institutions they required, an intellectual community, and Dutch cultural life.

The exceptional way Linda has built and sustained the SAR program at the ISS shows what working as a ‘professional’ requires: going beyond technical competencies, developing new practices which incorporate empathy, care, kindness, and an ability to connect with others.

As Linda observed:

“One can only stand back in awe at the resilience these individuals continue to show in spite of being cut off from contact with their friends and families at home. Working with scholars at risk is messy, it is tough, it does not fit neatly into protocols and procedures. Yet, it is vital that ISS continues to support such individuals as part of its mission to pursue greater social justice.” (personal communication, 2021)

This same dedication, care for people, and respect for the role scholars from the Global South can play in the Netherlands is equally evident in her work for the Prince Claus Chair (PCC). She has supported all 19 of the PCC holders and 12 postdocs to date, organised two PCC five-year-anniversary events, and from 2010 onwards worked with each awardee and postdoc intensively during his/her term. As Executive Secretary of the PCC, she facilitated the establishment of links between PCC holders’ work and wider networks. For instance, Stella Quimbo’s work on health insurance was connected with HM Queen Máxima of the Netherlands and UN special advocate for inclusive finance Saradindu Bhaduri’s work on ‘frugal innovation’ provided an input for the EU Horizon Europe programme. Besides all of this, she helped them navigate the Dutch milieu, got to know their families, and shared her own family with them, creating a sense of home for the PCC holders during their time in the Netherlands.

As Linda reminisced:

“I tried to create a family feeling among the PCC community members and to facilitate cooperation and collaboration among chairholders. I felt that it was important for the chairholders and postdocs to get to know something about the Netherlands during their time here and saw it as part of my role to make this possible. This led to many concerts, ballets and meals together, both at my home and in restaurants in Amsterdam, Utrecht, and The Hague.” (personal communication, 2021)

Linda’s work with the SAR scholars and Prince Claus Chair holders has contributed to bringing vibrant networks working toward social justice closer to Dutch academia. It is important that we uphold her legacy by ensuring that our university continues to participate in and cherish these small but far-reaching initiatives over the coming decades.

About the authors:

Amrita Chhachhi is Associate Professor at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University, Netherlands. Her research, teaching and publications focus on gender, labour, poverty, inequality and social policy and the state, religious fundamentalisms and social movements.  She is the author of Gender and Labour in Contemporary India: Eroding Citizenship and co-editor of Engendering Human Security: Feminist Perspectives and Confronting State, Capital and Patriarchy: Women Organising in the process of Industrialisation. She is on the editorial board of the journal Development and Change. She is linked with a number of South Asian feminist, labour and peace networks.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

Professor Dr Wendy Harcourt was appointed full Professor and a Westerdijk Professor together with an endowed Chair of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Hague in October 2017. She is Coordinator of the EU H2020-MSCA-ITN-2017 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks (ITN) WEGO (Well-being, Ecology, Gender, and Community) awarded in May 2017. She has published widely in feminist theory with a focus on critical development, body politics, feminist political ecology. She is series editor of the Palgrave Gender, Development and Social Change and the ISS-Routledge Series on Gender, Development and Sexuality.

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COVID-19 | How COVID-19 exacerbates inequalities in academia

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Man with laptop in the dark

[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1592900783478{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;}”][vc_column css=”.vc_custom_1592900766479{margin-right: 10px !important;margin-left: -10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]The COVID-19 crisis has brought to the fore gendered and racialised aspects of precarity that were steeping in academia long before the virus emerged. The increased burden of unpaid care work, still mostly borne by female academics, has skewed research output. Casualised staff, many of them early-career and/or international researchers, are expected to withstand the worst of the crisis, with their job security under threat. What action can academics take to challenge these negative developments? We need a post-pandemic vision, writes María Gabriela Palacio.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#f00f0f” css=”.vc_custom_1593430915072{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_single_image image=”17332″ img_size=”600×450″ alignment=”center”][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#f00f0f” css=”.vc_custom_1593430944892{margin-top: -20px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]COVID-19 has illuminated deep-seated inequalities overlooked during ‘normal’ times. As we grapple with the extent and severity of the outbreak, we have been required to isolate and contemplate the cessation of economic activities. The fragility of our systems has been thrown into sharp relief, evincing that it is not necessarily the virus, but the lack of regulation and protection that amplifies inequalities among us.

What is work? What is essential?

COVID-19 gave us a new grammar to talk about what we do and how it is valued: essential and non-essential work. What we now consider essential work is the kind of work that our economies have systematically devalued. Health workers have been at the forefront of the response, with many women and minority ethnic communities at the lower tier of the healthcare system, working in underfunded systems without the necessary compensation and protective equipment. Many do work that is neither considered essential nor ‘work’.

Women’s unpaid work has increased as lockdown measures disrupted childcare provision and increased other care obligations. School and daycare closures have created new forms of stress and anxieties among caregivers (predominantly women), with a sizeable social gradient in the extent to which families feel able to support their children and provide home schooling. Within the academe, the drop in the number of papers submitted by female academics and the skewed distribution of research grants illustrate the increased burden of unpaid care work that women shoulder.

What work is valued? What is disposable?

This crisis intersects not only with gendered but also with racialised aspects of precarity in academia. As the pandemic rages across diverse geographies and international students defer entry for a year, higher-education centres face operational challenges, resulting in recruitment freezes, contracts not being extended, or the scrapping of research projects. Early-career academics on temporary contracts—many scheduled to expire this year—are anxious about their job security. International staff members are more likely to participate in casual employment, often unable to make any long-term commitments as their residency is attached to their work status. The experiences of international and ethnic minorities often go unheard in academia as they are less likely to participate in decision-making: non-white female academics are heavily under-represented in professorial positions across the Netherlands.

These elements show that diversity in higher education has not been accompanied by a change in normativity, with tangible consequences in terms of career prospects. Academics of diverse backgrounds encounter themselves having to working harder to be accommodated in their work environment (to fit in), for example by doing more service work and being less protective of their research time (if any), thus hindering their chances in the labour market. One could consider this a sign of an increasingly fragmented and market-driven academia that fails to recognise differences.

Doing what you love is still work

Most jobs that involve ‘doing what you love’ make it more difficult to assert one’s position and demand better conditions. It is often expected of academics to be intrinsically motivated and concerned about the wellbeing of students—and the vast majority indeed are. Yet, this expectation makes it difficult for us to demand better work conditions, particularly during a crisis like the one we face today. Support and care for students have become central to our online teaching. It is assumed that in the next academic year, most teaching will continue online, supplemented with some on-campus activities.

Though new forms of work are highly welcomed, they need to be accompanied by a reflection on how these new forms of work would be valued and compensated. We need a post-pandemic vision of our institutional setting while we respond to the immediate challenges of online education, casualised employment, and intensified work demands. This is a crucial moment to reflect and raise awareness about how our experience in academia is affected by who we are (e.g. gender, race/ethnicity, citizenship) and the challenges to measure and capture the value we create. What can we do to take action and tackle the privileges and systemic inequalities that this pandemic has illuminated? A first step would be to openly appreciate academics, as an online campaign at Leiden University using the hashtags #staffshouldstay and #koesterdedocent (‘treasure the lecturer’) is doing.

Another thing you can do is to engage in discussions within your faculty and/or programme to discuss how new forms of work derived from the COVID-19 crisis, e.g. mentor programmes, will be valued and compensated. Inclusion is central to such discussions: where would this work come from? Who will be asked? How would they be compensated? Because we as academics genuinely care for students, the conditions of and compensation for this type of work tend to become afterthoughts—and they shouldn’t.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#f00f0f” css=”.vc_custom_1593177038993{margin-top: -10px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]This article was originally published on the Leiden Inclusion Blog and has been written by the author in her capacity of Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Chair of LUDEN: Leiden University Diversity and Equality Network. This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here.
[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#f00f0f” css=”.vc_custom_1593177017606{margin-top: -10px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1593467094013{margin-top: 0px !important;}”]

About the author:

María Gabriela Palacio holds a PhD in Development Studies by the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS). Her research contributes to interdisciplinary work on critical social policy and it seeks to understand how state interventions shape social and political identities. Increasingly, her research interests have expanded to include the study of processes of exclusion within academia. She is the chair of the network LUDEN, tackling racism and other forms of exclusion at Leiden University’s working and learning environment.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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COVID-19 | Will current travel restrictions help academics change their flying behaviour? by Lara Vincent and Oane Visser

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Condensation Trails of an airplane

With drastic restrictions on mobility due to the COVID-19 pandemic, international academic air travel for research, conferences, and defences has largely come to a halt. The sudden inability to hop on a plane and fly away makes us even more aware of how mobile academics have become over the past decades. The COVID-19 pandemic may provide the perfect opportunity to reassess and alter our travel behaviour now that we are forced to stay put, write Lara Vincent and Oane Visser.

Hypermobility is widely viewed as a cornerstone of contemporary globalised academics and a sine qua non for professional success in the increasingly competitive environment of higher education that requires the showcasing of research at academic conferences and elsewhere. Academics are pressured to be innovative and utilise travel to undertake and present distinguishable research (Nursey et al. 2019: 1). Data collection, conference attendance, and networking opportunities are three of the main reasons for international (short-term) mobility, all which are described by academics as essential for one’s visibility—and success—in the academia. This is consistent with the profession’s ranking as one of the three most mobile jobs in the world, with business executives and politicians filling up the other two spots (Mahroum 2000: 26).

Frequent air travel is gradually becoming an issue of debate in academia. Several European universities have introduced policies to reduce (the impact of) academic travel. In the Netherlands, a ‘climate letter’ drafted end 2018 by a group of prominent academics pushed for a progressive climate agenda to be adopted by Dutch universities, with strong support from the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU). In Belgium, Ghent University is one of the pioneers, with a travel policy that distinguishes ‘green destinations’ (with a travel time by train or bus below six hours) and ‘orange destinations (up to eight hours). For green destinations like Oxford, Frankfurt and Montpellier, flights are not offered anymore; for ‘orange destinations’, such as Geneva and Hamburg, train and bus are the preferred options.

