Paper short abstract:

Partnerships in international development continue to be corrupted by hierarchies of knowledge. We will reflect on an academic, developmental and artistic collaboration between South Omo and London that has attempted to challenge those hierarchies over the last five years.

Paper long abstract:

Despite the widespread rhetoric of decolonising research and development travelling across academia globally, hierarchies of knowledge have sedimented into hard structures, influencing encounters across various constellations. The critiques by Chambers, Hobart, Ferguson, Crewe and Harrison and others that portrayed development as a neocolonial project many decades ago still ring true as far as knowledge extraction is concerned. Whether it is international development, artistic projects or academic research, sophisticated expertise and skill are seen as emanating out of the Global North while simpler knowledge is apparently extracted from decentralised locations. The political economy of funding creates opportunities for consultancy, creative collaboration or research that are skewed towards Europe, the US and Australasia, excluding consultants, scholars and artists in Africa, Asia and Latin America from central decision-making roles. This paper is about an experience of trying to challenge these mechanisms and assumptions in a space where development, scholarship, and creative collaborations intermingled. Since 2017 SOAS, Mekelle University and the South Omo Theatre Company have been part of an initiative that aspired towards decolonising knowledge production. We have given grants, made plays and films, and enabled research capacity development, the results of which substantiate our empirical claim that complex talent and expertise are even distributed across the world, even if funding opportunities are usually not. Collaboration across boundaries generates new inequalities and throws up new conflict and challenges; we will reflect on the processes required to confront rather than evade them with examples from Ethiopia and the UK.