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Paper short abstract:

The study would narrate the Nigerian example in defining who is a development scholar?

Paper long abstract:

As part of a broader doctoral thesis project titled ‘Towards Decolonising Development Studies Teaching & Learning: Teaching Informed by Alternative Development Epistemologies in Nigerian Universities', the study engaged with a self-developed concept of Critical Development Scholar (CDS). The CDS concept can further be operationalised in relation to the study’s broad question ‘How do critical development scholars in the Nigerian academy reflect on alternative development worldviews/epistemologies in teaching content and pedagogy and how does it inform the decolonisation of development studies (DS)?’. This study seeks to portray the teaching & learning practice of critical scholars, including their personal experiences that depict activisms.

Foremost, it is important to emphasise that the Nigeria’s academic environment was established based on recolonisation and imperial frames of development and has developed in the post-colonial on neoliberal and Western-based ethos, Eurocentrism and coloniality. In order to target and select participants in the Nigeria-based study, CDS was defined as a lecturer that critiques Eurocentric development approaches and favours pluriversality and alternative discourses such as postcolonial, feminist, African-centred, indigenous, post-development, ‘Marxism’, and decolonial perspectives. By adopting the CDS concept, the study had to categorise the Nigeria’s Development Study academic population, which in itself colonial. By this classification, it also portends a straightjacket binary of defining scholarship to be either critical or otherwise and downplay the vast space of in-betweenness and liminal spaces. This article shares the difficulty and challenges of selecting, categorising, and defining a CDS with academic activism and ‘alternatives’ being preeminent in this selection and categorisation.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper argues for decolonizing the gender and sexuality curriculum at Western Sydney University by reflecting on my lived experience as a feminist academic of colour living and teaching in a neoliberal institution of a settler colonial country

Paper long abstract:

The current aggression of the Western Imperial knowledge system in global universities is concerning because these universities being run by Western neoliberal logic of business principles treat education as a marketable product, rated, bought, and sold by standard units, measured and counted by impersonal, mechanical tests with limited opportunities for Indigenous and postcolonial knowledge(Connell 2016, 2018b; Mbembe 2016; Bhambra 2014). Contemporary academic activism must work to decolonize the curriculum in neoliberal universities, ensuring democratic access to higher education and the free pursuit of knowledge. Nevertheless, the study of sex and gender has historically been dominated by Western academia and Eurocentric perspectives, often erasing the diversity of experiences and Indigenous understandings of sex and gender This paper, therefore addresses these knowledge gaps and argues for decolonizing the gender and sexuality curriculum in a second-year core Culture and Society unit titled ‘Politics of Sex and Gender’ at Western Sydney University, a white, neoliberal institution. In doing so, I reflect on my lived experience as a feminist academic and activist of colour within a white institution in a settler-colonial country. This paper examines the shift from a previously whitewashed curriculum to a new one that highlights Indigenous and decolonial feminist interpretations of sex and gender. Drawing on positive student feedback from two consecutive semesters of this unit, this paper underscores the need to amplify the voices of often erased and marginalized scholars within a white, Eurocentric university.

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Paper short abstract:

In India, two paradoxes— neo-liberalism and social justice, continue to affect the socio-political discourse in every social setting, and universities are at the centre stage. This paper brings the perspective from below to the forefront of the question of graded inequality in knowledge production.

Paper long abstract:

Since the inception of higher education in India, the dominant castes have had control over knowledge production. In the age of neo-liberal universities, the concentration of power remains with the caste elites. Despite the constitutional mandate for affirmative action for Dalits (ex-Untouchables) and Adivasis (Tribals), these underrepresented groups remain at the margins of the knowledge production process. Consequently, my research engages with one of the critical sites, the university, to understand the academic activism of the faculties from historically marginalized communities. Using the perspective of the socio-politics of caste, the paper elucidates the process of academic scholarship with social and political activism in Indian higher education.

This paper, based on an ethnographic study (January 2019 to January 2020) at the University of Hyderabad— one of the top-ranking public universities in India— engages with the perspective on anti-caste pedagogy. The site of study made headlines after the ultimate protest by the Dalit student-activist Rohith Vemula in the year 2016, further developing in a series of nationwide student agitations against caste discrimination. The study critically examines the relationship between identity, knowledge and power through the lived experiences of the Dalit and Adivasi faculties to capture the identity resistance.

Given the conspiracy of silence towards the contribution of marginalized castes in knowledge production, the study analyses the everyday engagement of the Dalit and Adivasi faculties in academic and non-academic spheres. It also reflects on the processes and practices of deconstructing the Brahmanical-hegemonic narratives through the teaching-learning-research activities in Indian higher education.

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Paper short abstract:

We wish to discuss from a critical development studies perspective how to maintain anti capitalist pedagogy and academic activism within the neoliberal university, especially around the topic of the climate crisis

Paper long abstract:

As critical development scholars teaching the climate crisis, we sit at a juncture. The neoliberal university has put employability, policy relevance and impact at the front of teaching metrics to our student cohort, dominated by international elite students who aspire to go into law, finance, policy or consultancy careers. Within climate change, this means a commitment to ecomodernist principles and policy-based approaches driving big “D” development in the global south. In this paper, we draw on focus groups with undergraduate and postgraduate students enrolled in climate change modules in international development at KCL to co-produce a novel climate curricula. We find we need to teach to the “concrete” and be situated in the political realities of international climate politics and the neoliberal university. There is still an urgency to critique hegemonic capitalist power responsible for the climate crisis. However, we need to do so without it paralysing students into apathy and anxiety and obscuring hopeful possibilities coming from climate justice movements from the global south. This means valourising everyday struggles for wages, working conditions, land rights – direct, bottom-up approaches to respond to the climate crisis, as ‘solutions’. We also re-think the boundaries of what ‘valuable’ knowledge is from both educator and student perspectives, confronting and rethinking what ‘value’ means for advancing a radical climate pedagogy of hope in the context of climate anxiety and the specific career aspirations of students at neoliberal universities.