But at most universities, it still seems business as usual regarding air travel. Unlike business executives and politicians, academics are deemed knowledge producers. The paradox between the abundant knowledge produced and circulated in academic settings about the far-reaching negative repercussions of climate change and continued frequent air travel by academics raises the question why the profession fails to move to more pro-environmental mobility.

Research by Tom Storme of Ghent University on the contradictory nature of knowledge and action regarding air mobility stimulated Lara to conduct her ISS Research Paper on this topic. She found that many of the 20 academics interviewed about how they view their academic travel behaviour mentioned psychological discomfort due to the inconsistencies between their knowledge and behaviour. This can be characterised as cognitive dissonance and can only be relieved with a change in attitudes or actions to match the other (Festinger 1957: 7).

The academics interviewed at the ISS stated that not travelling was viewed negatively in the ever-changing world of academia where transnational connections enhance the ability to be socially and professionally visible. As a result, the interviewees dismissed their dissonance by predominately adapting their attitudes to match their flight patterns, such as by comparing academic flight emissions favourably to other industries, emphasising the lack of control over their actions, compensating emissions by becoming more environmentally conscious in their personal lives, or highlighting the essential societal value of the research that the travelling enabled. Changing travel behaviour by reducing flying was seen as impossible when you want to build an academic career.

Ironically, it seems that 2020 has forced academics to re-evaluate their reliance on cross-border travel. The grounding of aeroplanes due to COVID-19 has forced academics to review their reliance on air travel, behaviour that was previously imagined as virtually impossible. PhD defences are now suddenly done online, part of planned conferences are being shifted online, and some face-to-face research is being substituted by online and phone interviews. Will these trends stick when the airspace is opened, or will we divert to our old habits?

The move to confine individuals to their houses and limit travel to contain the coronavirus has also drastically reduced the carbon emissions produced by air travel. The world has seen a reduction in pollution levels with satellites images showing clear skies over cities that were previously impossible to view from space (Collins 2020: 1). The pandemic has unexpectedly unleashed or accelerated pro-environmental mobility policies in various cities. Mostly notably, Milan is drastically reducing car use to rapidly make space for laying out cycling infrastructure in order to stimulate people to avoid public transport where it is difficult to keep enough distance to prevent the proliferation of the coronavirus.

While air traffic is likely to rebound substantially after the pandemic has been contained, it seems that the global lockdown has enabled academics to re-evaluate their need for hypermobility in a world where the repercussions of climate change are acutely experienced—a change that was deemed almost impossible until early 2020. The pandemic has shown that it is possible to go back to ‘normal’ levels of mobility when compared to today’s hypermobility, but the academia that demands air travel as way to ensure success may also have to be fundamentally transformed to allow for academics to conduct and showcase their research  differently. More online conferences, conferences with a mixture of online and offline presentations, and organising (or selecting) conferences based on their accessibility by ground transport may be some of the ways to go.

Acknowledgments: A word of thanks to the ISS academics who shared their views in the interviews.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here.

About the authors:

Lara VincentLara Vincent was part of the 2018/2019 Masters students who graduated in December 2019. While at ISS she majored in Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies, with a specialisation in Environment and Sustainable Development.

Foto-OaneVisser-Balkon-1[1]

Oane Visser (associate professor, Political Ecology research group, ISS) leads an international Toyota Foundation funded research project on the socio-economic and environmental effects of -and responses to- big data and digitalisation in agriculture. He is an ISRF fellow for 2020-21.

 

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#MeToo and the need for safe spaces in academia by Brenda Rodríguez, Bruna Martinez and Vira Mistry

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Woman holding poster with the words #MeToo

We hope this article leads to a larger discussion about sexual harassment in academia and the urgent work of creating a safe and inclusive environment for all of the members of the ISS community.

Initiated back in 2006 by African-American civil rights activist Tarana Burke, the #MeToo movement exploded in 2017 during the sexual misconduct scandal of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein when actress Alyssa Milano asked her Twitter followers from across the world to share their experiences of sexual harassment. As the hashtag went viral, a number of others also emerged, shedding light on sexual harassment in specific sectors. This included the #MeTooAcademia and #ScienceToo hashtags that highlighted the prevalence of sexual harassment in academic spaces and the need for change.

Gender discrimination and sexual harassment[1] exist in every sector, and academia is not unaffected by this. A report released by UN Women in 2018 titled ‘Towards an end to sexual harassment: the urgency and nature of change in the era of #MeToo’ shows that 55% of women in the European Union have experienced sexual harassment at least once since the age of 15. Amongst these women, 32% identified somebody from their employment context—a colleague, a supervisor, or a customer—as the perpetrator.

Inspired by the #MeToo movement, the Swedish Research Council in 2018 published an international report on sexual harassment in universities. The research analysed 800 publications on sexual harassment during the period 1966-2018. The study concluded that sexual harassment takes place in all disciplines of academia and is reported by students, doctoral candidates, and faculty members alike. Women, especially younger women, women with precarious employment conditions, and those belonging to ethnic and sexual minority groups, are more exposed to sexual harassment than others. Underreporting is also very common.

The study also stated that there was evidence of women who had experienced varied forms of harassment having to deal with physical, psychological and professional consequences such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress syndrome, physical pain, unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, increased alcohol use, impaired career opportunities, reduced work motivation, etcetera. How this is affecting the overall work environment and organisational culture in academia remains under-researched.

Focusing on our local context in the Netherlands, a recent study commissioned by the Dutch Network of Women Professors (LNVH) showed that unwanted behaviour is prevalent in Dutch academia, with cases ranging from sexual harassment to physical and verbal threats, denigration, and exclusion. Another report by the Dutch unions for the science sector FNV and VAWO pointed out that four in ten university staff members are affected by bullying, intimidation, gossip, and abuse of power. While gender plays an important role in cases of undesirable behaviour, this situation is often exacerbated when gender intersects with other axes of oppression such as race, age, sexuality, religion, and ability.

Fighting sexual harassment at the ISS

Critical academic spaces like ISS are not exempt from cases of harassment (sexual or otherwise), bullying and discrimination that continue to plague academic spaces in the Netherlands and worldwide. In addition, the ISS draws researchers and students from all walks of life. This year, as in many other years, ISS welcomed a batch of approximately 150 MA students from over 50 countries. In such a cross-cultural setting, interpersonal interactions are enriching and exciting; however, they can also run the risk of resulting in different types of undesirable behaviour.

So what are we doing at ISS to address such situations and prevent them from happening? At the institutional level, ISS has set up various organs to provide support and address issues of inequality, discrimination and safety for both students and staff, such as the Welfare Office, the ISS Counselling Team, the Institute Council, and the Diversity and Inclusion Team. Additionally, the student body’s Gender Committee and the Sexual Diversity Committee have been working towards creating a more inclusive and safe community.

It’s worth noting that for the past 25 years, the Welfare Office provides a workshop on cross-cultural communication as part of the orientation programme for MA students, establishing a precedent for what is acceptable—or not—for the ISS community. And ISS is also commissioning experts to help it break out of the cycle of harassment and abuse. During orientation week in September last year, the ISS Counselling Team collaborated with Know It, Name It, Love It, an organization that seeks to build safer, better and truly inclusive communities and organizations through workshops and trainings. They facilitated a workshop for the incoming students on how to build a safe and inclusive environment. By using concepts of positionality, intersectionality and empathy, they provided strategies on how to minimize the potential for unwanted behaviour.

The most concrete goal of the workshop was the creation of the ‘Pillars of Our Community’, a set of guidelines developed by the new batch of MA students that laid the foundation for how to engage and interact with each other in a caring, safe, and respectful way, as well as to create an understanding of a collective responsibility to hold each other accountable when necessary.

Most of our examples are targeted at MA students, and we recognise there is more to be done both at a ground and institutional level, including sensitising work with other members of the ISS community such as PhD researchers and academic and administrative staff. Some of the ways that higher education spaces can confront and improve their response to sexual harassment is the creation and implementation of sexual harassment training programs aimed at students and staff that be conducted over a longer period of time. Additionally, they can review current policies, protocols and reporting mechanisms, promote a culture that discourages all forms of sexual harassment, and hold perpetrators accountable.

[1] According to UN Women, sexual harassment is “any unwelcome sexual advance, request for sexual favour, verbal or physical conduct or gesture of a sexual nature, or any other behaviour of a sexual nature that might reasonably be expected or be perceived to cause offence or humiliation to another.”
References:
FNV and VAWO (2019) “Sociale veiligheid medewerkers universiteiten” https://www.fnv.nl/nieuwsbericht/sectornieuws/fnv-overheid/2019/05/helft-universiteitspersoneel-ervaart-sociaal-onvei
Naezer, Marijke; Van den Brink, Marieke; Benschop, Yvonne (2019) “Harassment in Dutch academia: Exploring manifestations, facilitating factors, effects and solutions”, Commissioned by the Dutch Network of Women Professors (LNVH) https://www.lnvh.nl/uploads/moxiemanager/LNVH_rapport__lsquo_Harassment_in_Dutch_academia__Exploring_manifestations__facilitating_factors__effects_and_solutions_rsquo_.pdf
Purna Sen, Eunice Borges, Estefania Guallar, and Jade Cochran (2018) “Towards an end to sexual harassment: The urgency and nature of change in the era of #MeToo”, UN Women https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2018/11/towards-an-end-to-sexual-harassment
Swedish Research Council (2018) “Sexual harassment in academia – An international research review”, https://www.vr.se/english/analysis/reports/our-reports/2018-11-30-sexual-harassment-in-academia.html

About the authors:

Brenda RodriguezBruna Martinez and Vira MistryBrenda Rodríguez Cortés is a PhD candidate at ISS working on gender and sexuality, ISS MA ‘14 alumna and a member of the ISS Counselling Team. Bruna Martinez and Vira Mistry are co-founders of Know It, Name It, Love It, and ISS MA ‘18 alumnae.

