Tag Archives decoloniality

Unlearning Colonial Analytics: Rethinking Women in ‘Conservatism’

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In this blog, ISS Alumna, Tia Isti’anah invites us to rethink beyond the binary label of conservatism vs progressive. Drawing from decolonial feminist thinkers, it challenges the secular-liberal feminist moral world and invites readers to centre love as an act of unlearned colonial biases.

 

Image from Harmonia Pictura from Pixabay

In 2020, I was doing research with Yayasan Rumah Kita Bersama in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia. I remember that I perceived women who joined the Islamic teaching in ‘conservative’ mosques as victims of religious doctrine. I had some categories for what I call ‘conservative’ mosques; the ones that called themselves ‘salafi’ or ‘manhanji’ and the ones whose women used the big veil which covers their shoulders and chest.

In one of these mosques, I talked to women who refused to work after getting married because they were worried about the ‘ikhtilat’. Ikhtilat refers to the gathering, mixing and intermingling of men and women in one place. I whispered to myself about how this kind of tafsir (explanation or exegesis) limits women from doing what they want. One woman I met even refused to use online booking services for transportation because it could result in her being alone with a man, although the public transportation in that area (Cikarang, Bekasi) was difficult to find. When I also joined the Islamic studies for this research in one of the mosques in Bekasi, I saw that women could only ask questions on paper by writing it down and giving it to the committee, while men could raise their hand and speak directly to the speaker in front of the audience.

As a woman who grew up in a traditional Islamic family and school, I often experienced the Islamic tafsir that justifies patriarchy and I remember feeling angry and confused listening to it. That experience made me feel the urge to save women who follow ‘conservative’ Islamic teaching which I thought of as patriarchal. This is also the reason why I am actively involved in the Islamic feminist movement in Indonesia.

Later, I found out that my analysis of putting women who accepted ‘conservatism’ teaching as merely a victim of religious doctrine is a colonial and binary approach. Chandra Talpade Mohanty called this kind of analysis a commodification and appropriation of knowledge about women in third-world countries, where we pack them as one category: oppressed, dependent and powerless, without allowing them to speak for themselves. This objectification or analysis, however, has been used by many Western and middle-class African or Asian scholars for their rural and working-class sisters. Sabaa Mahmood book’s Politics of Piety, which is the result of her anthropological research in Egypt with pious women, can be used as an entry point to unlearn this colonial analytical category and challenge secular-liberal feminist analysis. She invites us to see religious practices in their own terms, not through the eyes of other moral values.

Unlearning colonial categorization

Mahmood’s work is important because it challenges the secular-liberal feminist approach, which is obsessed with individual freedom or free will. This obsession with the norm of individual freedom stems from a secular-liberal feminist approach, which is rooted in Western history. Individual freedom, however, is inadequate for understanding the reality of pious women in Egypt, the women with whom Mahmood conducted her research. Pious women in Egypt are living in communities with significantly different norms than women in Western countries. Mahmood saw that their life goal was not individual freedom or free will, but striving for piety by following the Prophet Muhammad’s example.

I reflected on this during my own research in Bekasi. I assumed that women following ‘conservative’ teaching are backwards and in need of being saved. I thought that the ‘conservative’ Islamic doctrine, such as ‘ikhtilat’ limits their freedom.  I also considered women having to ask questions in writing in Islamic teaching as a sign of subordination, especially when the same rules do not bind men. In fact, my analysis mirrored what Maria Lazreg calls reductionism, where religion is assumed to be the main reason for gender inequality or patriarchy. By assuming this in my analysis, as Saba Mahmood mentioned in her book, I denied other realities and factors of patriarchy. This also made me reject another reality about women in Islamic teaching –  the reality that what they strive for is not about individual freedom but about striving to embody piety modelled after the Prophet Muhammad.

Mahmood’s work generated criticism, for example that the celebration of pious agency, if taken too far, could risk romanticizing the power of domination and denying the structure that is often imposed by those in power. However, her argument allows us to pause before putting other women (who, borrowing from Mohanty, are actually our sisters in struggle) in the oppressed, dependent, powerless and backward category box.

Decolonial Calling

Maria Lugones, a decolonial feminist, argued that even the gender system itself is colonial, as is the very definition of gender-oppressive. Moreover, she deepened this conversation by inviting us to practice playful ‘world‘ travelling by moving to each other’s ‘world’ with a loving rather than an arrogant eye. A world, as I understand from Lugones, is characterized as being inhabited by flesh and blood people, where meaning, ideas, construction and relationships are organized in particular ways. Loving here means that we see with their eyes, that we go to their world, see how both of us are constructed in their world, and witness their own sense of selves from their world. Only by travelling to their world can we see them as subjects and identify with them because we are not excluded and separate from them.

This made it clear to me that I have failed to love women who joined the ‘conservative’ Islamic teaching. Instead, I looked at them arrogantly, seeing them as victims and as oppressed women, while at the same time seeing myself as an educated woman who has become enlightened. I failed to understand how women in ‘conservative’ teaching see themselves within their values and their world. I failed to meet women where they are, not where I assumed they should be. I failed to see their own ways of making meaning, but rather saw them through the lens of me, who was already brainwashed by the idea of individual freedom as the only valid goal in life. By travelling to other women’s worlds, we are not necessarily endorsing what they believe, but rather learning to see their world.

Looking back, I realize that Lugones’s framework has helped me embrace contradictions and differences, to live with a loving way of being. I might not always agree with what people believe but I now try to love them. I think of a friend in Iran who is forced to wear a hijab. Because of that, she hates how religion is used as a tool to discriminate against those who are different. Her story is real and painful. Yet, by travelling to the other women’s world, I also find women who find their meaning and purpose in life from the same moral universe my friend rejects: ‘conservative’ Islam. Decolonial feminists remind us to see the plurality of women’s worlds; worlds that cannot be looked at through one single lens, especially not the lens of Western domination and power.  The journey has humbled me, enabled me to unlearn what I thought I knew ,and relearn seriously from the wisdom of other women’s worlds who are different from mine – how they seek meaning, resilience, and dignity.

 

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

About the author:

Tia Isti’anah

Tia Isti’anah is a freelance writer/researcher. She is an alumna of International Institute of Social Studies. Some of her writings can be found here: https://linktr.ee/tia.istianah (mostly in Indonesia language). Connect professionally here: www.linkedin.com/in/tia-istianah

 

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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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Polycrisis and reasons for hope at the Humanitarian Leadership Conference: a practitioners’ perspective

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In this blog, Carla Vitantonio (and host of the ‘Living Decoloniality’ podcast), takes stock of the views of humanitarian practitioners and researchers at the recent Humanitarian Leadership Conference, held in Doha, Qatar. Throughout the conference, Carla interviewed various humanitarian practitioners and researchers for a special podcast series. She posed two questions, about challenges for humanitarians in a time of polycrisis, and about hope for the future. To listen to the podcast, check out the CHL website.

On April 6th, roughly 70 days after the cancellation of USAID and the earthquake that shook the humanitarian and development sector, about 200 people from 85 different countries met in Doha for the Humanitarian Leadership Conference. Roughly 200 more joined online.
The organization of the event had been uncertain until the very end, as organizers themselves have been deeply affected by the cuts and so had most of the participants. But at the end, thanks to the firm willingness and hard work of the organizers, all pieces fell together and people arrived from all over the world, with some of them crossing through zones affected by conflict and disasters, to attend the two days of conference and one extra day organized by the Pledge for Change, a movement that seeks to decolonize the sector. The title of the conference, “transformative leadership in times of polycrisis”, which only few months before had seemed to many a simple exercise of anticipation, proved to capture perfectly the feelings of many participants, who arrived in Doha looking for answers and solutions to an unprecedently complex web of problems.

The challenges faced by the humanitarian sector are both personal and professional

I am a humanitarian living and working in Cuba, one of the most unseen crisis in the world (some participants to the conference openly admitted that they did not know that since 2022 Cuba has been affected by 3 devastating hurricanes, a strong earthquake and a growing socioeconomic crisis that keeps every day the country in the darkness for several hours, and has brought more than one million people – one tenth of the total population – to flee). I had to travel almost 3 days to reach Qatar, and I found myself overwhelmed by the intensity, variety, depth of the content shared through the conference.

