Short Abstract:

This panel aims to bring together voices from the Global South to discuss their reflexivity and positionality in development studies. Focusing on southern researchers’ geographical choices, training, and fieldwork encounters aims to enrich the discussion on research decolonisation and reciprocity.

Long Abstract:

Global South researchers navigate a multilayer complex positionality while conducting research in the field of development and social studies, as their experiences are shaped by their identities of race, gender, religion, values and politics. Existing literature, personal stories, and researchers’ experiences reveal the complexity and sub-layers of emerging identities for Global South scholars, especially while conducting research challenging the static and linear perception of the researcher’s positionality and ethics in the field. The growing movement of epistemic justice and decoloniality within development studies poses essential questions on how and by whom knowledge is created and for whose benefit. At this crucial moment of the discipline’s transformation, Global South researchers can play a significant role in shaping the intellectual conversation and reversing the knowledge gaze in development studies research. The panel aims to highlight and bridge the experiences of Global South researchers in development studies, which are usually concealed or censored for the fear that they would affect academic analytical production. These experiences shape and tell an important story on the role of researchers, the importance of fieldwork, power dynamics in fieldwork, mental and physical challenges, and the importance of fieldwork beyond data collection to a real-life experience that shapes the researcher’s positionality for years to come. The panel is part of a book project that aims to centralise and position the voices and experiences of early-career Global South researchers in fieldwork encounters, methodological approaches, and transboundary knowledge production.

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