Fighting Climate Change: Is Academia Doing Enough? by Fleur Zantvoort

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Sometimes our research takes us to unexpected places. I spent the last weeks gluing my friends to fossil fuel corporations, getting lifted up and “bureaucratically displaced” by riot police, and dancing to David Bowie’s “Rebel, Rebel” in the rain on a bridge occupied by Extinction Rebellion. In the midst of climate chaos and ecological breakdown, the boundaries between activism and academia are collapsing all around me. And that is the point. 

Frontline communities, including many indigenous people, have been defending their lands and ways of living and being with the earth for centuries. They are strenuously resisting colonial capitalism’s appropriation and commodification of “nature”. Globally, the movement for climate justice and a liveable planet has gathered incredible momentum over the past year, with the global climate strike in September being one of the largest coordinated global protests in history. Yet, we know that it is not nearly enough. We cannot solve the problem of climate change, but we can do our best to limit its impacts. Whatever action we take, millions of lives have already been lost and millions more will be lost in the years to come. The climate is already changed, and we cannot turn it back.

There is still a lot that is worth saving, nurturing and reconstructing, but this requires a radical overhaul of our political, economic and social systems. Moreover, to change everything, it will take everyone. The most important thing that I can share with you from my MA research conducted alongside the people of Extinction Rebellion Netherlands, is that hiding behind our institutional walls to try and conjure up solutions is not going to help much. I knew this before, but I do not think I was able to fully grasp what that meant.

Social justice scholarship is crucial to confront climate and ecological breakdown, and we need academia and activism to stand united in this struggle. Although ISS takes pride on building these bridges, I find myself wondering if this amounts to more than empty words. In industrialised countries, we are responsible for demanding rapid mitigation and compensation for the destruction that has already been caused. Yet, the climate movement has not quite reckoned with a long history of exclusion, as environmental issues are compartmentalised into a white, middle-class, educated niche. Activist scholarship can play an important role in overcoming this, building a movement that challenges the colonial, hetero-patriarchal capitalist system that lies at the root of climate change and ecological destruction.

However, activist scholarship also demands that our commitment to social and climate justice moves beyond our classrooms and offices and into our daily lives and praxis. This applies to us as individuals as well to our institutions. On the request of students and staff to close ISS during the climate strike, the institution responded by offering us tea and cookies. In the meantime, there is no plan, not a single policy in place for mitigating the ecological footprint and carbon emissions of the institute. A proper analysis of the climate and ecological crisis and, its intersections with human rights, women’s liberation, economic development and social policy remain absent from the curriculum. It is 2019 and even the oil companies have acknowledged the catastrophic impacts of climate change for over 50 years. Isn’t it rather time for academic institutions to also proactively respond?

If we as an institute take social justice seriously, we need to demand climate justice as well, in our research, in our board rooms, and at our kitchen tables. This is the fight of our lives, and we need to do it right. Even conservative scientific estimates predict the collapse of our food system, mass species extinction, and yearly flood events that used to occur once a century displacing an additional hundreds of millions of people. All of this is already happening and will intensify over the coming decades, within our lifetime. So, I want you to ask yourself: will I be able to say that I did what I could? If the answer is no, you know what you have to do.

If there is a strike, go strike. If your situation allows you to participate in civil disobedience, participate. If you work in government, do what you can to push for meaningful action and do not take no for an answer. If you are a professor, do not allow a course to go by without seriously considering the implications of climate change. And, if you are an institute for global development and social justice, take a clear stance and do what you can to support students and staff, because cookies and coffee are just not going to cut it.

About the author:10991580_10202507029756701_1759256381974962672_o

Fleur Zantvoort is doing her MA in Development Studies at ISS, specialised in Social Justice Perspectives. She is conducting her research with Extinction Rebellion Netherlands, on the politics of knowledge and relation in the climate justice movement.

Related to this topic: It’s time for flying to become the new smoking by Dorothea Hilhorst

 

Celebrating a year of blissful blogging: ISS Blog Bliss turns 1!

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Bliss, the blog of the ISS on global development and social justice, turns one this week. Although the blog is still in its infancy, it is already showing great promise. The Bliss Editorial Board here reflects on the reasons why Bliss should be celebrated and outlines their wish list for the year to come.

Bliss, our blog about global development and social justice, celebrates its first birthday today. We don’t really have a frame of reference for thinking about whether we are doing a good job, and can thus only share why we have come to like the blog.

In the first 12 months of existence of our blog, 68 posts have been published. Two-thirds of these were written by staff and students of the ISS. The breadth of topics mirror the lively diversity in the institute, with topics ranging from economic diplomacy, humanitarian aid, women’s rights, epistemic diversity, deglobalisation, the Orphan Industrial Complex, populism, and much more.

We know our stats. We have had 13,000 visitors in the first year—more than 1,000 every month. Is this good or not? It pales in view of the intimidating numbers one has become used to for web-based platforms. But what do we compare the blog to? When we think of the average number of students in a classroom or participants in seminars, we are extremely happy and impressed if indeed 13,000 people have bothered to read at least one of our posts!

Making our research known

What inspired the blog is an urge to open the windows of our building and reach out about pressing issues that our research sheds light on. We defined our audience as people in policy, practice and the public at large. We are particularly pleased that we have had 1,000 visitors from India, and another thousand from South Africa and Kenya! We have actually had visitors from across the world due to the diversity of our articles.

ISS staff and students have also gotten to know each other’s work better through Bliss. We see each other every so often over lunch or in meetings, and we usually know the kind of project or topic colleagues work on, but rarely do we know the specifics of the research. It is really wonderful to get the occasional glimpse of what your neighbour at work has been up to and what insights she or he reached and wants the world to know about.

Pursuing social justice

One blog will not change the world, but it is wonderful that we can add our voices to the critical streams for positive change, global development and social justice that keep up and manage to trickle through all the often depressing layers of naïve, selfish, blinded, devious, scared, evil, commercial, unthinking, or fanatical messages that continue to condone inequality, violence and threats to our climate.

Our first year has brought some evidence that blogging can be fun and powerful. Dorothea Hilhorst, one of the Editorial Board members, wrote her first post for Bliss about a report on transactional sex in the DRC that she was quite proud of, but that had not gotten much traction in the two years after its completion. However, Bliss helped her to make known her work on transactional sex in the DRC. The topicality, the title, and the picture related to the blog article all added to the cocktail that made the post one of the most popular on Bliss. It importantly led to different follow-up requests for lectures, blogs and even an invitation to contribute to a special issue on sexual abuse in the aid sector. This just shows what impact Bliss can potentially make if it reaches the right audiences.

The year ahead

It would be tempting to present you here with links to our favourite posts, but there are too many, and each has its own merits. We invite everyone to identify their personal favourite and tell us in a comment. So, instead of listing our favourites, let us rather share with you our wish list for the year to come. Here are five things that we hope to see in the coming years:

  1. More series. We have had several series this year on deglobalisation, epistemic communities and humanitarian studies. Series have turned out to be an effective way of disseminating fresh messages while creating a continuing conversation about different faces and shades of an issue.
  2. More responses on topical issues and news related to our academic work. Many things happen in the world that our research directly speaks to, so our research can feed into ongoing debates. Just recently, for example, we had a wonderful post on the recent elections in Brazil.
  3. More frequent use of blogging to increase the societal relevance of academic work. ISS places a high premium on societal relevance. Although there are many meanings of and approaches to societal relevance (a blog article on the topic is to be published soon), blogging is definitely a wonderful way to go the extra mile and tell a wider audience about relevant findings from an academic publication.
  4. More discussion about issues that matter to academic work in a world where the nature and status of science and evidence is increasingly under discussion. Confusingly and interestingly, these discussions take place in different corners. They come from places that favour fake news and like to see science as just another opinion. But they also come from within the academe where we wonder how inequality and a lack of recognition of the value of diversity biases our work. There is lots of space for debate on our blog.
  5. More stories that give voice to people that may not easily be heard. To paraphrase comedian Hannah Gadsby: it is not laughter or anger that connects people and communities, but stories. Let Bliss be a place where connecting stories are being told!

The Bliss Editorial Board members are Sylvia Bergh, Dorothea Hilhorst, Linda Johnson, Rod Mena, Matthias Rieger and Christina Sathyamala.

Exploring masculinities: being a man in the #MeToo era by ISS Counselling Team members

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A recent workshop on masculinities hosted by the ISS Counselling Team focused on ‘being a man in the #MeToo era’, drawing participants from the ISS and beyond. The workshop provided a space for reflection on lived experiences regarding masculinity, for the exploration of the ways in which masculinities have been constructed and performed, and for the examination of some of the ideals of masculinity across different cultures. This article briefly details some of the workshop’s highlights.

The #MeToo movement and its impact in academia

Previous to the workshop, some students at ISS felt the need to figure out how to navigate their masculinities in light of the #MeToo movement. The #MeToo movement is a global movement against sexual harassment and sexual violence that was initiated in 2006 as part of a grassroots campaign led by the African-American civil rights activist Tarana Burke, with the initial purpose of helping young women of color that had previously experienced sexual abuse. In 2017, the hashtag gained widespread visibility and popularity when the Hollywood actress Alyssa Milano asked her followers on Twitter to use the hashtag #MeToo to share their own stories of sexual harassment and assault, amidst the scandal of sexual abuse allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein.

Academia, as any other space in society and like any other industry, is not exempt from sexism, misogyny and sexual misconduct. This is why there’s a need for the ISS community to engage in conversations around the issue of sexual harassment and its connection with hegemonic ideals of masculinity and manhood and prevent this from happening.

Masculinity studies

Within the field of Gender Studies, there has been a steady growth in research on men and masculinities since the early 1980s. The leading proponent in theorizing masculinities is Raewyn Connell (also R.W. Connell in some publications), Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney, who has asserted the existence of plural masculinities, the social hierarchy that exists between them, and the theoretical idea of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. For Connell, masculinities are necessarily plural given the different shapes masculinity takes depending on the different sociocultural contexts where they are constructed. Nevertheless, there is also a modern western idea of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ that prevails over women and other subordinated masculinities.