As I often do, I decided to use storytelling to create threads and a sort of order among this huge volume of information, and I invited 6 of the people who had impressed me the most to share their own story, guided by two questions:

  1. In times of polycrisis, what is one challenge and one opportunity for you and your organization?
  2. What is one thing from this conference that makes you hopeful for the future?

I had to arrange interviews in very different times of each day. Some speakers could make it very early in the morning, had to skip breakfast and so their voice was still a bit rusty. Others gave me their time after a long day of conference. Their voices sound tired. Some had to speak the day after. Their voices betray anxiety. Some were happy with the outcome of their session. Their voices sound hopeful.

They were all honest, generous, gentle to me, and their perspective helped me in finding my way through the conference.

The result is a short podcast series, which includes a bonus track recorded with Lars Peter Nissen, author of Trumanitarian.

One month after the conference, I feel I can draw some reflections:

  • Local leadership is now. As a coach told me once, a “beautiful, unique party is happening now”. Organizations need to decide if they are ready to join, or if they prefer to just keep discussing The transformation we have been talking about for long is already taking place. In the Emergency Response Rooms (ERR) in Sudan, through the courageous appeals of the Myanmar civil society, the actions of the White Helmets and of the many others that decided to take action and not to wait for those in power to give them permission.
  • Finally, the discourse on the coloniality entrenched in the system is gaining voice and space. The abstract need to “decolonize the sector” is slowly being transformed into a series of creative, profound attempts to analyse all our practices, to identify the coloniality that shapes them, and to transform them into something else. We need to work for change to happen at all levels. Advocacy and alliance at global level is paramount. Bringing philanthropy onboard and contributing to its own change is also very important, but we also need to look critically at the principles that move humanitarian assistance, and at our processes. Coloniality needs to be disentangled one piece after the other.
  • INGOs are struggling to follow the rhythm of this change. Some that signed the Pledge for Change in 2022 today face difficulties inchanging a system built on inequalities. But besides those initial 12 signatories of the Pledge for Change, and a few notable others the debate on the decolonization of practices and processes is virtually absent from the agenda of many, while others engage in aesthetic debates on the use of correct vocabulary.

In summary, the humanitarian leadership conference 2025 left many questions on how to leverage transformative leadership to bring about a new humanitarian sector.
However, something emerged clearly: the change we have been talking of happening before our eyes. Are we being this change, or are we rather standing aside? Each one will make their own choice. Meanwhile, enjoy the listening.

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

About the Author 

Carla Vitantonio

Carla Vitantonio is a humanitarian practitioner and researcher who has worked across a number of contexts and organisations, including CARE (as country Director for Cuba), and Handicap International (including as country Director for North Korea). She contributes to academic research initiatives at institutes including the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the European University Institute, and ODI. Carla hosts the podcast ‘Living Decoloniality’, and also serves on the Board of the International Humanitarian Studies Association, as well as regularly contributing blogs, think pieces and papers – in English, Spanish, and Italian.

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Data inaccuracy is a global problem — a plea for decolonizing the debate on the quality of statistics

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Policy makers and researchers want their analyses and advice to be evidence-based. Economic and social statistics seem to provide the hard data needed to make decisions. But those statistics are often inaccurate and are measured imprecisely. In this blog article, ISS Professor of International Economics and Macroeconomics Peter van Bergeijk points out the biases of academia in the global North, showing that their pretention about their statistical superiority perpetuates power imbalances in academic and policy discourses.

In the realm of economic analysis, the pursuit of precision has long been hailed as the ultimate goal. Yet, behind the veil of statistical exactitude lies a disturbing reality: the pervasive presence of measurement errors, typically disregarded and sidelined. Data inaccuracy at first sight might look like a very boring issue, but it is actually highly relevant for development studies, amongst others because of the data-based nature of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Indeed, large data-driven projects such as the SDGs are seen as a major step forward, but since no attention is paid to the accuracy of the target variables during the selection of quantified goals, disappointment is, so to speak, built in.

A good example is the goal to reduce global poverty. Espen Prydz, Dean Jolliffe, and Umar Serajuddin compared per capita income statistics calculated from the national accounts to countrywide household surveys. The numbers should be the same, but the difference can be as much as 50%. They found that for the year 2011, the World Bank’s target of reducing poverty to less than 3% globally was met when looking at national accounts, but that the number of people living in poverty was actually twice as high when household surveys were considered. Those who do not recognize or report inaccuracies such as these rest on their laurels before the work is done.

It is unfortunately common practice for economists to sweep data inaccuracies under the rug. We are confused with data that doesn’t work the way we want it to. So, we continue ignoring the problem. Obscuring their existence means that we don’t know the extent of these inconsistencies. And, as I argue below, the mainstream ignores its own mistakes while emphasizing the statistical problems of developing countries.

A rude awakening

The journey into the murky waters of economic data accuracy often begins with a rude awakening. For many, like me, it was during our early professional endeavours that we encountered an unsettling truth: economic and social statistics, even from reputed sources, are riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies. The disillusionment can be profound when young professionals realize that the numbers they rely on to inform critical decisions are far from infallible. I was introduced to this issue only when regarding the reading list of my final exam. The examiner asked what I thought about this, and I told him that this should have been part of teaching from Day 1.

Yet, the issue has persisted for many decades. Published in 1950 as a discussion paper and in 1963 as a monograph by Princeton University Press, Oskar Morgenstern in his seminal work On the Accuracy of Economic Observations was one of the first to expose the shadows of data imperfection. Through meticulous case studies, Morgenstern revealed the inaccuracies that plague economic and social statistics; he uncovered measurement error to the tune of 20% to 50%, even for massively quoted numbers such as GDP, international trade, and the current account of countries worldwide. The areas from which Morgenstern drew his examples are wide and include agriculture, natural resources, (un)employment, prices, and production. In my last book that I briefly discuss below, I show that these problems persist, redoing Morgenstern’s research and adding some of the SDG indicators (poverty, health and nutrition, and illegal flows).

Figure 1. Only few economic analyses have few data inaccuracies — most studies have significant error rates. Source: Peter A.G. van Bergeijk, 2024, On the inaccuracies of macroeconomic observations, National Accounting Review, Figure 5.

A wake-up call

Yet, despite the continued relevance of Morgenstern’s findings, nothing has changed, and the discourse around measurement error remains conspicuously absent from mainstream economic narratives. What happened was that a discourse developed that presented inaccuracy as a major problem in Africa and Asia. The publication in 2014 by Morten Jerven, Professor in Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, of Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It struck me in particular and served  as a wake-up call. Jerven fell into the trap of the fallacy of portraying measurement issues as a problem confined to the global South.

The cost of pursuing perfection

The roots of the ignorance of measurement error lie in the biases embedded within academia in the global North. The training of economists is steeped in a tradition that venerates precision and disregards imperfection, perpetuating a culture of intellectual superiority and exclusion. This obsession with precision not only blinds economists and social scientists to the realities of measurement error; the global South, all too often relegated to the margins of economic analysis, bears the brunt of this colonial legacy.

The prevailing narrative portrays measurement issues as exclusive to developing countries, conveniently ignoring the systemic inaccuracies that plague advanced economies. Evidence-based policy making will often be counterproductive if based on mock statistics. A trade balance can be reported as showing a deficit and may induce policy measures to boost exports and restrict imports. But the statistics can easily get it wrong and may deprive a nation from important resources.

Doing economics (education) better

The imperative for decolonization in the measurement error debate cannot be overstated. It is time to dismantle the colonial perceptions that have long dictated our approach to economic data accuracy. This necessitates a fundamental re-evaluation of our methodologies and practices, rooted in principles of transparency, accountability, and inclusivity. I decided to write my last book titled On the Inaccuracies of Economic Observations: Why and How We Could Do Better on this topic because an accessible up-to-date text is necessary to convince students that this is a real problem. I hope that it will help to improve the education of economists and other social scientists.

In the book, which has just been published by Edward Elgar, I pay tribute to Morgenstern and redo much of his analysis but for more recent times and for a much broader country sample. Most importantly, I provide a concrete methodology and strategy for what I call crowd-researching the extent of measurement error and empowering data users, allowing them to take part in dismantling the power hierarchies that fundamentally perpetuate colonial perception within economic discourse. There have occasionally been calls for fundamental changes of the statistics producers, but that has not led to any change. It is time to try to do this differently. It is perfectly doable for data users to investigate the measurement errors that plague social and economic statistics.

