“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.

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[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.

“There are so many borders / dividing people / but ‘through each border there / passes a bridge. – the bridge of the everyday.” – Gina Valdés

In this blog entry I reflect on my interactions and learnings with the ‘cultural other’ when I entered Hamilton from 22^nd to 27^th April to collect data for the social profile. Admittedly, a wave of uncertainty loomed over me and my ability to perform the task as I found myself entering this alien context.

This is because on the one hand I was aware that my entry into Hamilton as a field researcher was part of a longstanding and mutually beneficial ‘partnership’ that Yaso and the community had built and nurtured together since she started the RICE Program [1] in the mid-90s (Nadarajah, 2005). Moreover, following the requirements of the principles of the community-engaged methodology I knew that one of my main tasks as the “outsider” was to consciously build a meaningful connection with the “insiders” or locals who called the rural town of Hamilton their home (Mulligan and Nadarajah, 2008). Thus I found that my positionality as the “outsider” started to greatly perplex me as I doubted my ability to build meaningful connections and additionally live up to the legacy of this work, given my lived realities as a Global South urban university researcher were so removed from rural community life that constituted the realities of the ‘cultural other’ in Hamilton (Nadarajah, 2007).

But as I had more face-to-face interactions with the community I saw myself being able to find threads of commonalities in realms I wouldn’t have otherwise expected. I found that these cultural ‘borders’ I assumed existed between us could be traversed by simply shaping engagement around the ‘everyday’ aspects of our lives (Colombo, et.al, 1989). This I noticed during my interactions with Katrina for instance, as we connected in the midst of doing everyday household chores like making the bed or doing laundry, or with Kelly’s 12 year old daughter Emily with whom I connected owing to our shared experience of being state-level athletes.

And it through these interactions with the cultural other and my understanding of the power that lay in the everyday that I came to learn something fundamental about the ‘self’. I learnt that my identity as the Global South urban university researcher was not singular and static but was instead constituted of multiple entities that included the experiences of that soccer player or the domesticated Indian who was raised to always help around the house. In other words, as Gloria Anzaldua posits I realized that my consciousness was messy and dynamic as I held within me several complementary and sometimes contrasting epistemologies and experiences that collectively assigned meaning to my being (Anzaldúa, 1987). Finally, from my interactions with the cultural other I was also made aware that the power of channelling this messy ‘pluralistic mode’ of being lay in the self’s ability to stay grounded while simultaneously remaining ‘flexible’ whilst moving across these entities (Anzaldúa, 1987). And in this manner I was able to build that ‘bridge’ with the cultural other and indeed within myself.

References

Anzaldúa, G., 1987. Borderlands: la frontera (Vol. 3). San Francisco: Aunt Lute.

Colombo, G., Cullen, R. and Lisle, B. eds., 1989. Rereading America: Cultural contexts for critical thinking and writing. St. Martin’s Press (2), pp.386-395.

Mulligan, M. and Nadarajah, Y., 2008. Working on the sustainability of local communities with a “community-engaged” research methodology. Local Environment, 13(2), pp.81-94.

Nadarajah, Y., 2005. Community and spaces for engagement. Local-Global: Identity, Security, Community, 1(2005), pp.64-78.

• 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.

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[1] RMIT International Community Exchange (RICE) Program was started by A/P Nadarajah in Hamilton in 1994 as an exchange program where international students from RMIT were taken up to Hamilton to better understand community life in Australia, that they wouldn’t necessarily have experienced in an urban city like Melbourne. The program facilitated a critical space for dialogue where RMIT students and researchers along with local community members from all walks of life could come together and discuss the challenges of and solutions to globalization, global education, rural recession and changing social values which was done through sharing ideas, practices and accounts of their lived experiences.

 “All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.” – Alain Badiou

I start this reflective blog invoking the words of  one of my favourite postmodern philosophers Alain Badiou as his words accurately lay the foundation for beginning the tale of the philosophy student who once had an experience of ontological and epistemological ‘decentring’;   and has since not been able to look back.

This decentring relates on the one hand to the general disenchantment I felt as a Global South student, the more I learnt about the professional field of development. This is because following much of the lessons I learnt throughout my masters, it became evident that the discourse of Development found its roots in events like the Marshall Plan of 1947 and Truman Doctrine of 1949 where the world got divided into the one-thirds, “developed” nations and the two-thirds, “underdeveloped” or previously colonized nations which resulted in creating the episteme of post WWII order on past colonial lines (Peña, 2015). Moreover, I learnt that development functioned as a mode of thinking which institutionalized itself through practices like leveraging scientific and technological knowledge of the West and providing foreign aid and investment through agencies like IMF or WB which rendered Development into a legitimizing force of Western economic intervention into the newly emerging ‘Third World’ (Rist, 2014).

Yet this experience of decentring more so came about following an experience I had in my ‘Practical Ethics for Development’ class last year. The format of the class unfolded such that there were weeks exclusively dedicated to teaching us about Western ethical frameworks like Utilitarianism, Deontology and Virtue Ethics whereas Eastern ethical frameworks like Buddhism, Confucianism and Afro-Ethics were crammed into one single class. I found this format problematic as to me it reinforced the same power dynamics I had learnt of that existed  within Development discourse where epistemological privilege was given to the knowledge of the One-Thirds over the knowledge of the Two-Thirds world. But as I sat there critiquing the course for its Eurocentricism I came to realize something very discomforting about myself. I realized that although my knowledge of Western moral philosophies were quite comprehensive given that I could trace these traditions right from ancients like Plato and Aristotle to more contemporary post-structural or postmodern thinkers like Badiou; I nevertheless lacked this comprehensive knowledge about my own Indian philosophical traditions. Hence I realized that even my critique of Eurocentricism was in many ways Eurocentric (Grosfoguel, 2007).

And this was the moment I experienced what Katherine Walsh calls ‘decentring’ as this experience made me confront and challenge the ontological and epistemological assumptions I bore within me despite my own declared critical stance of an anti-Eurocentric Global South student (Walsh and Mignolo, 2018). This experience was an important one as it made me aware of my positionality as a Global South student who had lived a relatively privileged middle-class life compared to those I would generally end up working with during my career. But more importantly this rupture in my being was so profound as for the first time I was truly able to think and feel from the position of the Development’s ‘Other’.  And it is by acknowledging this rupture within me with an air of humility that I believe I will be able to go about learning to unlearn all that disenchants me about Development both within my practice and myself. For now, it is here within my IDRP that I (dis)-locate myself.

References

Mignolo, W.D. and Walsh, C.E., 2018. On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis. Duke University Press.

Grosfoguel, R., 2007. The epistemic decolonial turn: Beyond political-economy paradigms. Cultural studies, 21(2-3), pp.211-223.

Peña, G.J., 2015. Is Development a form of Neo-Colonialism?. Dialéctica Libertadora, (7), pp.36-42.

Rist, G., 2014. The history of development: From western origins to global faith. Zed Books Ltd.

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