Recent critical reflections on masculinities have been brought even more into the fore since the advent of the #MeToo movement. The acknowledgement of concepts like ‘toxic masculinity’ have become popular to highlight the negative and harmful effects of certain norms of masculine behavior but also the unattainable expectations that men and boys face. It’s a term often associated with forms of masculinity that end up encouraging misogynistic, homophobic and violent behaviours, while at the same time pushing boys into intense emotional repression.

Coming into the workshop, participants had varying degrees of engagement with these concepts, some encountering the critical idea of “masculinitIES” (in plural) for the first time, while others preparing to dedicate their MA or PhD research around such issues. During the workshop, participants engaged in conversations on social expectations and stereotypes of men from around the world, and how attainable they really are in practice. Participants in the workshop also agreed that although men do benefit from unequal gender relations, these benefits are not without a cost. Similarly, there are unequal power relations amongst men given that masculinities are constructed in relation to existing social hierarchies such as class, race, age, disability, sexuality, nationality, among others. Finally, one of the conclusions of this workshop was that there are many ways to be a man and express one’s masculinity.

Way Forward… What’s Next?

As a follow up to the workshop we realize the need to bring these dialogues into our daily conversations and interactions. We must find ways to address everyday experiences of misogyny and violence from an intersectional perspective, both in and outside academia. Men require spaces to reflect on their privileges and the costs of unequal gender relations with its variations across class, race, sexuality, ability and other intersections of power. The struggle towards equality continues, and we believe that discussions around masculinity are also an important part of that struggle.

Also see: Hyper-masculinity: a threat to inclusive community development in fragile environments by Holly A Ritchie

Picture credit: Wolfmann

Brenda RodriguezAbout the authors: 

Brenda Rodríguez Cortés (left) is a PhD candidate at ISS working on gender and sexuality. Ana Fabregas, Angélica Arámbulo and Ahmad Faraz are MA students at ISS. They are all Peer Counsellors and part of the ISS Counselling Team.

Epistemic Diversity| Understanding epistemic diversity: decoloniality as research strategy by Olivia U. Rutazibwa

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How do we make sure that our efforts to diversify knowledge production go beyond a window-dressing/Benetton operation? How can we move beyond merely adding some colour and other markers of ‘diversity’ to existing structures—a move that too neatly serves the neoliberal project embedded in our institutions, and their related unquenchable thirst for all that looks new, ‘shiny’ and exciting? I propose that an explicit decolonial engagement with epistemic diversity is one of the ways to productively address and navigate these challenges of co-optation and commodification.

A decolonial engagement[1] draws our attention to the need to foreground at least two important concerns. First, that epistemic diversification needs to explicitly speak to the issue of coloniality. Second, that we need to address the practical and institutional implications of anticolonial epistemic diversity.

The first concern invites us to understand that the (little) everyday institutional progress when it comes to more diversity in colour, gender, faith, ability, and sexuality, is merely the absolute minimal condition for a more just society. Hence, we should not mistake them for sufficient accomplishment. More importantly, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the ‘plussing-up’ exercise of the visible diversification is more damaging than simply not enough. We need to keep in mind that it is also a way through which coloniality can continue with a nicer face; and that that is the real and often most depressing danger.

The second concern points at the importance of moving beyond mere discursive deconstructions on what is wrong with our actual knowledge systems; the aim is to invest our efforts in material and immaterial (re)constructions of what and who has been erased or silenced.

In this regard, we could conceive of decoloniality as a research strategy consisting of three related sub-strategies: (1) the need to de-mythologize, pertaining to issues of ontology; (2) the need to de-silence, which more explicitly relates to epistemology; and (3) the need to anticolonially de-colonize, addressing both the tangible, material and the normative of knowledge production/cultivation.

De-mythologizing: where do we start the story?

In relation to the need de-mythologize, in International Relations and International Development Studies, this invites us to consider how we understand the world. A first question that arises is: where do we start the story? What is our point of departure? For example: many international development courses start with American President, Harry Truman, who in his inaugural address of 1949 declares that the USA will help the world and embark on a new program for the improvement and growth of the ‘underdeveloped areas’. It is a point of departure that systematically sustains the logic of development. If we instead start the story with how these areas became ‘underdeveloped’ to begin with, it becomes impossible to sidestep or minimise the constitutive force of transatlantic enslavement and colonialism in both International Development and International Relations thinking and practices. It becomes even more difficult to sustain the epistemic, technological and moral superiority of the West – the myth par excellence on which much of International Relations and International Development Studies is built.

A second consideration of de-mythology is that of Eurocentrism, be it geographic, imaginary or methodological. The question that arises from this is: what would our research questions or teaching look like if Europe, or the European experiences and knowledges were not the centre of our story? What would it look like when other places and experiences are centred? More importantly maybe, what if the European experiences were no longer cast as universal? It would again jeopardise the natural North-South capacity-building logic that is so central in much of our global knowledge systems and relations.

The third de-mythology consideration has to do with fragmentation. Much of colonial knowledge production is built on chopping up parts of the story that fundamentally belong together. Modernity (with the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, i.e. epistemic and technological (re)discoveries) and Coloniality (with Enslavement and Colonialism, i.e. genocide, epistemicide and ecocide) are hardly ever brought to us as sides of the same coin. So is our understanding and study of the origins of wealth and poverty, which are institutionally fragmented into different departments and disciplines. This allows us to study poverty without systematically engaging with the fact that the wealth in the global North has literally been sourced from the poverty in global South. Consequently, when we seek to explain poverty in, let’s say ‘Africa’, our students and many of our colleagues turn to the issue of corruption; a locally contained phenomenon which becomes the lead character in a tale from which we – the global North – can mythologically write ourselves out.

De-silencing: who are the experts? What is expertise?

If we look at de-silencing, the two main questions that arise are: who are the experts, and what do we consider expertise? Who has the microphone, who has the megaphone, and why? Who/what type of knowledge is (not) around the table and why?

When it comes to types of knowledges, we see that in the hegemonic global Northern canon, rationality is put forward as the one legitimate (i.e. ‘objective’) way to know and understand the world. Both feminist and decolonial scholarship have challenged this, yet the empiricist, linearly incremental, competitive, zero-sum, logic of colonial knowledge production continues to dominate the field – be it in our classroom, what we value and mark, how we teach, or in our own research designs.

When it comes to the ‘who are the experts’ question, we can see the literal silencing of peoples that are supposed to be the protagonists; take for example the systematic absence as experts of Muslim women in debates on the headscarf in continental Europe. Silencing can also manifest itself in binary representation, hierarchized difference, whitewashing or overexposure; think for instance of how whenever crime or terrorism comes up, there is an almost automatic invocation of Muslim men. Silencing also bears on our use of languages, on how some of them (like English) are overrepresented in our systems of knowledge and more importantly, how we forget to remember how little we can actually know about a place when we do not know its languages. So, as a first and minimal step, de-silencing invites us revisit the implications of the incredibly limited pool from which we source our knowledges in our quest to understand the world. In practical terms, but in the classroom and in our own research, it invites us to revisit not only what we include or exclude, but also what we foreground, start with, where we theorize from.

De-colonizing: fighting coloniality through knowledge cultivation

The third and last strategy, to anticolonially de-colonize, invites us to be explicit about the purpose of our knowledge production endeavours and connect it to the material consequences of coloniality. Why am I researching this? Who does it empower? How does this serve or work against the colonial status quo? One way to look at this is by asking ourselves the extent to which our knowledges contribute to, or fight processes of epistemicide, ecocide and genocide. Put differently, we can ask ourselves whether we cultivate knowledges to address the quality or possibility of life (of those denied by coloniality) or feed the colonial status quo; knowledges at the service of the will to power or the will to life?

As such, a decolonial research strategy pushed to its logical implications, invites us to re-consider the purpose and contents of our syllabi, disciplines and departments. In the case of International Development Studies for instance, once we have discursively addressed the myth of white western superiority, colonial amnesia and re-/de-centred/pluralised the logic and voices of knowledges, the decolonial invitation is to revisit the institutions in which we do this. When the logic of ‘aid’ and linear development reveals itself as highly problematic, its will-to-life alternative would rather propose something like a Department of Global Justice and Reparations instead; for instance. It is in our embracing or resistance of such drastic engagements with the implications of diversification that our commitment to dismantling coloniality reveals itself. Maybe we should start the conversation of epistemic justice here.

[1] The ideas in this blog entry are further elaborated on in Rutazibwa, O. U. (forthcoming, September 2018), “On Babies and Bathwater: Decolonsing Development Studies”. In: de Jong, S., Icaza, R. and Rutazibwa, O.U. (eds.). Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning, London: Routledge.
With special thanks to Umbreen Salim for voluntarily transcribing this presentation that was recently presented at the ISS.
This poem forms part of a series on Epistemic Diversity. You can read the other articles here and here and here and here

IMG_2442.JPGAbout the author: 

Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa is senior lecturer in European and International Development Studies at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. Her research centres on ways to decolonise thinking and practices of International Solidarity by recovering and reconnecting philosophies and enactments of dignity and self-determination in the postcolony: autonomous recovery in Somaliland, Agaciro in Rwanda and Black Power in the US. She is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics (2018) and is associate editor of International Feminist Journal of Politics.

 

Epistemic Diversity | From ‘do no harm’ to making research useful: a conversation on ethics in development research by Karin Astrid Siegmann

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Ethical dilemmas are part and parcel of the research processes that researchers are engaged in. This article details a recent conversation between ISS students and staff in which they tried to make sense of some of the ethical issues that researchers face. While the ‘do no harm’ principle was emphasised as an overall yardstick, the discussion went beyond that, raising broader questions about epistemic and social justice.

With thanks to Andrea Tauta Hurtado, Zhiren Ye, Kristen Cheney, Roy Huijsmans and Andrew Fischer.

Scholars in Development Studies are quick to brag about how relevant their research is for the underdogs of society. The reality is that representatives of marginalised groups rarely knock at our office doors to ask for scholarly support. In fact, development research often does harm by justifying economic and social inequalities, reproducing stereotypes and stigma, and misrepresenting or even erasing knowledge about the lives of marginalised people.