A radical reimagining

Our journey towards progress demands a radical reimagining of our approach to data accuracy. Confronting the legacies and mainstream views that underpin our current discourse helps to pave the way for a more equitable and inclusive understanding of economic and social phenomena. Especially in the current times of disinformation, scientific rigour requires us all to be transparent about measurement error and its impact on our analysis and policy advice.

The implications clearly stretch beyond academia. Policymakers must confront the uncertainties inherent in economic observations, recognizing the limitations of relying on flawed data for decision-making. Similarly, researchers must embrace methodologies that prioritize inclusivity and equity by treating the problem of statistical quality from the perspective that the problems are similar for all countries. But this starts with the recognition that it is indeed a phenomenon that should not be ignored but ultimately should be embraced for what it is.

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

About the author: Peter van Bergeijk

Peter van Bergeijk

Peter van Bergeijk is almost emeritus professor. His valedictory ‘In Praise of Observations’ is scheduled October 1, 16:00 +

link to event:  https://www.iss.nl/en/events/valedictory-lecture-professor-peter-van-bergeijk-2024-10-01

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Book review – We Belong to the Earth: Towards a Decolonial Feminist Pedagogy Rooted in Uhuru and Ubuntu (Nadira Omarjee)

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In this blog post, ISS PhD researcher Xander Creed offers a book review on Nadira Omarjee’s “We Belong to the Earth: Towards a Decolonial Feminist Pedagogy Rooted in Uhuru and Ubuntu”, drawing out the relevance for educators interested in emancipatory pedagogies. Engaging with the auto-ethnography of Nadira Omarjee, which outlines African philosophies of Ubuntu and Uhuru and colonial logics of hierarchization, this blog highlights the need for mutual recognition to be included on the syllabus, particularly for migration studies, in order to tackle oppression in and from the classroom.

Image by Author.

To put the end first, “We belong to the Earth and we belong to each other.” (Omarjee 2023: 149). Nadira Omarjee’s book We Belong to the Earth: Towards a Decolonial Feminist Pedagogy Rooted in Uhuru and Ubuntu  offers an exciting approach towards the classroom, bridging the tension between self and other. Reflecting on the work of ISS’s very own Prof. Dr. Rosalba Icaza  in discussing the diological format of auto-ethnography centering on lived/felt experience-knowledge, Omarjee conducts an attentive psychoanalysis of her own existence under structures of domination (for instance, gender and race as a Black womxn), as well as teaching in the neo-liberal university. Here, Icaza raises the conversational or dialogue dimensions of the auto-ethnographic format, particularly as it emerges “from the embodied experience of the vulnerability that carries the un-learning and/or refusal to reproduce epistemic privileges of a ‘subject’ that interprets and represents reality”. Omarjee argues that from this view – her view -we can begin to see “the ways in which coloniality together with patriarchy have designed the academy, serves the system and further marginalizes and affects the mental health of vulnerable communities through othering” (Omarjee 2023: 104).

The diagnosis? The narcissism of coloniality and skewed recognition; a worldview so entangled in itself that it is unable to recognize any others. The treatment? Jouissance; the reaffirmation, actualization of and coming into self (uhuru) in tandem with the mutual recognition of the other through collective (ubuntu). This treatment plan applies for both narcissists and those entangled with them – jouissance allows for us to lose ourselves in the pleasure of being together as equals, without hierarchy or domination. Indeed, this applies within the classroom, but far beyond the confines of the academy, as it relates to interactions with nature and the more-than-human, encompassing “all sentient beings, challenging notions of supremacy of being by displacing the hu/man without losing the ‘hu/man being’ in the notion of being” (Omarjee 2023: 94).

In this way, the narcissism of coloniality comes to signify the “the perception of superiority, entitlement and privilege” (8), but like perceptions, it can be broken. More centrally, it can be broken together. The classroom offers an opportunity for this transformation, wherein all present might be empowered to come into themselves (uhuru), liberating themselves and their peers (ubuntu). This entails the conscientization of students across the spectrum of (dis)advantage– becoming aware of their own situations as well as that of their peers. All can participate in their own liberation (uhuru) and look beyond their blindspots (privilege) through solidarity (ubuntu). While both uhuru and ubuntu originate from African philosophy, Omarjee identifies these two concepts within the basic psychoanalytical drives of “self-enhancement” and “contact and union with the other” (2023: 1). “[W]e need uhuru and ubuntu – a profound respect for life, implying a profound respect for ourselves and for others” (Omarjee 2023: 3).

Through putting her own wounds and healing journey on full display, the work calls back to the message of Audre Lorde, in The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action: “Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am black, because I am myself, a black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours?”.

Perhaps, for some, the intra-psychic and psychoanalytical approach (reflecting on her own mental health and cognition) included alongside a vulnerable auto-ethnography might not be ‘the work’ they imagine doing in the academy or their classrooms. This includes (re)visiting deep psychic wounds within intimate relationships, as well as personal failures, admitting her own inability and shortcomings as an educator. It very well might scare them, those who have built empires in the academy and would hate to see their privilege challenged (or worse, have to challenge it themselves!), and that might very well be their narcissistic right.

However, for those who can bask in this radical presence in-text, it is less off-putting – those who can give into jouissance, la petite mort, to walk the path – who took the advice of Hélène Cixous more than 40 years ago to imagine what a feminine language could be outside of phallologocentrism (privileging masculinity in cognition and meaning making) – “You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing”. To reinterpret this advice – face your fears as an instructor, looking at Medusa will make you into a real (vulnerable) human in the classroom rather than turning to a stoic statue behind the podium. Regardless of whether you have looked at Medusa or not, “The system traps us all: therefore, we all reproduce the system” (Omarjee 2023: 146). Neutrality is not an option, especially not in the classroom, and we might be teaching things that are not included in the lesson plan.

Exemplary of this potential, Omarjee shares the perspective of participants in her decolonial feminist pedagogy, one scholar reflecting that, “As opposed to feeling like merely students in a classroom, we felt like human beings in conversation with mutual recognition at its core” (111), and another sharing that “Personally, I have never been in an academic environment where I could speak a little bit more about my life and experiences. It felt a little unusual but only because I had been so used to the more Draconian (‘repeat after me’) sort of approach. But this class made me realize how traumatic that approach had actually been. However, while this class became a way for me to unpack and heal from it, I felt I also had to be reflexive and see where I could be reinforcing that traumatic approach around me (i.e. other peers)” (110-111). Through these reflections, Omarjee affirms the potential for the classroom to be a space-and-time for radical transformation. “Group projects further explored ubuntu as praxis, extending care to the other in the form of holding space, encouraging safety and healing” (Omarjee 2023: 115), while processes of conscientization allow for students to come into themselves and their experience (uhuru).

Returning to my own experience in the classroom, as a migration studies scholar and instructor, as well as a student, who attended the Decolonizing Scholarship CERES Research School course, the book reminded me of my learned/lived experiences of the violent regime of citizenship and integration. I remember sitting in classrooms as a student learning about migration and feeling an unease or misalignment with my own experience. In this way, Omarjee’s book has allowed me to revisit that memory, and think about who’s knowledge was being shared/suppressed. Likewise, her work has helped me reframe as an instructor, when moderating a heated discussion about the possibility of a global institution or its employees to be racist or not. I have been able to approach the discussion in terms of supporting students coming to themselves (uhuru) as well as coming together (ubuntu), even if they disagree. This is certainly a different classroom than one where students seek to ‘be right’. Certainly, a decolonial feminist pedagogy offers opportunities to transform the classroom while exploring topics within migration studies such as identity, challenging the divide between migrant/citizen:

(B)earth-right Citizenship

We belong to the earth, not to borders, to each other

            to the earth we will return

            from the earth we will rise

Birth, life and death are matters of both

            blood and soil

            jus sanguinis and jus soli

matters of which

            I / you becomes we

            where citizen and non-citizen meet

For we cannot live nor die

                        without us-you-me;

                        without earth

(Xander Creed, July 2023 in response to Nadira Omarjee).

