“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller
As I complete the final blog entry Henry Miller’s words rightly capture the nature of my IDRP journey. As following the motivations of the (dis)-located self I initially began the IDRP journey intending to learn more about decolonial development projects and methods. But following my experience I saw things anew not only about the practices or the contexts I engaged with but I saw sides to myself emerge and manifest that I previously hadn’t acknowledged.
Based on the experiences of ‘decentering’, and time as a volunteer researcher in 2015 I recognized that my ontological and epistemological orientations allowed me to look like the colonized whilst often thinking and acting like the colonizer (Gill, et. al, 2012). This is because being an English speaking Indian born in the post LPG[1] era in the former Portuguese colony of Goa, who had been educated in private school under British, American and most recently Australian boards I was experientially and institutionally more a product of modern Western culture and thought than my own Subaltern Global South (GS) roots. From this I perceived that colonialism didn’t operate solely through the apparatuses of political-economy and GS/GN divisions as Postmodern and Postcolonial traditions argued (Grosfoguel, 2007) rather it was an on-going global force that manifested and re-manifested itself as Quijano posits (2007, p. 171) through the “cultural complex of European modernity/rationality” which much of my lived experiences and education had aligned with. Thus from growing aware of my ontological and epistemological orientations I learnt that authentic ‘decolonization’ could not solely occur at the level of nation state rather the move towards decolonization started with the self, through the decolonization of one’s knowledge.
Upon reflecting on my experiences from the IDRP, from my engagement with the cultural other I recognized I wasn’t purely constituted of colonial knowledge systems rather my epistemic constitution was also founded on a set of everyday lived experiences as a person from the GS, which allowed me to undertake my role as the field researcher. I observed I gained the ability to be flexible between various modes my being as I moved across (Nadarajah, 2007, p. 125) “multiple layers of my consciousness” permitting me to relate the personal to the cultural other and back, that occurred through channelling these everyday aspects of my life. Moreover, through interacting with the method I was able to challenge the dominating epistemologies that governed my understanding of field research. For whilst collecting data I found my answers in those moments of “ambiguity” or the “in-between” spaces (Nadarajahh, 2016) which happened not by invoking empiricist or objective frameworks the volunteer researcher was used to. Rather I ended up “affectively” interacting with the “sensual dimensions of [my] experiences” (Abrams, 1997, p74) thereby moving from praxis that was defined through Western philosophy’s driving principle of the Cartesian ‘ego-cogito’ which established a hierarchical dichotomy between (Western) theory and practice. Instead I was able to shape my praxis through combining the analytical and embodied knowledge I engaged with in the field. Finally from interacting with the context I perceived that neither were research methods merely replicable procedures to be followed nor was the field limited to a physical geographical place on the map (Nadarajah, 2007). Instead both were relational processes comprised of ‘dialogical exchanges’ and ‘co-created spaces’ through which the researcher and researched collectively generated meaning about the self the other and the area of inquiry (Gill, et. al, 2012). Here I was made to challenge the assumptions I bore within me as I believed following technocratic and managerial frameworks that methods were constituted solely of quantifiable indicators that could be measured on charts or tables (Escobar, 1995); and understood them as humanistic networks or complex processes made up of the experiences of the self, other and place.
To conclude, by acknowledging multiplicity in being, training oneself to combine analytical and embodied insights and recognizing that methods and the field of ID are made up of humanistic networks of intersubjectivities of the ‘self’ ‘other’ and ‘place’ I was able to develop the skills through which I could begin the move towards epistemic decolonization. As I position myself at the brink of my masters journey I believe I will be able to utilize the knowledge gained to improve my practice as an ID practitioner and researcher and also build on my understanding of the practices that allow for authentic epistemic decolonization in the future.
References
Abrams, D. 1997. The Spell of the sensuous. USA: Vintage Books.
Escobar, A., 1995. Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton University Press.
Freire, P., 1996. Pedagogy of the oppressed (revised). New York: Continuum.
Gill, H., Purru, K. and Lin, G., 2012. In the midst of participatory action research practices: Moving towards decolonizing and decolonial praxis. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 3(1).
Grosfoguel, R., 2007. The epistemic decolonial turn: Beyond political-economy paradigms. Cultural studies, 21(2-3), pp.211-223.
Nadarajah, Y., 2007. The outsider within-commencing fieldwork in the Kuala Lumpur/Petaling Jaya Corridor, Malaysia. International Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies, 3(2), pp.109-132.
Quijano, A., 2007. Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural studies, 21(2-3), pp.168-178.
- 2016. Doing fieldwork in disaster areas-Nurturing the embodied for analytical insight. Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, 2(1), pp.57-76.
[1] In 1991 under the New Economic Policy the Indian Government for the first time adopted Principles of LPG in which India’s domestic markets were opened up to foreign trade and International Investment and Private Sector Development marking a shift from the previous socialist model of national development.
IDRP 1 & 2 