How can scholars prevent such harm from being done through their research? This question was discussed by ISS students majoring in Social Policy for Development and staff members in a workshop on “ethical, integrity, and security challenges”. The discussion aimed to prepare ISS students for their fieldwork. While in our conversation the ‘do no harm’ principle was emphasised as an overall yardstick for our research, the discussion went beyond that, raising broader questions about epistemic and social justice.

Challenges to informed consent and ensuring anonymity

Roy Huijsmans’ example from his masters’ research on Dutch school-going children’s employment experiences illustrated that research participants’ informed consent is crucial, but also complicated by the power relations structuring the research arena. Teachers in his former school had facilitated meetings with their students. Several of these students, in turn, had expressed interest in and consented to participating in Roy’s study. When conducting telephone interviews with these children, however, in some cases parents became suspicious: who is that adult male calling their child? Roy’s experience raises the issue of whether it is adequate to understand informed consent individually. If not, what role do we give to the—in this case generational—power relations wherein consent is embedded? Can ethics protocols that require consent from parents or other gatekeepers alongside children’s own answer these questions?

In my own research, class-based power relations motivate special attention to research participants’ anonymity. Referring to a recent study on working conditions in South Asian tea plantations, I flagged that if workers’ and unionists’ statements could be identified, this could lead to their dismissal or worse outcomes. Our research team addressed this concern by not providing names—neither of people, nor of research locations. Andrew Fischer challenged me: would that really prevent identification? It is likely that few people are probably willing to stick their necks out as labour leaders, making those that do more easily recognisable.

One student followed up and asked how she could protect the identity of chemsex users— people having sex while using hard drugs—whose experiences she plans to investigate. Referring to the do no harm principle, Roy encouraged her to reflect on the consequences of research participants’ names leaking out: the Dutch government tolerates illegal drug consumption. Hence, in the current scenario, enforcement agencies are unlikely to arrest users. However, such political priorities can easily change over time. Andrew therefore recommended the anonymisation of transcripts, with their key to be stored outside the computer.

The quest for epistemic justice and diversity

In recent years, I have become increasingly concerned with the responsible representation of the lives, concerns and demands of the people who participate in my research, or, put differently, with epistemic justice. For instance, how will I represent the plantation workers who generously shared their experiences in our tea study? In a way that responds to the academic pressure to publish in highly-ranked journals with specific theoretical fancies? Or do research participants’ concerns guide my writing? This relates to questions that Marina Cadaval and Rosalba Icaza raise in their earlier post on this blog: ‘who generates and distributes knowledge, for which purposes, and how?’

Other participants in the discussion shared this concern for a fair representation. The student who engages with chemsex users’ experiences was acutely aware of the role of race in her research. In exploratory interviews, she learned how race shapes the exercise of power in chemsex users’ sexual relationships and how it either enables them to get support from or bars their access to the healthcare system. How to do justice to participants’ narratives without simultaneously repeating and reinforcing the underlying stereotypes?

For me, one way to deal with this quest for epistemic justice has been to engage in processes of activist scholarship, i.e. in collaboration and joint knowledge production with people who struggle for recognition and redistribution. Activist scholarship involves moves towards epistemic diversity, challenging the widely assumed supremacy of scientific knowledge heavily produced in Northern academic institutions. For instance, I have been involved in the campaign of a Florida-based farmworker organisation for making the Dutch retailer Ahold sign on to their programme for better working conditions in US agriculture. In dialogue with that organisation, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), I have written about lessons from that campaign for how precarious workers can effectively organise. Sruti Bala points out that this implies ‘to listen to articulations radically different from the frameworks that I may be trained in, but more than good listening is required in order for those articulations and insights to translate themselves into what we might call knowledge’. These processes of listening, dialoguing and learning didn’t lead to “consensus-based writing”, though. We had disagreements and I tried to make them visible in my writing.

Besides, there may be internal power hierarchies within the movements with which we collaborate. My colleague Silke Heumann earlier warned that through our decision of who participates in our research and who doesn’t, we run the risk of reinforcing existing power relations and of legitimising an elite’s perspective of a movement.

This approach may not be feasible for a masters’ thesis. What is possible in most cases, though, is to get research participants’ feedback on, critique and validation of how they understood our conversations or my wider observations about their lives. Time is a key resource in this effort to respect their knowledge as experts on their own lives. Taking time for research participants—rather than racing from one respondent to the next—enables us to conduct research in a more responsible manner. I want to integrate this principle more and more in my research due to the belief that this not only helps to prevent harm. Over and above that, it enables me to treat my research participants and their concerns with care. The more time I plan and spend for engagement with those who participate in my research, the greater the likelihood that it will embody epistemic justice.

 

This article forms part of a series on Epistemic Diversity. You can read the other articles here and here

csm_5abd70057687ec5e3741252630d8cc66-karin-siegmann_60d4db99baAbout the author: 

Holding a PhD in Agricultural Economics, Dr Karin Astrid Siegmann works as a Senior Lecturer in Labour and Gender Economics at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Hague, the Netherlands. She is the convenor of the ISS Major in Social Policy for Development (SPD).

Epistemic Diversity | The challenge of epistemic poverty and how to think beyond what we know by Sruti Bala

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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.

I am not sure if I can claim with any certainty that I practice epistemic diversity in my research. At first glance, following from epistêmê, the Greek word for knowledge, one could assume epistemic diversity to mean a diversity of knowledge. Sounds straightforward, for who would not seek a diversity of knowledge? Yet following Michel Foucault, the brilliant innovator of method, an episteme is not literally knowledge (connaissance)—something that is out there waiting to be known—but a historical set of relations or founding assumptions that unite, formalise, and systematise what comes to be regarded as knowledge.

An episteme tends to consist of unspoken, tacit modes of sensemaking that allow us to recognise something as knowledge, i.e. scientific, and therefore distinguish it from what is not knowledge, and call this by other names, like belief, ritual, gossip, superstition, crime. Epistemic diversity, in this Foucauldian sense, implies a diversity of ways of recognising knowledge and distinguishing it from non-knowledge. This is anything but straightforward!

What if my system of knowledge formation has taught me that knowledge must have a name, a language? Then I will try to acquire knowledge by naming the things I encounter, by making them enter an episteme through nomenclature, typology, or categorisation. If it cannot be named or ordered, then it must not be knowledge, but belonging to another realm—that of dreams or fantasies, for instance. What if my system of knowledge conceives of knowledge as something to be acquired, possessed, or accumulated? Then knowledge to which no ownership is attached will not count as knowledge. It may come to be regarded as folklore or rumour. What if the episteme I have been inserted into by way of education gives great importance to empirical verifiability or to linear progression? Then something that defies the rules of empirical verifiability and does not move in a straight line from simple to complex may come to be regarded as superstition or ritual or magic, but not as knowledge.

One might argue that epistemic diversity tends to come to our notice primarily when certain forms of knowledge production are in danger. Foucault’s conception of the episteme in The Order of Things (English translation 1970) points to such moments of rupture, and theorisations following from his, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of “epistemic violence” in her essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ (1988), reveal how certain types of practices and ways of life are criminalised and destroyed, not necessarily through physical violence, but through modes of knowledge production. The extinction of a language or of an art form are instances of epistemic violence. The silencing of certain aspects of history in public memory, such as the history of colonialism and resistance to slavery, is another. To some extent it feels simpler to say that we have to strive to preserve subjugated knowledge forms, because that is a charitable task, undertaken elsewhere, as it were. It is far more difficult to know how we should practice epistemic diversity within the four walls of our own edifices of research and study. It 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.

Where Spivak emphasises the issue of epistemic violence done to subjugated knowledges, the challenge I face in my research is better described as epistemic poverty, the loss that accompanies my set of epistemic assumptions and privileges. As a researcher I realise that it is important to listen to articulations radically different from the frameworks that I may be trained in, but more than good listening is required in order for those articulations and insights to translate themselves into what we might call knowledge. Just by desiring epistemic diversity, or proclaiming it, doesn’t mean it will have been accomplished.

Placing ourselves in others’ shoes

The task of epistemic diversity could perhaps begin with persistently training ourselves to recognise how certain epistemic privileges are ingrained in our disciplinary histories, and train ourselves to challenge and revise them. It is about learning to imagine the conditions of knowledge formation differently. One must be able to first imagine that something might be valuable, even if it does not appear valuable to oneself at all. One must be able to break the habitual rejection of something because it appears distant and irrelevant at face value. The absent potential of what one does not yet know can only be recognised when its possible presence can be imagined.

There is a specifically gendered and sexual politics at play when epistemic diversity becomes a matter of accumulation and possession of difference. I regularly encounter public declarations of the idea that the intimate encounter with difference, especially with minoritised, primitivised others, is full of pleasure and has the capacity to transform and redeem the dominant self. Authoritative claims, for instance, of intimacy with a certain culture on the grounds of one’s spouse or sexual partner being from that culture, are indicative of this stance. Bell Hooks brilliantly reflects the underlying desire for pleasure and their erotic connotations in popular cultural expressions and fantasies in Black Looks (1992). Under which conditions is the longing for and affective appreciation of otherness a move of acknowledgement, when is it a form of ‘imperialist nostalgia’ or primitivism, or fantasy of possessing and claiming the other?

It is my strong belief that the quest for epistemic diversity must be accompanied and guided by what Rolando Vazquez and Rosalba Icaza, following Maria Lugones, call a ‘politics of coalition building’ (Pilgrimages/peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions, 2003). I am acutely aware that appropriation, theft, erasure, blind spots, equivocation and over-simplification are real problems in research in the humanities and social sciences. The relationships between researcher and researched or between disciplinary formations continue to remain painfully asymmetrical when it comes to the life worlds of the Global South or of those marked as minorities. Yet we cannot overcome these asymmetries without reaching out and learning from and with each other. Epistemic diversity calls upon us to engage critically with all kinds of bodies of knowledge, even and especially if we don’t (fully) agree with them.