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

Xander Creed is a PhD researcher at the ISS. Their work explores migration and asylum governance with a particular focus on the human dimension of (im)mobility, for instance through the lens of human security and feminisms.

 

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Grappling with unease – together: collective reflections on Migration Studies and Colonialism by Mayblin and Turner

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How can scholars tackle the legacy of colonialism in migration studies? Last year, a small group of critical development studies scholars at ISS sought to reflect on this challenge by collectively reading and discussing the book Migration Studies and Colonialism that explores exactly this issue. In this article, we share our observations and discuss two things that we consider vital in meaningful discussions on the  topic: the need to move beyond simplistic notions of European colonialism and the importance of meaningful engagement with scholars from the ‘Global South’.

Photo Credit: Authors.

While it is difficult to make generalizing claims about the broad field of migration studies that attracts scholars from various disciplines, one can confidently state that we have not yet adequately addressed the colonial legacies that continue to colour research and discussions on migration. It is in light of this that a group of scholars from the ISS got together in November last year to discuss a book that critically explores the issue. We hoped that in discussing colonial histories and migration studies, we could better understand our collective unease with the way in which we may reproduce colonialist harms through our work.

The book we discussed, ‘Migration Studies and Colonialism’ by Lucy Mayblin and Joe Turner (2021), is written as an intervention that is meant to place colonialism and its critique at the centre of discussions in migration studies. Moving beyond a critique of migration studies, the authors echo the call for action to dismantle the field’s contribution to the reproduction of coloniality – one that has been growing louder thanks to contributions by migration scholars engaging with postcolonial and decolonial thought.[1]

Instead of reviewing the book,[2] we chose to highlight our collective reflections on the unease many of us face in trying to engage with decolonial ideals, aspirations, and/or commitments as early-career researchers working on highly polarizing topics. Most of us identify as women of colour who come from the so-called ‘Global South’; we research migration, child sex tourism, or humanitarian intervention within academic institutional structures in the Global North. Coming from these diverse backgrounds, we offer input for the discussion on how to grapple with colonial legacies at the university and beyond through deep, collective, and horizontally organized reading, which is important in itself as a counter-current against fast academia.

These are our insights stemming from our discussions:

 

  1. We need to acknowledge non-European experiences and legacies of colonialism

 Mayblin and Turner argue in their book that colonial histories should be central to understanding migration praxis. They warn against what they call “sanctioned ignorance of histories of colonialism”, which leaves scholars and practitioners with theories that are inadequate in explaining the present state of migration regimes and moreover normalize the use of dehumanizing terms (such as ‘illegals’) that appear to be objective rather than historically and culturally emergent (p.3).

As they attempt to frame their discussions[3]  in a global manner, the authors rely on intellectual legacies from the Americas (North and South) and engagement with scholars from Asian and African traditions (p.4). They acknowledge that as ‘white’ academics working in British higher education institutions, they write from particular perspectives that may result in readers spotting limitations and omissions.

And we did. In our discussions, the tension between appreciating the thematic discussion of colonial histories and the wide brush used to portray international migration studies was consistently present. As we delved into each chapter, we found that the telling of specific colonial histories still placed Europe at the centre of the discussion. One participant for instance remarked during our conversation about Chapter 3 that “[the authors] make a solid case for why race and colonialism are intertwined with and shape migration. I do, however, feel the perspective adopted is still Eurocentric. It’s important to note that colonialism is not only European.”

We concluded that by emphasizing their critique of Eurocentrism reproduced through coloniality, the book showcased not only a tendency to limit and equate colonialism to Europe but also a limited take on Europe as a monolith. Another participant observed, “One Europe – as if there is one Europe, one type of colonialism, no differentiation.”

While we acknowledged the inclusion of geographical contexts and topics that are not commonly discussed in the historicizing of colonialism and migration, such as the mentioning of former colonized nations in the construction of international refugee regimes (Ch. 5), Mayblin and Turner’s focus on Europe’s colonial history reinforces a lack of acknowledgement of non-European experiences and legacies of colonialism.

To offer a more balanced picture, we feel the need to highlight topics important to the diverse contexts we come from or work with. These include South-South migration, indentured labour, and transnational solidarities that were instrumental in the independence of many formerly colonized nations. Otherwise, by limiting ourselves to a critique on a seemingly monolithic Europe and its (lasting) systems of categorization, the ‘Global South’ continues to be present as an ‘object’ in the retelling of the colonial histories (Quijano 2007). Interestingly, this discussion forced participants to reflect on our roles and commitment as researchers to actively unlearn and challenge the ‘subject-object’ relations between the ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ prevalent in knowledge production. By centring colonial histories within migration studies, both the authors and the readers should reflect on their positionality, roles, and choices in the retelling of histories.

 

  1. We need to be transparent about our inclusion of ‘voices from the Global South’

 Mayblin and Turner acknowledge that literatures problematizing mainstream migration studies exist but are often still inaccessible or unaccounted for, partly due to structural inequalities within higher academic institutions. They write on pages 4 and 5: “This book seeks to showcase some of this work for people who research migration yet never encounter such perspectives… Our aim is not that you cite this book, but that in the future you cite some of the scholars discussed within it.”

We followed their sound advice. The references to perspectives, approaches, and concepts developed mainly by scholars from the Global South required the reading group participants to read and reflect beyond what was presented in the book. For example, in Chapter 5, Mayblin and Turner’s critical discussion on forced migration brought readers’ attention to Vergara-Figueroa’s (2018) elaboration to the notion of ‘deracination’. While the concept of ‘deracination’ has been widely adopted by scholars and activists in the Latin American and the Caribbean contexts, particularly in Colombia in relation to land dispossession, forced migration, violence, and rupture of communal ties caused by the prolonged armed conflict, it was still unfamiliar to most of the participants.

As an Ecuadorian researcher who was very familiar with the Colombian context was able discuss ‘deracination’ in more detail, the collective reading evolved into a space where thought processes and conversations moved from Mayblin and Turner to concepts and ideas developed in particular localities and historical contexts and their potential applicability elsewhere to reflections by participants on their own identities, voices, and research.  Reflecting on these discussions, one participant said: “I’m not doing research at the moment, but this book and discussion has made me more aware about my own internalized Eurocentric ideas, being more conscious about the spaces I am in and realize how we represent ‘the Global South’.”

However, one question remained after completing the collective reading: how did Mayblin and Turner choose what to include and exclude in the book? While the referencing of scholars from the Global South is important and welcomed by group participants, there is a lack of explanation on how they chose whose work to include.

In addition, Mayblin and Turner’s choice to reference these scholars as opposed to inviting them to contribute directly through an edited volume is also worth noting. While they state early on that they hope the book will lead migration researchers to reference some of the work they included, these decisions still positioned them as gatekeepers of knowledge production. Being more transparent about these choices would have allowed more open accountability towards the power hierarchies in knowledge production that they are critical of.

 

A way forward: the value of collective reading and reflections

We (try to) engage with ‘decoloniality’ and the responsibility to acknowledge the legacies of colonialism in our research to different degrees and in different ways. Most participants are used to applying a critical and historical lens towards the themes raised in the book but are less certain about taking up the responsibility of ‘doing decoloniality’. One participant for example stated that “I often encounter this question [of centring colonialism] in my field when working on development aid. I think we are aware of many of the problems mentioned, such as the topic of race, inequality, etc., but we don’t necessarily know what to do.”

This tension between recognizing ‘problems’ and feeling unsure of what to do and how to position ourselves as researchers from diverse backgrounds is at the heart of our ambivalence and unease when engaging with the book. This tension is also recognized by Mayblin and Turner, who decided against calling their book “Decolonizing Migration Studies”. Instead, they positioned it more broadly to support decolonization agendas within academic institutions. But as we show, tension, ambivalence, and unease can drive critical reflection and prompt change in practice.

While we did not start or end with a common commitment to decolonizing knowledges, there was a general agreement among us, as one participant stated, “… to actively participate and also to allow yourself to listen with discomfort.” Grappling with unease was the starting point for our collective reflections, and we left with concrete clues for conscious historicization and contextualization to avoid the broad brushstrokes that overlook other experiences and legacies.

