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Contribution short abstract:

Black researchers in the UK face stories of race, class, colonisation, social justice, poverty, religion, ethnicity and identity that can impact their emotions. This paper reflects on the challenges and emotions I experienced within academia during my PhD research journey.

Contribution long abstract:

Understanding how a researcher’s positionality and emotions impact knowledge production is important in the social sciences. Black researchers in the UK face stories of race, class, colonisation, social justice, poverty, religion, ethnicity and identity that can impact their emotions. This paper reflects on the challenges and emotions I experienced within academia during my PhD research journey. My PhD was about Identity, transnational, translocal Activities and Intergenerational Relationships for Young Zimbabweans in the UK. I argue that the difficulties black women face is a ‘survival’ attitude navigating academia and activism, let alone being made to feel like outsiders. They also have to work hard in the UK academic spaces as activists on race and social justice issues to promote and decolonise knowledge while at the same time, they are expected to achieve excellence in their research work. It is also to recognise the power dynamics of whiteness in educational spaces in the UK and that there are also few black female geographers in my discipline, marking lesser representation in academia. I address this by looking at if there is a ‘We’ in feminism and activism. Suppose there was a ‘WE’ as women academics who address gender inequalities. Why are black students and black women in UK universities struggling with racism and discrimination continuing to be entrenched in systems within higher education?

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Contribution short abstract:

An autoethnographic account of how positionality in my research has hindered the quality of interviews during field data collection.

Contribution long abstract:

South Africa is often referred to as the Rainbow Nation, a term coined by the revered Archbishop Tutu. The term was an attempt at rebranding the country after the dark past of Apartheid. Policies, such as Black Economic Empowerment were implemented to encourage more diversity in industries such as agriculture. While analysis of food systems in South Africa debate the outcomes of these policies (McEwan and Bek, 2009; Visser and Ferrer, 2015), it remains a white dominated field and the research participants for my work on south african value chains are not a rainbow selection - among the 7 interviews conducted only 2 were women and only one person of color. Conducting the research as a black Zimbabwean women, meant positionality, defined as when the researcher and the researched hold different unequal positions of power and privilege, class, ethnicity (Charmaz, Thornberg and Keane, 2018) had an effect throughout the field collection.

While there are many impacts this has on the research, a reoccurring phenomena was that research participants felt that the interviewer did not have sufficient technical agricultural knowledge or empathy with their experiences. In an attempt to minimize this impact a trained technical observer was present, however, this resulted in instances where the observer and the participant would speak in Afrikaans and without the skills to translate, the researcher was left to be an outsider. Turning to my white supervisory team, I often blush with embarrassment at how I may be to black to hold the research light.

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Contribution short abstract:

My approach to a decolonial methodological praxis and findings on ways the approach I took mediated a less extractive method and encouraged one where I especially learnt so much from my participants on methods for living, conducting business and surviving oppressive hetero-capitalist-racist systems.

Contribution long abstract:

In my presentation, I would like to address how Black researchers and development practitioners experience the development sector contributing to ways we contend with the unethical, colonial and extractive methods embedded in conducting research in African countries as ourselves, researchers often representing Global North institutions. More importantly, I would like to invite discussions and reflections on our role in challenging this.

With ongoing discussions on decoloniality across the world engaging more in indigenous politics of living, creativity and methods of living which have proven those often on the margins as having been resisting and surviving global capitalism and racism , being witness to the conversations has played a key role in driving the methodological approaches I take in my research. I traveled to Kenya in 2022 to carry out ethnographic fieldwork research using methods which included semi- structured interviews, participant observations and the collation of archival material in the form of photographs. The methodological approach I took began by acknowledging that there is no one way or practice that encapsulates what a decolonizing research methodology looks like however, I drew on decolonization theories as an ethnographic researcher which employ the importance of critical reflexivity, a practice of “reciprocity and respect for self-determination”, and a centering of “‘Othered’ ways of knowing” in my move towards an embodiment of a transformative decolonial feminist praxis and methodology (Kilomba, 2015; Thambinathan, Kinsella, 2021; Kinyanjui, 2019, 2021).

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Contribution short abstract:

As a mid-career African academic in the UK in the discipline of development studies, I want to reflect on the "triple hurdles" I face. The hurdles are epistemic orientation, language, and passport positionality

Contribution long abstract:

The challenges associated with epistemic orientations emanate from the hegemony of Eurocentric epistemologies in development studies. The universalist claim of Europe-centred knowledge frameworks, theories and concepts contributes to disregarding and discrediting ways of knowing and interpretations of the world I have been exposed to growing up in Ethiopia. I would like to share my experience of bringing non-Eurocentric epistemic orientations into my teaching and research. The second hurdle about language concerns normalising English as the only language for producing academic output recognised and valued in evaluating my academic success and achievements. The incentives to produce academic outputs in languages other than English are almost nonexistent. As a result, aspiring academics like me are discouraged from producing knowledge outputs easily accessible by most people from whom the empirical data is gathered and about whom most research in development studies is apparently concerned. The third hurdle is an outcome of systemic inequality that academics from the global south are experiencing because of their nationality/passport which restricts their social and physical mobility. In addition to the challenges associated with immigration policies in the UK (vast sums of money paid in the process of renewing visas, including their families), most academics from the global south invest lots of money, time, and psychological resources when they plan to travel for academic activities (Visa applications). I want to reflect on how the implications of these “triple hurdles” can be further explored within the context of pursuing social and epistemic justice within the field of development studies.

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Contribution short abstract:

I plan to highlight the manifestation of notions of race based on my academic research findings on African diaspora development activities and arising from my 25+ years of experience as a Black development practitioner in the 'mainstream' of the development industry.

Contribution long abstract:

The longstanding silence on issues of 'race' within the development sector has been deafening. I will look at:

- Assumptions about the lack of racialisation in the sector's recruitment and staffing processes; the behaviour of the staff; and the activities carried out by development organisations;

- the marginalisation of African diaspora organisations as development actors which has been masked by the use of apparently positive responses which function as smokescreens that explain the lack of engagement between mainstream and diaspora development organisations while masking the racialised reality;

- the teaching of development which allows for the discussion of 'white saviourism' and encouragement of self-reflection of all students, coexisting alongside the substitution of euphemistic terms such as 'the West', and 'westerners' and avoiding dilutes the relevance

Mode of delivery: oral presentation