This article forms part of a series on Epistemic Diversity. You can read the other article in this series here

About the author: 

Sruti BalaDr Sruti Bala is Associate Professor at the Theatre Studies Department of the University of Amsterdam and Research Affiliate with the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies and Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. Her research interests are at the crossroads of theatre and performance studies, cultural analysis, post- and decolonial thinking and feminist theory.

Epistemic Diversity | “I am where I think”: research and the task of epistemic diversity by Marina Cadaval and Rosalba Icaza

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Epistemic diversity in research is sorely needed in the academia. But what is epistemic diversity and why is it so important? This post—the first of a series on epistemic diversity— introduces the topic and illustrates the importance of discussions on the political economy of knowledge production taking place in our universities. 

On Monday 7 May, the ISS Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Team organised the first of four Research Seminars taking place at the ISS that will focus on epistemic diversity in research. The main objective of these seminars is to provide a different angle to ongoing discussions about the appalling state of diversity at universities. Often these have remained focused on demographic diversity and the absence of women in higher ranks of academia. [1] To redress this absence we have seen the implementation of individually-based ‘solutions’ in universities (e.g. bias trainings).

But these interventions rarely consider structural and institutional elements behind the lack of demographic diversity in positions of leadership in universities. On the other hand, these interventions remain silent about the intersectional conditions of knowledge production in universities along axes of differentiation based on race, class and gender.[2]

Unfortunately, the emphasis on demographic diversity—who is at the university—also tends to render invisible the political economy of knowledge production at universities: who generates and distributes knowledge, for which purposes, and how?[3] Bringing epistemic diversity to the discussion means opening critical conversations on the geo-politics and body-politics of knowledge at universities. This angle emerges from an understanding of knowledge as contextual and situated: “I am where I think”, as decolonial feminist thinkers insist.

But, of course, we are aware that across time and place, the different models of knowledge generation at universities have responded to a diversity of social, cultural and ecological contexts, and to diverse aspirations. For example, let’s think about the foundation of the first universities in the Americas in the 16th Century. These institutions were founded—literally—over conquered First Nations people’s lands and with the exploitation of the labour of enslaved African peoples.[4] What kinds of aspirations were driving these violent interventions and who has benefited from this?

Another example that we can think of is the 1910 creation of the journal Foreign Affairs—which has a higher impact index in the field of international relations (IR)—under the name Journal of Race Development. Despite this, IR has been considered a “colourblind” discipline due to the neglect of “race” as a critical theoretical lens and research agenda and the absence of women and people of colour in IR curricula.[5] This neglect has been widely documented[6] in current efforts to decolonise IR canons. We wonder in which ways the present context that pushes universities’ regulation and normalisation through international ranking systems produces and reproduces neglect and silencing in our disciplines?

Between epistemic poverty and the decolonisation of knowledge

 In our first D&I research seminar, we ask to our keynote speakers—Dr Olivia Rutazibwa (University of Porthsmouth, UK) and Dr Sruti Bala (University of Amsterdam, NL)—to engage with the following questions:

What does academic research in the social sciences and humanities look like when epistemic diversity is considered? 

Which kinds of questions emerge? 

Which kinds of ethical and methodological challenges are opened?

Dr Bala started her presentation by sharing what epistemic diversity has meant for her in research and teaching. She shared a powerful reflection regarding academia as characterised by epistemic violence, injustice, and epistemic poverty when a translation of embodied experiences and their exposure in academic languages occurs. Bala invited us to think about practices in knowledge production that are critically attentive to the translations we carried on and that encourages coalitional ethics.

Meanwhile, Dr Rutazibwa spoke about the absence(s) and silence(s) in academic research in international development and its articulations with eurocentrism and colonialism. She introduced a decolonial-anticolonial methodology centred on integrity, dignity, intellectual curiosity, and generosity. Their arguments will be presented in future blog entries on Bliss.

For us, one of the most interesting quotes was the statement by Olivia Rutazibwa: “Being in the academy, not of the academy’. Rutazibwa mentioned this when one ISS student asked her how to navigate universities as institutions that do not welcome black women and people of colour in general.

“I am where I think”

 Our title is not accidental, but is rather an invitation to think critically about the implications of positioning our thinking when addressing epistemic diversity in research. This means for us not to suppress the epistemic, political and body locations from where we generate knowledge, but, on the contrary, to consider this as a possibility for enriching our learning experiences. This also means to locate—historically, epistemically and politically—this discussion in the Netherlands, where the ISS is based.

So, how is Dutch society rethought throughout its transatlantic kingdom?

How do decolonial efforts in the academia, the streets, in theory, and anti-colonial consciousness contribute to this rethinking?

Why does this rethinking matter for the study and practice of International Development?

In our next D&I Seminar on June 26th, we will have the opportunity to address these questions with Dr Melissa F. Weiner, Associate Professor of Sociology at The College of the Holy Cross, and Dr Antonio Carmona , President of the University of St. Martin, at Philipsburg, Sint Maarten. They are the editors of the book “Smash the Pillars: Decoloniality and the Imaginary of Colour in the Dutch Kingdom” (Rowman and Littlefield), which will be launched at the ISS on this date.

About the book, Professor Nelson Maldonado Torres (Rutgers University) has commented the following:

“For too long the Netherlands has been considered an innocent and benevolent country, without apparently a significant colonial past or a racist present. This volume not only completely shatters this illusion, but also demonstrates the significance of multiple contemporary efforts to critically engage and decolonize Dutch society, culture, and political life.”

At the book launch Dr Carmona and Dr Weiner will be joined by two contributors to the book: Dr Patricia Schor from Amsterdam University College and an ISS alumnus, and Egbert Alejandro Martina, Queer Activist and Anti-Racist Intellectual and creator of the blog “Processed Life”.

 The event is open to the public and we warmly invite you to attend.

This article forms part of a series on Epistemic Diversity. You can read the other article in this series here
[1] Read, for example, the Bliss article ‘The university of paleness’ by Willem Schinkel, which discusses the author’s discontent following the Erasmus University’s decision not to appoint women professors despite possessing adequate funds to do so.
[2] See: Icaza, Rosalba and Rolando Vazquez “Diversity or Decolonization? Researching Diversity at the University of Amsterdam” Decolonising the University. Pluto Press, 2018 with Rolando Vazquez
[3] “Let’s do Diversity”. University of Amsterdam Diversity Commission Report. Wekker, Gloria; Marieke Slootman; Rosalba Icaza, Hans Jansen, Rolando Vazquez, UvA: Amsterdam, October 2016.
[4] http://www.harvardandslavery.com/
[5] Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line Edited by Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda and Robbie Shilliam, London and New York: Routledge, 2015.
[6] ibid

About the authors: 

MarinaMarina Cadaval is currently a PhD student at the ISS, where she also completed her Masters’ in Development Studies in the major of Social Policies for Development (2015-2017). She works on topics of inclusion of indigenous women in graduate education in Mexico, analysing the processes of formation of educational policies that have taken place in the last twenty years. Before returning to the academia, she worked for more than 10 years in the implementation of the first policy to promote graduate education for Mexican indigenous peoples.Rosalba2.jpg

Dr Rosalba Icaza is Associate Professor in Global Politics, Gender and Diversity at the ISS and Chair of the ISS Diversity and Inclusion Team. Her publications can be accessed at https://ricaza.academia.edu/research

The university of paleness by Willem Schinkel

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In a recent attempt to address the underrepresentation of female professors in the Netherlands, the Dutch government made extra funds available to universities to appoint women. To the dismay of many people at Erasmus University, the university refused to fill over half of the available positions and sent the money back. This triggered Willem Schinkel’s personal essay in which he explains how he feels alienated from a university whose masculine dominance is closely tied to its corporate character.

 

If an alien from an exoplanet came to Erasmus University, or to any other university in the Netherlands, and if that alien considered the composition of the university in terms of gender and race, it would most likely draw one of two conclusions. One, this space has been invaded by white men. Two, the model that best describes the spread of white men through institutions of higher learning is that of some kind of plague or epidemic. Of course us earthlings would be quick to explain to our alien friend that the unequal distribution of men and women, of white people and people of color, is normal – even though it is not a normal distribution in the statistical sense! You see, we would tell this alien, the principle that governs our distribution over institutions of knowledge and power, is what we call quality. To which the alien might rightfully respond: ‘I see. And what is the principle that governs the distribution of your quality?’

At this point in time, I don’t think administrators at Erasmus University have a good answer to this question. Recently, our university refused government money for the appointment of so-called Westerdijk chairs for female professors. The dean of the Rotterdam School of Management, Steef van de Velde, made a classic patriarchal move and wasn’t shy about it: in an interview with Erasmus Magazine he said he hadn’t appointed any women because he wanted to “protect” them. After all, an appointment on a Westerdijk chair would be perceived as “stigmatising”, since people would think ‘that they needed this type of appointment because they could not get an appointment on their own merits.’ Moreover, he said, this was not at all a question of money – the RSM has plenty and doesn’t need such money to appoint women. To top it, he said there were plenty of upcoming women in tenure tracks – and why give some women some money (in Dutch, he spoke of a “sweetener”, or douceurtje) and others not?

This kind of reasoning and rhetoric is an affront on so many levels, including the level of intellectual discussion befitting a university. I have no intention to counter it with all the good reasons for the appointment of women. I don’t think it’s my place in particular to make that case, and I also think that the case has been made over and over again. We know all the arguments – that is, if we choose to pay due attention to the scientific study of “diversity” – but they run aground in the morass of the white male dean-dominated powerhouses that university faculties are in this country and elsewhere in the world. So this essay is not a case for diversity. If anything, it’s a case for a university that may be gone, and that more likely may have never existed.

The alien in my hypothetical example might assume that an invasion had occurred. And in a way, of course, the invasion has always already taken place. We are in a state of occupation. Getting serious about undoing it is what is called “decolonising the university”. Here’s another way to think about what it means that our appointments are so one-sided. If I often feel alienated from the university  it has something to do with the model of living together we embody.