[1] E.g. Mains et al. 2013; Achiumi 2019; Samaddar 2020; Fiddien-Qasmiyeh 2020

[2] For reviews, see e.g. Favell 2021; Stallone 2022

[3] Mayblin and Turner’s historizing of colonialism provides the starting point to their discussion of migration studies and the thematic exploration of modernity and development (Chapter 2), race and racism (Chapter 3), state sovereignty and citizenship (Chapter 4), asylum seekers and refugee regimes (Chapter 5), national and border security (Chapter 6), and gender and sexuality (Chapter 7).

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

About the authors:

Mahardhika Sjamsoe’oed Sadjad is an interdisciplinary scholar in the field of international development and migration. Her research focuses on discursive and affective constructions of identities and belonging in The Netherlands, Indonesia, and broader region of Southeast Asia.

 

Zeynep Kaşlı is Assistant Professor in Migration and Development at ISS, affiliated with the Governance, Law and Social Justice Research Group. Her research interests include mobility, citizenship, borders, transnationalism, power and sovereignty with regional expertise in Turkey, Middle East and Europe.

 

Nanneke Winters is an assistant professor in Migration and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research interests include im/mobility, migrant trajectories, and translocal livelihoods in Central America and beyond.

 

 

Haya Alfarra is a PhD researcher at ISS-EUR. Her research explores the role of diaspora as non-traditional humanitarian actors in protracted humanitarian situations, looking specifically at the role of Palestinian-German diaspora in humanitarian responses in the Gaza Strip, occupied Palestinian territory.

 

 

Mausumi Chetia is a PhD researcher at ISS-EUR. She researches on meanings of home and lived human (in)securities in context of disaster-related displacements in India. Her research is part of the Erasmus Initiative called Vital Cities and Citizens (VCC), under the theme of Resilient Cities.

 

Xander Creed is a PhD researcher at the ISS. Their work explores migration and asylum governance with a particular focus on the human dimension of (im)mobility, for instance through the lens of human security and feminisms.

 

Vanessa Ntinu is the Jr. Executive Manager of the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Governance of Migration and Diversity. She is interested in notions surrounding race, anti-Blackness, diversity, and migration laws and institutions.

 

Gabriela Villacis Izquierdo is a Ph.D researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam in the field of development and humanitarian studies. Her current research is based in Colombia and focuses on the contributions of feminism(s) to humanitarian governance, with an emphasis on the potential of collective action and humanitarian advocacy.

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On the Racist Humanism of Climate Action

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Mainstream climate change mitigation and adaptation policies are imbued with neocolonial discursive constructions of the “other”. Understanding how such constructions work has important implications for how we think about emancipatory and socially-just responses to the climate crisis.

In her 2016 “Edward Said Lecture”, Naomi Klein made the case that “othering” is intimately linked to the production of the climate crisis. Borrowing from Said’s Orientalism, Klein defines othering as the “disregarding, essentialising, [and] denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region”. She argues that this is much needed for justifying the sacrifice zones necessary for fossil fuel exploitation, and for refusing to protect climate refugees.

In these ways, othering permits letting off the hook the neoliberal and neocolonial structures of domination that are largely responsible for climate injustice.

Constructing people as not-fully-human, not part of “us”, or as threats—internal enemies, foreign agents, terrorists, obstacles to development, and the like—is a common strategy for legitimising repression against those who resist extractivism and dispossession. Indeed, compartmentalising populations into those who need protection and support, and those who can be sacrificed for the sake of the “greater good”, is what theorists from Michel Foucault to Achille Mbembe saw as the fundamental function of racism, originating in European colonialism. Similarly, Frantz Fanon defined racism as a global hierarchy based on the “line of the human”, which created a distinction between the zone of being (the human) and the zone of not being (the sub- or non-human).

At the same time, the workings and reach of othering go beyond what Naomi Klein suggests. Discursive constructions of populations or territories as “other” are also mobilised to include them within the reach of government action and control. This is typically the case with populations or territories that are constructed as “in need of improving” that, as anthropologist Tania Murray Li has shown, have long underpinned colonial and development interventions. These constructions are no less racist and colonial than those justifying the “need to sacrifice”, yet they are intermeshed with a humanitarian or humanist “will to improve” the other, a reactivation of the imperial discourse of the “white man’s burden”.

Image 1. Mural dedicated to Edward Said, Palestine, 2016. Unknown author. Source. Wikimedia Commons

Climate Action and Othering

We claim that this ambivalent mobilisation of othering—oscillating between improvement and sacrifice—also characterises mainstream responses to the climate crisis, imbuing them with a neo-colonial and, at heart, racist ethos. Policies for mitigating climatic changes, adapting to them, or governing climate-induced migration, require prior discursive work to frame targeted populations or territories as problematic or deficient, through narratives that stress vulnerability, underdevelopment, and victimhood. At the same time, these interventions are associated with effects of dispossession, environmental destruction and the production of surplus populations and sacrifice zones, and must therefore rely on othering to justify letting such populations die.

Mitigation and green extractivism

Think of climate change mitigation, and its purported goal of shifting away from fossil fuels by aggressively expanding industrial-scale renewable energies and electric automobility. Environmental movements and researchers have demonstrated abundantly that this strategy is problematic. They denounced the dispossession effects of “transition mineral” extraction and large hydropower projects, and the “land grabbing” associated with wind and solar energy generation and biofuel plantations. Such industrial-scale solutions follow a “green extractivist” logic that aims to appropriate as much resources, energy and profits as fast as possible from a territory, irrespective of the social and ecological impacts. As such, they produce dispossession and sacrifice outcomes similar to those of fossil fuel extraction (and don’t fare a lot better in terms of CO2 emissions, as Alexander Dunlap has shown).

Compared to the old, “grey” extractivism of dirty coal and oil, such projects are cast as necessary not only for the improvement of otherwise “underdeveloped” territories and peoples, but also for saving the planet from catastrophic climate change—as research by activist and writer Daniel Voskoboynik demonstrates in the case of lithium. The more urgent and necessary the improvement, the more acceptable the sacrifice, and the more “selfish and irrational” the resistance.

Adaptation and vulnerability

Climate change adaptation is another case in point. While emanating from ostensibly disinterested concerns with the adverse effects of climatic changes upon “vulnerable” groups, it draws upon and reinforces images of the other as both in danger and potentially dangerous. This manifests itself in adaptation policy documents—for instance, by the EU—which construct Africa as a climatic “heart of darkness” of unruly environments, failed institutions, and backwards populations, ready to flood European borders with unwanted migrants.

This type of representations depoliticise vulnerability. They separate it from colonial histories and previous rounds of capitalist dispossession and neoliberal restructuring that created or exacerbated people’s “lack of adaptive capacities” in the first place; and obfuscate the historical responsibility of colonial states and capitalists in the global North for generating the majority of greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, adaptation interventions seek to make “target” populations responsible for managing the adverse effects of climatic changes, receiving limited assistance (in the form of debt and corporate investments) conditional on their willingness to go along with a pre-packaged plan.

The “improvement” of populations and territories targeted by adaptation programmes has no room for redressing development-induced dispossession; rather, it is expected to work through the dispossession itself. As Markus Taylor shows in the case of adaptation policies in Mongolia and South Asia, urbanization and proletarianization of rural populations, which result in poverty, indebtedness and loss of access to their means of production and livelihood, are framed by the institutions like the World Bank precisely as a way of reducing small farmers’ vulnerability to climate change, while also freeing up rural space for more mechanised and capital-intensive agriculture.

Climate-Induced Migration

Discursive constructions of the climate migrant exemplify how the two forms of othering (to “sacrifice” and to “improve”) are deployed in overlapping and contradictory ways. A common way in which othering operates in this context involves the separation between “good” and “bad” migrants. For instance, Andrew Telford has shown how EU and US policy reports on climate-induced migration often represent Muslim and African migrant populations as threats, as racialised others with a potential for radicalization and terrorism.

At the opposite end of the “migrant-as-threat” trope stands the image of climate migrants as victims, which is apparently benign but nonetheless problematic. Victimisation involves representing those vulnerable to the effects of climatic change as powerless and resource-less. This disempowers communities by obscuring the adaptation strategies they already practice. At the same time, it bolsters neo-colonial imaginaries of a silenced other with no agency who, driven by desperation, “easily becomes the unpredictable, wild ‘other’ that threatens ‘us’”—in the words of geographer Kate Manzo.

