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Interactive Workshop: Designing a 'Knowledge Exchange Partnership for Comparative Development' - dissolving our barriers to collaboration.
Workshop W13 at conference DSA2022: Just sustainable futures in an urbanising and mobile world.
How do we design a space in which development knowledge hierarchies can be addressed? Can we move to a framework of Comparative Development? Practitioners, academics and civil society activists are warmly invited to come together to discuss barriers to collaboration and how they can be overcome.
Long Abstract:
It would enhance your experience of the interactive session if you could sign up to the collaboration whiteboard app MURAL beforehand: https://www.mural.co/
Do development practitioners and Development Studies degree programmes challenge current structural inequalities or reinforce them? How do we characterise and value 'development knowledge'? Who has access to the spaces in which this knowledge is created or selected? By proposing a conceptual shift from 'development' to 'comparative development', we can evaluate alternative approaches from a perspective of curiosity and openness. However, if we are to avoid falling into previous traps of power and knowledge hierarchies, it is important that the 'comparative development' space is co-created from the start.
This interactive workshop builds on two years of research at the University of Reading. Working with a range of academics and practitioners, we have explored barriers to collaboration. We have seen how class and race contribute to these hierarchies, but we have also seen how market forces in education and development organisations, challenges of cross-cultural working and resource limitations impact collaboration. It takes considerable work to create new spaces for equal dialogues between stakeholders.
With live surveys and interactive debate, civil society actors, practitioners, academics and students are all warmly invited to contribute to the early design of a Knowledge Exchange Partnership for Comparative Development. This space is being co-created from its earliest stages. Participants are invited to contribute a 5-10 minute summary of a barrier they have faced or have overcome (and how they overcame it) when attempting to feed their academic, practitioner or lived experience knowledge into either the academic or policy space at the local or national level.
As a Sierra Leonean, who has studied, lectured and worked internationally in the traditional development space for almost two decades, I am passionate about the decolonisation of the aid agenda and addressing the power imbalances that show up in development - both the teaching and the practice. My contribution to this panel will offer insight into this perspective - how it feels to have “experts” from the global north hold space as the “experts” and “knowledge holders” of you and your people’s lives and experience. As we sit with this tension and truth, I also offer ideas and insight into how we can balance this power to overcome the North and South divide and imagine a new reality together. One that is based on trust, respect, and solidarity.
Alex holds 7 years of experience conducting and managing policy-oriented research in ecology, conservation, and Nature-based Solutions. For the past 5 years, he has been based at the Nature-based Solutions Initiative, a dynamic research and policy thinktank at Oxford University. There he manages knowledge-exchange projects and conducts applied evidence-synthesis, with a focus on the role of Nature-based Solutions in economic recoveries and climate change adaptation.
He is also compiling guidance for funders and research teams to operate transdisciplinary, ‘North-South’ research partnerships addressing socio-environmental challenges. He is interested in supporting innovative interdisciplinary research and the development of transdisciplinary collaborations as pathways to impact at the nexus of development, climate change, and biodiversity issues.
I will bring examples from designing and implementing mentorship, curriculum and skills building initiatives that will spark a critical reflection on how to develop and co-create a new paradigm for knowledge exchange for comparative development. I would like to share my ten plus years working in international education in a field capacity where cross-cultural exchange was key to success. I will also draw on my more recent experience from working in higher education on fostering collaboration across sectors, fields and demographics.
Why would you like to speak in this workshop?:
This session will highlight two specific regional case studies to spark critical reflection and discussion around how to set the foundation for more equitable knowledge exchange, particularly in global development or cross-cultural programs. We will explore some challenges, failures, best practices and breakthroughs that occurred in the preparation, implementation and evaluation phases of global development programs in Amman, Jordan and in Humjibre, Ghana. How can such findings shape actionable next steps both in the field and in the teaching of global development subjects? Toward this end, we will share recent research, anecdotes and suggestions on how to embed 'co-creation' into these processes. Acknowledging the barriers to realizing a meaningful exchange in such evolving and often fluctuating contexts, we hope to begin to draw out some key questions, areas for further study and engagement strategies to move towards a more inclusive, transformative model of learning and knowledge-sharing. This session will resonate for those practitioners working on global and intercultural programs and also those working in and around training, teaching and learning, especially of global development and humanitarian subjects.
This presentation will also touch upon some of the larger questions at work in this panel and on the subject of an early design of a Knowledge Exchange Partnership for Comparative Development.
Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality, and to see the links to virtual rooms. Log in
Short Abstract:
How do we design a space in which development knowledge hierarchies can be addressed? Can we move to a framework of Comparative Development? Practitioners, academics and civil society activists are warmly invited to come together to discuss barriers to collaboration and how they can be overcome.
Long Abstract:
It would enhance your experience of the interactive session if you could sign up to the collaboration whiteboard app MURAL beforehand: https://www.mural.co/
Do development practitioners and Development Studies degree programmes challenge current structural inequalities or reinforce them? How do we characterise and value 'development knowledge'? Who has access to the spaces in which this knowledge is created or selected? By proposing a conceptual shift from 'development' to 'comparative development', we can evaluate alternative approaches from a perspective of curiosity and openness. However, if we are to avoid falling into previous traps of power and knowledge hierarchies, it is important that the 'comparative development' space is co-created from the start.
This interactive workshop builds on two years of research at the University of Reading. Working with a range of academics and practitioners, we have explored barriers to collaboration. We have seen how class and race contribute to these hierarchies, but we have also seen how market forces in education and development organisations, challenges of cross-cultural working and resource limitations impact collaboration. It takes considerable work to create new spaces for equal dialogues between stakeholders.
With live surveys and interactive debate, civil society actors, practitioners, academics and students are all warmly invited to contribute to the early design of a Knowledge Exchange Partnership for Comparative Development. This space is being co-created from its earliest stages. Participants are invited to contribute a 5-10 minute summary of a barrier they have faced or have overcome (and how they overcame it) when attempting to feed their academic, practitioner or lived experience knowledge into either the academic or policy space at the local or national level.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Wednesday 6 July, 2022, -Chernor Bah (Purposeful)
Farida Bena (Kiliza.org)
Alexandre Chausson (University of Oxford)
Jennifer Lauren (New York University)