The university, like any other setting, is always also one answer to the question how to live together, how to be social, how to practice sociality as being in the world together. And I guess it just keeps on being disappointing that this – the current composition of the university – is the modality of sociality that keeps on being reproduced. Ours is a conditioned stupidity. It is conditioned by an imagination limited to market-based modes of finding value in life. But being so conditioned is not a condition; it is a constraint that is enforced, but over which we might have control.

So whatever happens, let it be obvious that our “diversity”, that is, the composition of our togetherness, is a choice. And the university as it is produces what might be best called a form of paleness. By this I mean a uniformity and homogeneity, a desire for and expression of an order of looking and working alike, an order of whiteness and masculinity, in which “I don’t recognize this picture of the university” even counts as an argument. This paleness is of course a form of whiteness. But the paleness I’m alluding to is also an intellectual desolation or drabness, an achromatics of thinking. And it is a submission to neoliberal procedural routines in the ways we work, as well as a general appreciation of mediocrity sold as “excellence” – remember that, after appointing men on half the positions available, we’re tapping into the lower tiers of intellect and creativity if we continue to appoint men.

And what a bleak picture it is to see those with a ticket to inclusion! What has happened when students (they are not to blame for this!) don’t even think to criticise the curriculum set by the order of pale sameness? What has happened when technocratic markers of achievement that are “evidence based” take precedence when in fact most have no clue what a genuine spirit of inquiry would be, what intelligence might be as a mode of sociality beyond individuated IQ indicators, or how study might be a shared venture to recompose the world in ways that subvert the pale order of sameness to which we currently sacrifice ourselves, but mostly others, for the noble cause of producing “knowledge”?

If anything is clear, it’s that the university is invested in state and corporate power, including criminal fossil fuel companies, and divested in diversity. And when we keep on seeing how diversity basically functions as what Sarah Ahmed calls a “non-performative”[1] – something designed not to produce its stated goals – the only way to move forward is to step up our critical reflection on, and our subversion of, the university at large. The point is thus not to consider the university as basically fine as it is, and to just grant access to it to a greater number of people, or by people of a variety of gender and “race”. It’s not about letting others get a piece of the pie, of sharing in the otherwise unchanged corporate paleness that marks the university today. Much more fundamentally, it is a matter of living as such, of living together. After all, this is what we do on campus: during the day, ours is a specific modality of being together, a selective, tilted, and pale form of intimacy. So the question who gets to be there is pertinent, and concerns us all.

[1] See: Ahmed, S. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Durham: Duke University Press.

An earlier and longer version of this piece was published in Erasmus Magazine: https://www.erasmusmagazine.nl/en/2018/05/19/opinion-the-university-of-paleness/?noredirect=en_US


willemschinkeloverracismecensuurenpolitiekecorrect-0-0-820-540About the author:

Willem Schinkel is Professor of Social Theory at Erasmus University Rotterdam and a member of the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

 

 

Trump’s ‘doublespeak’—why academics should speak out by Jeff Handmaker

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U.S. President Donald Trump in January 2018 delivered his first State of the Union Address (SOTU). At first glance, he sounded more presidential than ever following his tumultuous first year in office. However, his careful words hid an agenda that is hostile to most of us, and to academics in particular. As scholars, we have a responsibility to take notice, and to speak out. 

The SOTU Address – Trump’s doublespeak

During much of his SOTU address, Trump made an effort to reach Americans, beyond his more familiar, albeit dwindling ‘base’ of support, composed of evangelicals, the elderly and whites without a university degree. His presentation was peppered by American proverbs and even managed to come across as compassionate.

But gaps and contradictions blatantly revealed Trump’s doublespeak. While Trump refrained from referring to countries as “shitholes” as he had done a few weeks earlier, his contempt for foreign nations was evident. He praised the Iranian peoples’ “struggle for freedom”, while failing to mention the travel ban in place against all Iranians.

Trump also praised his decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a decision condemned by most nations in the United Nations General Assembly. Trump said that “friends” of the US would receive support, while “enemies” would not. While these were not explicitly specified, there was a clear reference to how nations voted at the UN concerning Jerusalem.

Capping off a dizzying array of international law violations, Trump insisted that the notorious detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, associated with torture and indefinite detention without trial, would remain open. He affirmed that the US military would continue its operations in Afghanistan, ominously, under unspecified “new rules of engagement”.

So how is this all relevant for scholars?

The overall response from media commentators to Trump’s SOTU address was disappointing. Most focused on its tone rather than its content. In the Netherlands, some even referred to Trump’s address as “brilliant” and “politically, very clever”. The NRC Handelsblad offered perhaps the best commentary, emphasising its ‘polarising’ content, but this was an exception.

The fact remains that a significant majority of Americans have consistently disapproved of Trump’s job as president. There has been a public outcry in countries around the world, particularly after Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. So why have there been so few critical analysts, particularly in the mainstream media?

In my own observations at academic gatherings in the US and abroad, since Trump first came to office in January 2017, it appears that most academics tend to dismiss Trump, rolling their eyes, ignoring his statements, mocking him, or even suggesting that he doesn’t really have all that much power. A handful of academics have even openly supported him.

There are, of course, notable exceptions. Those in the immigration law field have written persistently on the Trump administration’s persecution of immigrants. Apart from the alternative media, such as Mondoweiss, Democracy Now and MSNBC, The Conversation has produced in-depth articles by scholars condemning the Trump administration’s policies. But even critical media outlets, such as De Correspondent in The Netherlands have acknowledged that, while news outlets have tended to reflect daily indignation, they have rarely produced sustained resistance to the policies of the Trump administration.

A position of ambivalence in these circumstances is not tenable. As Professor Harris Beider has poignantly observed: “we live in an age of volatility and scepticism … As academics we find ourselves in the dock of public opinion too … we as universities and academics can also be part of the problem”.

Accordingly, with the rise of ethno-nationalist administrations in the USA and the United Kingdom, Beider has issued an appeal to academics to be less self-absorbed and “to question received wisdom and follow the people rather than expect them to follow us”.

What Trump says publicly should matter a great deal to us, if only in view of the vast military and nuclear arsenal at his disposal and the message to other world leaders that Trump’s behavior should in any way be regarded as acceptable.

Trump’s specific threats to academics

Alongside general concerns around Trump’s policies, there are at least three specific examples that are pertinent to academics worldwide.

First, Trump’s travel ban on nationals from specific countries has made it impossible, and even dangerous for academics from these countries, some of whom are regarded as scholars at risk, to share their knowledge and in extreme cases obtain safe refuge in the United States. Several vice chancellors (rectors magnificus) of Australian universities have protested Trump’s travel ban, joining thousands of other scholars worldwide.

Second, while Congress has so far pushed back on Trump’s proposals to slash health research, Trump’s refusal to accept the scientific consensus concerning a link between carbon emissions and climate change is having a devastating global impact in restricting access to crucial research funding. Research funding cuts in other areas are also likely.

Third, the harassment of scholars by right-wing groups has been steadily rising against scholars, particularly following the election of Donald Trump. Such harassment is even described as “becoming normal” by the American Association of University Professors, which has set up an on-line platform for reporting incidents of harassment.

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Picture Credit: Newtown grafitti

This would not be the first time scholars have stood up in protest against regimes whose policies have threatened society at large, and academics specifically. This includes South Africa’s persecution of non-whites and critical scholars in the 1980s, the persecution of scholars by the government in Turkey and Israel’s persecution of Palestinian scholars.

Whether as scholars of climate change, international law, race relations or many other related areas, we should all be shocked. Alarmed. Indeed, appalled at Trump’s SOTU speech. And we should speak out at every opportunity, particularly outside our close-knit community that largely holds the same views we do.

Also see: Scholars at risk: precarity in the academe by Rod Mena and Kees Biekart

Picture credit: DonkeyHotey

JeffHandmakerISS_smallAbout the author:

Jeff Handmaker teaches law, human rights, development and governance and conducts research on legal mobilisation at the ISS. He is also an associate member of the Faculty of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Editor-in-Chief of the South African Journal on Human Rights and a member of the EUR INFAR Project.

How to make sure that research has a durable impact? Examples from DRC by Dorothea Hilhorst and Adriaan Ferf

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About the authors:

IMG_4761_2Adriaan Ferf coordinated the DRC programme of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium. He has over 40 years of experience with policy studies and evaluations of development and humanitarian programmes in Africa and Asia.

TheaDorothea Hilhorst is professor of humanitarian aid and reconstruction at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam.

This post was originally published on the website of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium and is reproduced here with permission.

The Institute of Social Studies means to produce knowledge with a societal impact. It has been long realised that researchers need to be pro-active to ensure that their findings find their way to people in policy and practice (called research uptake). The authors of this blog have participated for 6 years in a research consortium, the ODI-led Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium, where they had a range of research projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  The long-term nature of this work gave them a unique opportunity to think about possibilities for durable impact. So what have they learned about how to make research count for development?

A history of research uptake

In past decades, donors have often put a premium on research uptake. A clear research uptake plan tends to be a requirement for any research funding. The primary focus of such a plan is to highlight that both researchers and funding partners have a responsibility to ensure that research findings reach key audiences. In recent years, research uptake has evolved from mere dissemination and communication strategies built around bombarding policy-makers and development actors with messages in the hope that some would get through.

Familiar problems

But some of these traditional approaches to research uptake have shortcomings. They often solely target decision-makers (including donors). This assumes that policy shapes practice, and hence that influencing practice should start with policy. But it has long been recognised that practice is shaped by many factors outside of policy. Often, innovation starts in the field, and practice gradually influences policy over time. That means it is as important for research uptake to get communities of practice to engage with research.

A second problem with focussing mainly on decisionmakers is that they spend far less of their time than researchers imagine on ‘the technical’ and ‘the practical.’ The challenge of keeping big programmes running and hungry bureaucracies satisfied may draw decision-makers’ attention from research-based insights (even if they would rather be spending their time on reading research). Conversations and conferences that draw in the great and the good from the policy and decision-making worlds can cause temporary flashes of interest, but their impact tends to fade quickly.