Image 2. Global Climate Strike in Melbourne, Australia. September 2019. Credit: John Englart. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Othering and the Adaptation of Capital

Despite their stated aim to mitigate and adapt to disastrous climatic changes, mainstream climate policies are explicitly envisioned as avenues for furthering capital accumulation.

This is obvious in the case of industrial-scale renewables, dominated by transnational energy corporations seeking to expand their markets and diversify their production. But it also applies to the increasingly privatised and financialised business of adaptation, presented as creating opportunities for profit-making and rent extraction. For instance, a report released in September 2019 by the Global Commission on Adaptation—a private-public partnership led by the UN, World Bank and Gates Foundation—calculated that “investing $1.8 trillion globally” in climate change adaption until 2030 “could generate $7.1 trillion in total net benefits”.

What’s more, climate policies are motivated by a geostrategic concern with security. This points to a continuation of the post-WWII “development project”, which was motivated by the threat that newly decolonised populations might turn to communism or Third World anti-imperialism. While the political coordinates have changed, “climate-related development” functions to a large extent as a way of containing the “excess freedom” of surplus populations: stopping them from becoming unruly, or migrating to rich countries (in larger numbers than capital needs).

Taken together, the current choreography of policies and interventions that make up the “climate action” framework can be seen as a way to preserve global capitalist class power in the face of the ongoing climate catastrophe. Othering in this sense is central to the “post-political” governmentality of climate change, a key tenet of which is, for Erik Swyngedouw, “the perceived inevitability of capitalism and a market economy as the basic organizational structure of the social and economic order, for which there is no alternative.”

Alternatives

A central implication of all this is that plans for radical socio-ecological transformation—including Just Transition or Green New Deal frameworks—should not reproduce a colonial logic whereby peripheries (primarily) in the global South are treated as pools for resource grabbing and carbon dumping, or as sites for salvation-type interventions that dismiss frontline community action and priorities. As climate justice activists advocate, there can be no decarbonisation without decolonization.

Challenging the neocolonial and neoliberal government of climate change entails affirming the ability of the subaltern to “speak”: recognising and reasserting the “pluriversality” of “non-Western” socio-environmental knowledges and praxes should be foundational to climate justice. We must be mindful, however, that—as the Aymara theorist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui has argued—there is more to decolonization than discursive emancipation.

Recognising ontological multiplicity must go hand in hand with the critique of material power asymmetries and global unequal (ecological) relations. Decolonizing means, primarily, giving back the land to indigenous communities and reasserting the sovereignty of formerly colonized peoples, including access to and control over natural resources and other means of production and reproduction—as part of globally connected struggles attacking the material and ideological bases of racial-patriarchal capitalism and imperialism.

This blog was originally published in Undisciplined Environments, and is based on a longer, open access article published in the journal Political Geography. The article first appeared on Bliss on 13 October 2021.

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

Diego Andreucci is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Juan de la Cierva Social and Political Sciences Department at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

 

 

Christos Zografos is a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

Transformative Methodologies | Listening differently, hearing more clearly: a decolonial approach to fostering dialogue between plural knowledges

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Recent debates on decolonising research have highlighted the importance of accounting for plural knowledges by seeking to foster a dialogue between them. Yet, a dominant modern rationalist approach informing how we understand the knowledges we encounter and produce through our research is impeding this objective. A diversity of languages is used to share and represent knowledge – and not all of them can be captured and understood by modern rationality, writes Agustina Solera.

“The people (el Pueblo)[1] do not speak the same language that we do. Their alphabet doesn’t have letters; only shapes, movements, gestures.
And it is not that the people are illiterate, but that they want to say things that we no longer say.”[2]
Rodolfo Kusch, 1966, Indios, Porteños y dioses

In the chapter ‘La Zamba y los Dioses’ (‘Zamba and the Gods’) from his 1966 book Indios, Porteños y Dioses (Indians, Porteños and Gods), Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch contemplates the ritual meaning of Zamba, a traditional Argentine music genre and folk dance that is performed in pairs and with handkerchiefs in hand. In the colony, Zamba was the term attributed to the mestizo descendants of indigenous and black people, arising during the independence process as a show of affection for the mestizos. Kusch, recognised as a key antecedent for decolonial thought thanks to his in-depth research on indigenous and popular Latin American thought, in this work wonders which senses are evoked through Zamba – which meanings emerge through the movement of bodies, the rhythms, the gazes, the cadence, or the energetic swishing of handkerchiefs.

Kusch’s examination of this form of expression sets the scene for my discussion of the link between languages and transformative methodologies. It is clear that Zamba is a form of non-verbal communication that is used in popular culture to say those things that cannot be expressed orally or in writing – or that its adherents do not wish to say in any other way than through music or dance. And, as the ethnographic research I did with the Mapuche community near the city of San Martín de los Andes in Patagonia, Argentina in pursuit of my PhD showed, trying to render these forms of expression meaningful by assuming a rational lens results in the failure to capture the sensitivity and spirituality of such ways of communicating. Zamba, like other forms of cultural or social expression, must be understood in ways not based solely on a modern rationality.

From the modern-Western knowledge perspective, a dialogue of knowledges becomes possible only when the exchanges coexist within a framework of modern rationality; exchanges can only occur when communities share the same language. By language I mean any system of expression used to represent meanings. From this perspective, the senses that cannot be expressed through the resources considered genuine in knowledge production become insignificant and subsidiary (Palermo, 2004). This is inherently problematic, first and foremost because the untranslatable is ignored – those things that are inexpressible in logical-rational terms, precisely because they come from other logics and other ways of seeing, feeling, and making sense of the world. If in the immense universe of meanings present in the encounter with others, those ones that cannot be translated to the specific understanding of rationality, are excluded, then what is the point of opening up our research process toward other ways of knowing? Aren’t those ‘insignificant’ senses – the ones that have been able to survive continuous domination and impositions – the ones that have transformative potential?

Different representational resources are needed for dialogue across different ways of knowing; these are rooted in transformative methodologies. Such methodologies would be transformative since they would challenge not only the privilege attributed to one valid form of knowledge (modern-Western) over others, but also the superiority attributed to the resources considered valid to represent life experiences.

Resistance and re-existence

Mignolo (1992) denounces the colonisation of language and memory in Latin America, enabled by introducing the Roman alphabet and the discursive genres (or frames) associated with it to this region. Alphabetic writing was imposed as a way to preserve that which was previously transmitted through glyphs, pictograms, and oral stories. According to him, the graphic languages used before the conquest to share knowledge could be silenced by alphabetic writing.

Yet, the languages spoken with the body could not be completely colonised. All those who keep alive indigenous languages up to the present are proof that knowledge can still survive when shared in non-written ways. Zulma Palermo (2012) argued that not only expressions of resistance, but also expressions of re-existence emerge through languages that confront the canonical principles of modern rational knowledge. From a critical perspective of what has led to refusal and self-ignorance, the processes of re-existence refer to ways of re-elaborating life, of revaluing what has been denied (Albán Achinte, 2013).

Let’s go back to Kusch and the endless meanings that can be found in Zamba. He cannot translate into words what’s so fascinating about Zamba, nor can anyone who has witnessed this form of expression. The argumentative reasons are difficult to be found; the fascination seems inexplicable: “In the end, it is something very simple; it is only a dance that takes place in a special moment of any popular celebration. … A man and a woman… braid a circle while flipping handkerchiefs to the rhythm of guitars and a kick drum, and that’s it. And yet, the Zamba fascinates us …  Why? Is there something else in it? … Have we put in it what we have forbidden ourselves to show?” (Kusch, 2007: 287-289)[3]. And it is acceptable not to understand that which is not expressed in a modern rationalist manner. Dialoguing, accessing, or even noticing the colorful fabric of cultural plurality will hardly become possible through a monochromatic canonical gaze.

Representational resources are a primary part of methodological procedures, since they are the rationalities in which the meanings that constitute a scientific investigation are sustained (Peyloubet & Ortecho, 2015). Languages are part of the tools used to represent, interpret and translate the meanings that emerge in the encounter with others. Hence the importance of reflecting on languages when thinking about transformative methodologies, as well as the importance of reflecting on the scope of the resources that scientific institutions consider valid for producing knowledge and the possibilities that other-than-verbal-centered languages may create.

