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Paper short abstract:

Histories of education are often enfolded in national histories of development and modernisation. My work draws attention to Tamil Bible women, who engaged in education as an intimate practice of transformation within their own communities, rather than as a site for development ideology.

Paper long abstract:

Histories of education are often unproblematically enfolded in national histories of development and modernisation. In Indian history, the study of women's education is typically also the scholarship on national womanhood: the complex making of subjectivity tethered to the geopolitical fantasy of a modern nation-state in the making. Whilst the role of missionaries has, to some extent, been studied in this context, my work draws attention to a class of women who engaged in education as an intimate practice of transformation within their own communities: Tamil Bible women. By centring them, I draw attention to a history of education that underlies Indian Christian subjectivity as simultaneously critical of missiological discourse, and of the tethering of educated womanhood to the nation-state. In particular, I focus on the work of Annal Satthianadhan in the late 19th century, whose work centred on educating women in Madras (now Chennai), often in their homes, and in a neighbourhood school. Satthianadhan's work centred on domestic transformation, driven by a Tamil Christian theology that centred on women's experience of family life. The work of Bible women like Satthianadhan, I argue, shaped projects of feminist community in early 20th century the South India that centre community-building practices, centred on anti-caste work, rather than iterating education as a key site for the enactment of development ideologies.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the archives of Third World internationalist organizations and movements between the 1960s-1980s to recover an Afro-Asian social science that advanced an anti-imperialist vision of development in an era of deepening contradictions between decolonization and neocolonialism.

Paper long abstract:

Following the meeting of its Executive Committee in 1963, the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) published a General Declaration in which it resolved to draw the attention of the people of Africa and Asia to emerging “forces of imperialist domination in the political and economic domains,” so as to facilitate a collective consolidation of the gains won from political independence in the service of a comprehensive sovereignty. In the decades that followed, AAPSO and other Third World internationalist movements published a prolific corpus of political, economic, and cultural analysis that constitute what I suggest we understand as an anti-imperialist, Afro-Asian social science. In this body of work, the idea of “development” was recovered as a tool for constructing sovereignty for newly independent Third World states. This theory of development threaded the ideas of national liberation and international solidarity, underscoring that cooperation both within the Third World and globally would underpin a truly postcolonial international political economy.

Examining a range of publications from organizations and popular political currents that constituted a many-hued project of Third World internationalism, and focusing on a journal published by AAPSO in the 1970s and 1980s called “Development and Socio-Economic Progress,” this paper re-narrates the production of “development theory” by examining anticolonial ambitions for forms of sovereign development resistant to neocolonialism. I develop the concept of an insurgent Afro-Asian social science: one that clearly delineated the imperialist underpinnings of the modernization paradigm, empirically examined the historical cost of underdevelopment, and simultaneously outlined an anti-imperialist developmental path.

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Paper short abstract:

I will use a PowerPoint as part of my presentation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper employs biography and recent network approaches to imperial history to write a global history of development through the micro-narrative lens of the life and career of the internationally renowned tropical agronomist, Arthur Hugh Bunting. It uses Bunting’s life history and career trajectory as a window into the wider history of international scientific cooperation, development, and transnational networks in the late colonial and early postcolonial era. By retracing the careering of Arthur Hugh Bunting - who served as the Chief Scientific Officer on the East African Groundnut Scheme before being appointed Chair of Agricultural Botany (and later of Agricultural Development Overseas) at the University of Reading - it reconstructs the multiple, overlapping, and interlocking networks (family, religious, professional, scientific) that helped form the many worlds through which he traveled and at times sojourned. Bunting's career offers unique insight into how knowledge and practices of development were generated and circulated. Bunting was associated with extensive circuits of expertise that frequently crossed colonial boundaries and sites, as well as international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank. The development schemes he was involved in can be seen as “nodes” where various networks overlapped and intersected. We can see how Bunting's previous experiences were brought to bear and applied to these sites, but also how his engagement with local knowledge and practices influenced his perspective in important ways. Bunting carried these experiences, in turn, to other schemes, to international meetings, and to headquarters of various agencies and organizations.

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Paper short abstract:

We plan to explore the potential of a variety of AI tools for decolonial epistemic ends using a corpus of digitised West African Economic Journals, aiming to generate lenses on technological development discourse that offer a radical departure from traditional Global North analytical norms.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on previous collaborative analysis of the British Library for Development Studies Legacy (BLDS) Collection (Corble, Graves and Millum, 2023), which involved using metadata from the collection to create a mapping tool to contrast its provenance with that of the main library collections at Sussex and use this to explore the potential for applying decolonial approaches to library discovery and research.

We now plan to move from metadata to the data itself, as part of a new project digitising another part of the BLDS collections, the rare West African Economic Journals. This will provide a unique corpus on which to explore the potential of a variety of AI tools, including chatbots, text and image analysis, and visualisation. Outcomes will include developing a large language level chatbot, with the intention being to compare the responses this generates with that produced by generic ChatGPT. We will focus on the Camel Forum Working Papers from the Somali Academy of Sciences and Arts, hoping these will generate lenses on technological development discourse that offer a radical departure from traditional Global North analytical norms. We are looking forward to the opportunity to test this hypothesis and problematising the outcomes!

What we discover as we start to apply the technology to the scanned texts will iteratively inform our next steps, with this methodology highlighting the co-productive benefits of combining the expertise of librarians with the critical analysis of an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of Development Studies and Library and Information Studies for decolonial epistemic ends. Delineating the issues that emerge and our strategies for overcoming them will be done in a way that will hopefully be useful for future researchers in this area.