IMG_3247A third problem with established approaches to research uptake is that they assume that those commissioning research mean it when they say that they want to base their programmes on evidence. Unfortunately, policy agents tend to cherry pick what they find useful in research, to then act only on pieces of evidence that speak to their frame of reference. Finding out that your leading governance or social development programme, which has taken years to design and implement, is actually challenged by emerging research evidence is a major headache. In the politicised pulls and pushes that inform the process of policy-making, the space for using evidence can be rather small indeed.

Not just messages—relationships

But this does not mean that we should abandon the research uptake. We now understand the ‘relational’ aspects of research uptake better. This means that messages need to be tailored to specific audience needs and packaged appropriately. But even then, to get research to have an impact on policy and practice means travelling on a long and difficult road.

Our work in DRC as part of the SLRC has as much as possible worked on reaching out to communities of policy and practice in a systematic way. Having the luxury of a six-year programme allowed us to pay attention to the relational aspects of research uptake and to invest in relations with representatives of policy and practice. This enabled us to tailor our communications to the specific needs of these audiences. Research into the networked governance of the health sector by Aembe Bwimana and into livelihood strategies by Gloria Nguya both fostered the type of relationships that allow the researchers to repeatedly meet key-stakeholders and spend time discussing the meaning of their findings for policy and practice.

In addition to the traditional approach of broad messaging to decision-makers, we should also broaden it and seek to complement the efforts to reach audiences with research findings with alternative forms of more lasting research uptake. Here are a number of examples from our work in DRC on how we have done this.

Durable Research Uptake by SLRC in DRC

  1. Strengthening the institutions that enhance evidence-based approaches

In the DRC, the SLRC programme includes a collaboration between a Netherlands-based university and the Institut Supérieur de Développement Rural in Bukavu. Joint production of evidence and research papers, and shared investment in research networks helped strengthen the institutional pillars of the ISDR. Through the SLRC, the collaboration resulted in an initiative to jointly set-up a Centre of Research and Expertise on Gender and Development (CREGED). The centre is hosted by ISDR and supported by different universities and NGOs in South Kivu, as well as by the Institute of Social Studies.DSC_0349.JPG

  1. Strengthen individual researchers through PhD trajectories

Because the SLRC is a long-term programme, we were able to offer a number of the researchers a PhD scholarship. These researchers advanced their academic skills through fieldwork in a programme that was also pro-development and pro-poor. We placed a premium on research uptake as well as academic excellence. Thus the SLRC has helped foster a generation of grounded, practice-oriented PhD holders who, we hope, will further advance the research principles that are at the core of the SLRC.

While finishing their theses, Aembe Bwimana and Gloria Nguya have both invested in building relations with development actors. Gloria has done an internship with UN-WIDER in Helsinki, and when Aembe was conducting research into performance-based financing he collaborated closely with the NGO Cordaid.

  1. Incorporate research findings in the curricula of higher education

When research findings reach higher education curricula, they can resound for years and inspire students that may well be future decision-makers in policy and practice. And years (rather than one-off research conferences) is what it takes to achieve durable impact. The DRC team is currently planning to develop a Master’s course on gender and development, partially grounded in the findings of our research.

This initiative has been taken on by ISDR, in collaboration with a national network of gender studies that is based in Kinshasa and CREGED is preparing to offer this course in the next academic year.

Conclusion

As the DRC struggles to make its way through another difficult time in its troubled history, we look forward to hearing further perspectives on how to translate knowledge into policy and practice and to the challenge of using our future research findings to see how we can further improve our research uptake.

 

Scholars at Risk: precarity in the Academe and Possible Solutions by Rod Mena and Kees Biekart

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About the authors:

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Rodrigo (Rod) Mena is a socio-environmental AiO-PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. His current research project focuses on disaster response and humanitarian aid in complex and high-intensity conflict-affected scenarios.

kees-biekart_Kees Biekart is Associate Professor in Political Sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. His area of expertise is in NGOs, social movements, civil society, and foreign aid, in particular in relation to Latin America.

The environment in which scholars are expected to produce societally relevant knowledge seems to become increasingly insecure. An estimated six hundred cases reported over the past two years of academics being subjected to arrests, threats, physical or verbal abuse, violent assault, prosecution or job losses have led us to raise the question: How safe is the academic milieu for scholars? This article, based on the Scholars at Risk seminar organised by the ISS in September 2017, discusses the precarious situation of academics and presents alternatives to current risky environments, particularly strategies both at the individual and institutional level for protecting scholars at risk.

Can the academic environment really be typified as a safe and secure space for scholars? While in some contexts academics may work freely and without fear, worldwide the reality can be quite different. Statistics show that academics are increasingly facing uncertain and insecure conditions, with almost six hundred cases reported over the last two years of negative actions taken against academics, including arrests, threats, physical or verbal abuse, violent assault, and prosecution. Such actions result primarily from negative perceptions of the research topics and ideas that scholars teach and research, the position that academics hold in society, the locations in which they conduct research, and their interactions with other members of society. The Academic Freedom Monitor has verified that in recent years, more than 800 attacks on staff and students in higher education have taken place globally; this number does not include cases remaining unreported primarily due to fear or the embarrassment associated with stigmatisation.

Scholars at Risk

In order to better understand the risky conditions scholars increasingly face, in September 2017 the ISS and the UAF co-organised a seminar titled ‘Scholars at Risk’, named after a project of the Foundation for Refugee Students UAF and the Scholars at Risk network (SAR). During the seminar the programme coordinator of the Scholars at Risk project and an academic who in her professional capacity had faced threats engaged in a discussion of their experiences and possible solutions to this problem facing the academe. Three topics discussed during the seminar are of particular interest:

First, the discussion emphasised that the phenomenon of risky academic environments does not just affect developing countries or institutions, but occurs globally. Northern scholars are also subject to pressures, threats and limitations on freedom of expression in their research and corresponding publications. When transgressing certain societal boundaries, restrictions and sanctions ensue. For example, in Eastern Europe and in Russia, cases of the imprisonment and prosecution of scholars can be cited; however, in the rest of Europe academics most commonly face the threat of job loss. However, in many northern countries justice systems generally operate more effectively, allowing scholars to denounce threats or seek support in threatening situations.

Second, scholars in diverse fields are affected. Precarious environments do not only affect social scientists and scholars in the humanities – mathematicians, biologists, doctors, and engineers are also constantly targeted. Last year, a NASA physicist conducting research at the University of Houston was detained in Turkey and accused of being a spy for the United States government and a member of the Turkish Gülen movement. This academic is still detained and awaiting a possible prison sentence of up to 15 years [1].

Third, the effects of risky academic environments stretch beyond the confines of the academic space, threatening familial security, forcing scholars and their families to seek refuge, and obstructing scientific advances and knowledge generation. Freedom of expression is also limited, as public discussions and discourses, social reflection, and freedom of thought are reduced, impeding efforts to strengthen democracy. It is hence evident that it is a serious and potentially dangerous phenomenon affecting society-at-large and the foundations whereupon societies are built – science, technology, and critical and reflective thought.

Scholars_At_Risk
Source: Getty Images via Times Free Press

Moreover, persecution is not only restricted to scholars, but also affects physical spaces in which they work. Universities, laboratories or observation centres are also attacked, destroyed, or limited in their operations. The non-academic staff working in these spaces, including translators, facilitators and administrative staff (and their relatives) are increasingly confronted with violent situations or are threatened due to their work. The problem hence can be said to directly affect the entire higher education community.

When confronted with this reality many scholars face, many people may ask whether the academic space, then, is shrinking, especially when viewed alongside the other harsh realities of the modern academic world, including the pressure to publish in high-impact journals and the dictation of research topics by research grants. While we do not know whether the academic space is actually shrinking, we do know that it is rapidly transforming. Academics are confronted not only with the risks mentioned above – their freedom of access to information is also under fire. Conducting research in countries suffering from violent conflicts often implies physical risks for academics, alongside the possible destruction of historical information or reduced capacity to produce new knowledge.

 

A Possible Way Out

After sketching this scenario, the obvious question that arises is how this situation can be addressed. Certainly, no easy solutions can be presented, but a number of steps can be taken in an attempt to create a safer working environment for scholars. The 2017 Free to Think report of Scholars at Risk states that scholars first have to cast a spotlight on the situation, advocating for change and urging states, civil society and leaders to ‘recognize publicly the problem of attacks on higher education, their negative consequences, and the responsibility of states to protect higher education communities within their territories against such attacks’ (Scholars at Risk 2017).

Within our academic communities, safe spaces will have to be created where affected people can publicly and freely discuss their situations. Moreover, we need to engage and urge our academic institutions to become part of organisations and networks protecting and assisting scholars at risk. After all, should it be so difficult to host scholars who seek protection? The academic community is responsible for providing protection to scholars and will have to create mechanisms to support affected people and their families. While ethics committees of research institutions focus on the safety of research subjects, the safety of researchers still does not enjoy sufficient attention.

Scholars also must reflect on the impact of their activities on others. While the full responsibility must not be placed on academics, we, as scholars, can also be proactive by taking measures such as avoiding hazardous situations, protecting our data, engaging with our informants, and by improving our interaction by means of the internet (through emails, web-based research and the use of cloud storage). The abovementioned are only some of several measures that we can take to actively protect ourselves from those people and situations putting us at risk. Especially scholars working or residing in repressive settings known for putting scholars at risk should know which options are available to them to avoid persecution. The global community will concurrently have to advocate for change. Manuals such as the ‘Security guidelines for field research in complex, remote and hazardous places’, although focusing primarily on one component of academic research, can provide valuable information on how to prevent and reduce risks scholars can face.

In conclusion, we as scholars need to engage in an on-going discussion on how to become more aware of scholars at risk and of the actions we can take to help our colleagues. Very likely, much more can be done to protect and support fellow scholars who cannot or are hesitant to speak out, or who have gone into hiding. A safe academic environment moves beyond support for affected scholars, since we all benefit from the academic freedom our predecessors have fought for. After all, how can we cherish academic freedom if some of us are unable to speak out freely?

[1] http://monitoring.academicfreedom.info/reports/2016-08-05-nasa-university-houston