References

Alban Achinte, Adolfo (2013). Más allá de la razón hay un mundo de colores. Modernidades, colonialidades y reexistencia. Casa del Caribe y Editorial Oriente.

Kush, Rodolfo (2007). Rodolfo Kush: Obras completas. Tomo 1. Fundación Ross. Rosario, Argentina.

Lugones, María & Price, Joshua (2010). Translators’ introduction. In W. Mignolo, I. Silverblatt & S. Saldívar-Hull (Ed.), Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América (pp. lv-lxxii). New York, USA: Duke University Press.

https://doi-org.eur.idm.oclc.org/10.1515/9780822392514-004

Mignolo, Walter. (1992). “La colonización del lenguaje y la memoria. Complicidades de la letra, el libro y la memoria”. Coord. Iris M Zavala. Discursos sobre la ‘invención’ de América. Ed. Amsterdam, Holanda.

Palermo, Zulma (2012). “Mirar para comprender: artesanía y re-existencia”. Otros Logos. Revista de estudios críticos. Nº 3. 223-236. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Neuquén, Argentina.

Palermo, Zulma (2004). “Ricardo J. Kaliman, Alhajita es tu canto. El capital simbólico de Atahualpa Yupanqui”. Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana. Nº 60. pp. 392-394. Lima.

Peyloubet, Paula & Ortecho, Mariana Jesús. (2015). Desafíos empíricos, crítica semiótica y una apuesta por la introducción a nuevos lenguajes. Signo y Pensamiento, 34(66), 14-27. https://doi.org/10.111447javeriana.syp34-66.decs

Solera, Agustina (2018). Movimientos decoloniales en la Patagonia Andina. Reflexiones para una conversación desde el territorio. (Decolonial Movements in Andean Patagonia. Thoughts for a conversation based on the territory). Doctoral dissertation. Centro de Estudios Avanzados, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.

[1] Pueblo points not to ‘‘the people’’ as an abstraction, but to the concrete, disoriented human manyness that contains the possibility of community. (Lugones & Price, 2010: Ixi).

[2] Author’s own translation.

[3] Author’s own translation.

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

About the author:

Agustina Solera is a Post-Doctoral Researcher for Prince Claus Chair in Equity and Development at ISS.

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EADI ISS Conference 2021 | Some steps for decolonising international research-for-development partnerships

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While partnerships between researchers and practitioners from the Global North and Global South can be and often are intellectually and socially impactful, they remain highly unequal. Coloniality pervades these partnerships, influencing who leads the research projects implemented in the Global South and whose interests are represented. Here, the conveners and panellists of a roundtable discussion on partnerships in academia that formed part of the recent EADI ISS Conference 2021 propose some steps for decolonising international research partnerships. 

Much of the very urgent and timely discussion on decolonising the academe[1] – recognising and changing the colonial relations of power that are embedded in teaching as well as research – has focused on representation, on diversifying the curricula, and on theorising from the Global South. But what about research partnerships and collaborations? This is a slightly overlooked issue in the decolonisation agenda, but one that is no less important.

In the field of international development particularly, but not only, collaborations between academic institutions in the Global North and academic and non-academic institutions in the Global South are often crucial to demonstrate research impact and to generate funding. But these partnerships themselves are fraught by unequal power relations. To truly decolonise research, it is necessary to decolonise every aspect of it – including the way in which we collaborate internationally.

At a recent roundtable at the EADI ISS Conference 2021 called ‘Partnership, participation and power in academia’, we sought answers to questions that included:

  • How do unequal power relations manifest in the design and operation of research?
  • What might we do to challenge these relations?
  • What would it mean to decolonise these research partnerships?

During the roundtable, participants highlighted key issues that arose in how international research collaborations are designed and implemented. These are summarised below. We start with reflections on how coloniality manifests itself through various stages of the collaboration process.

Agenda-setting: whose interests are really represented?

There are a number of programmatic and institutional issues that result in unequal relations between collaborators across the Global North and Global South, both within academic institutions and between academia and practice. Funding sources and structures are obvious culprits here. Not only are funders often situated in the Global North, the criteria for eligibility and affiliation means that these partners need to be the principal or lead investigators. As a result, more often than not, project outcomes and impacts end up being structured and valued by the parameters of funding bodies and university departments in the Global North with little regard for what might be important for partners inhabiting other geographies and institutional environments. So, for example, the inordinate emphasis in projects on high-impact journal publications may be at odds with the priorities of an NGO partner in the Global South.

Constrained research design processes

Moreover, grant applications typically require clearly defined questions, outcomes and outputs – in fact, proposals are often marked down when they demonstrate the slightest sign of tentativeness – and the time between the announcement of grant and submission deadlines can be quite limited. These issues mean that research partnerships do not always have enough time and space to jointly develop a research agenda that accounts equally for interests of partners across the Global North and Global South and to allow for the messy process that robust research often tends to be.

More knowledge is more power (when it comes to agenda setting)

In fact, because researchers in the Global North also have more tacit knowledge and institutional support to make a proposal ‘fundable’, they have more power in setting the research agenda. In such situations, the degree to which partnerships are equitable depends on the discretion and conscience of individual academics. 

Partners in the Global South: mediators or change agents?

There are more fundamental questions that arise from these issues: who is considered a researcher and what does it mean to be a researcher? It is now widely accepted that the ‘lone researcher’ never was – the work of academics has always been enabled by other individuals and networks of support. In the context of many North-South research collaborations, practitioner organisers and local communities based in the Global South often become mediators providing access to field data, data collecting agents and/or passive recipients of research findings. Academics everywhere, but especially in the Global North, need to find ways of sharing power with institutions, communities and individuals in whose name these collaborative grants are often established.

Decolonising international research partnerships: some steps

With these issues and questions in mind, and based on the roundtable discussion, we propose some steps to decolonise international academic collaborations and foster partnerships that are equitable, democratic, and lead to locally relevant impacts.

  1. Decolonise the research ecosystem

First, the research ecosystem of funding bodies, higher education organisations and research institutions needs to be transformed to eliminate systemic biases against research partners from the Global South. More often than not, grant guidelines require that project leadership and budget administration remain with the Northern partners while hiring policies for project staff (e.g. PhD researchers) frequently discriminate against Southern candidates. We propose:

  • Redressing the hierarchies of funding structures: building funding instruments that recognise academic excellence, merit, and local relevance, regardless of researchers’ nationality;
  • Designing funding instruments that prioritise project leadership by Southern partners, both academics and practitioners;
  • Reflecting on the ways in which our own attitudes and practices perpetuate the systemic injustices within the research ecosystem.
  1. Decolonise the research process

Second, it is necessary to think critically about the biases that permeate the research inception process – from articulating the research idea through conceptualisation to funding acquisition. Rarely does it happen that the Northern and Southern co-applicants have the chance to brainstorm the research idea together and articulate their needs and preferences.  For projects to be co-created in an equitable manner, we propose the following:

  • Debunking the myth of research projects as linear and allowing for flexibility, adaptation, and learning throughout the project cycle;
  • Recognising that a certain degree of ‘messiness’ is an indispensable part of collaborative knowledge co-creation and that project priorities, as well as desired outputs and impacts, might change during the project;
  • Creating spaces for informal interaction between researchers and practitioners from institutions in the Global North and Global South where innovative ideas can be developed and discussed prior to grant application submission.
  1. Decolonise the research outputs

Third, research projects in the field of international development are frequently expected to deliver both applied (positive social change on the ground) and scientific (contributions to theory) impacts, but it is only the latter that often determine project ‘success’. This results in a somewhat skewed project logic that prioritises scientific outputs over practical insights.

Research outputs may be decolonised by:

  • Legitimising alternative knowledge systems, recognising the plurality of methodological approaches, and appreciating the indispensability of grounded and localised practitioner experiences;
  • Decoupling academic and non-academic project outputs, as well as recognising their value and complementary nature.

Research partnerships: processes, not actor constellations

North-South partnerships are not an isolated issue – they are part of a complex and dynamic research-for-development system. For this reason, we propose approaching partnerships as a process, as opposed to simply a contract or institutional arrangement. This process starts with decentralised, inclusive, and democratic agenda setting, followed by resource allocation that acknowledges the indispensable and complementary contributions of all partners. Project governance needs to be democratic and fair and, finally, knowledge co-creation must be recognised as leading to both academic and non-academic outputs and impacts. Approaching partnerships as a process can allow us to prioritise locally defined development agendas, to include and appreciate all relevant stakeholders, and to build on their diverse knowledges, skills, and experience

[1] For example, https://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/about/decolonisation/

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

About the authors:

Katarzyna Cieslik is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on work, livelihoods and employment in the Global South, in particular in relation to technology/work/environment tradeoffs.

Shreya Sinha is a Lecturer at the University of Reading, working on agrarian political economy, political ecology and critical development studies with a focus on India.

Cees Leeuwis is professor of Knowledge, Technology and Innovation at Wageningen University. He studies processes of socio-technical innovation and transformation in networks, research for development policy, the functioning of innovation support systems and the role of innovation platforms, communication, extension and brokers therein.

Tania Eulalia Martínez-Cruz is an independent researcher and consultant at the Indigenous Peoples Unit at FAO, researching the politics of knowledge, gender and social inclusion/exclusion, climate action, nutrition and traditional food systems.

Nivedita Narain  is Chief Executive Officer, Charities Aid Foundation India, an adjunct faculty member at the Charles Sturt University, Australia and has worked with Professional Assistance for Development Action (PRADAN) for over thirty years. She has worked on gender, livelihoods, and human resources management for non-profits and setting-up development practice as an academic discipline.

Bhaskar Vira is a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on environmental and development economics; political economy, particularly the study of institutions and institutional change; public policy in the developing world.

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EADI ISS Conference 2021 | Questioning development: What lies ahead?

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Development Studies requires “an epistemological and ontological change”, write Elisabetta Basile and Isa Baud in the introduction to the recent EADI volume ‘Building Development Studies for a New Millennium’. The planned sequel of the book will take this analysis one step further and explore viable ways to build on both the critique of development as such and the growing demand to decolonise knowledge production. During a plenary session titled ‘Questioning Development – Towards Solidarity, Decoloniality, Conviviality’ that formed part of EADI’s recent #Solidarity2021 conference, four contributors discussed the upcoming book. Christiane Kliemann summarised the discussion.

The need to critique development has become urgent as global inequalities increase and the need for the decolonisation of knowledge to redress knowledge production asymmetries becomes greater. “We have been much better at critique than at changing things”, quipped Uma Kothari during a panel session titled ‘Questioning Development – Towards Solidarity, Decoloniality, Conviviality’ of EADI’s recent #Solidarity2021 conference that she recently chaired.

Kothari is also one of the editors of a forthcoming book with the working title ‘Questioning Development Studies: Towards Decolonial, Convivial and Solidaristic Approaches’ that will be a sequel to the already-published EADI volume titled ‘Building Development Studies for a New Millennium’. During the panel session she asked four panellists who contributed to the book to discuss their own practices towards challenging the classical ‘development’ paradigm and possible ways forward. Their diverse and insightful arguments are captured below.

Integrating indigenous understandings of relationality

Yvonne Te Ruki-Rangi-O-Tangaroa Underhill-Sem, Associate Professor in Pacific Studies, Te Wānanga o Waipapa, University of Auckland, New Zealand, started the discussion with an interesting example from New Zealand, or Aotearoa, as she calls it by its Maori name, where the Maori concept of Manaakitanga has even influenced the way in which research is done in the whole country. Manaakitanga, as Underhill-Sem explained, is all around caring for the ‘Mana’ of people we relate to – ‘Mana’ itself being understood as anything we relate to, be it other people, land, or whatever is meaningful to us. “We’ve been working very closely between New Zealand Maori and Pacific scholars to begin to infuse and embed this concept in one of the major research policy platforms in Aotearoa that control the funding of research and the definition of what is excellent research”, she explained.

As a very tangible example for encouraging research based on a much broader understanding of knowledge, she referred to the Toksave Research Portal which has drawn its name from one of the languages of Papua New Guinea and started as a “process inviting a whole range of different knowledge-makers around the region and the Pacific to submit their work”, be it a poem, a thesis, or an NGO report.

Lauren Tynan, Trawlwulwuy woman from Tebrakunna country in northeast Tasmania, who is currently doing her PhD on aboriginal burning practices at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, also views the issue of decolonising knowledge and knowledge production through a lens of relationality. She aspires to hold herself accountable to all relations she has; her recent paper ‘Thesis as kin: living relationality with research’ explored how she relates to her research.

At times, this understanding can be quite challenging to the concept of research she had been initially taught, which she finds “quite a colonising way of researching”. For example, it doesn’t take into account her responsibilities as a mother of small children, which prevent her from traveling back and forth for her research: “Part of that relationality is to see that I shouldn’t feel that as a limitation but as part my responsibilities and obligations to my family and my wider family which is also my research relationship”.

Migration as constitutive dimension of human existence

Samid Suliman, Lecturer on Migration and Security in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia, brought in another important, but much-overlooked perspective. As he focuses much of his work on the relationship between migration and development, he started from the point that “mobility has been and continues to be colonised through development”, with the “entrenchment and hegemony of the nation state as the primary organising framework of human existence”. Although we are now living in a ‘hyper-mobile world’, he pointed out that the “state-centred way of understanding human mobility continues to be reproduced”, and migrants are looked at with fear and trepidation. One of his research questions therefore is: “How can we better understand migration and mobility as a constitutive dimension of human existence, rather than just an outcome of human activity?”

As one step forward, Suliman suggested to “think critically about the way in which we normalise certain assumptions and certain normative dispositions about the movement of human beings and resist the impulse to settle everyone in their place”. This would require finding new mechanisms, institutions and possibilities for convivial relations and forms of justice that go “beyond the national as the frame of reference for decision making and action on the governance of the moving of people”.

Hospitality as basic principle for societies beyond development

For Aram Ziai, Heisenberg-Professor of the German Research Foundation (DFG) for Development Policy and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kassel, Germany, it all starts with questioning the term ‘development’. He considers a simple redefinition of the term insufficient, as this could produce misunderstandings and a “beyond-criticism gambit”. If the term development continues to bear different meanings, from democratic industrial capitalisms to any type of positive social change, he said, “we are in fact obstructing the critique of development organisations by saying, ‘if something bad happened out of a development project, it was not really development’”.

He also made clear that ‘development’ cannot be seen independent of its historical context: “Development came into being as a new programme to legitimise a capitalist world order in the Global South at a time when the colonial ideology was losing credibility and a new framing of North-South relations was needed to maintain access to the raw materials of the South and the corresponding division of labour. So, development thinking was a new frame, but it was still linked to colonialism, to the idea of transforming geo-cultural differences into historical stages, so that the self is the norm, and the other is the deviant, deficient, other”.

How to move on? Less data, more stories!

All panellists agreed that big changes don’t occur overnight and that it takes everyone’s efforts in their specific places and fields to contribute to a systemic change that might still take years or even decades to gain full ground. In Suliman’s words, “We need to do all we can within our various roles and positions to push back on the research monoculture imposed from above”.

As one important step in this direction, Underhill-Sem called on the older and more advanced scholars to be much more audacious in their engagement with policy: “Are we seeing that audacity with obligation? Are we seeing active engagement in these key structural places, in terms of reviewing the way in which we do and fund research, the way in which we build ethics around research? Are we reaching in those spaces and doing the work there, or are we leaving these spaces for others to populate them?” According to Ziai, we are already moving in the right direction by “talking more and more about these issues and less and less about economic growth, productivity and other things that are increasingly questioned”.

Suliman thinks that it all boils down to the question of making ourselves known to each other in ways that don’t colonise, and in creating space for multiple meanings and exchanges between us: “I think we need to keep moving towards other ways of seeing and listening and knowing, so in short: less data, more stories.” And, Tynan observes, these stories are already there: “Wherever we are in the world there are peoples who have story and belonging to the land, it’s about knowing these stories and their full implications on ourselves as individuals and communities”.

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

About the author:

Christiane Kliemann Communications European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI).

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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