Short Abstract:

The workshop calls for stories on navigating the crises of postcolonial development, to open up reflexivity as a critical approach that encourages (a)knowledge-making as relational, ongoing and unfinished, and (b) challenges the very idea of reflexivity that privileges ‘speaking for’ the community.

Long Abstract:

The crisis of postcolonial development is marked by a burgeoning informality that is the subject of development interventions. Yet within these interventions our critical engagement with alternative narratives is limited. By alternative narratives, we mean the relationship between our knowledge as researchers and practitioners and the knowledge of our communities of practice. By focussing on the relationship between different types of knowledge, we challenge existing theoretical paradigms of what constitutes knowledge, negotiating knowledge production as a collaborative process.

We draw on Doreen Massey’s feminist and relational spaces to recognize that informal and formal spaces are not static but are always in the making. We focus on how knowledge flows and the simultaneity of “stories so far,” to understand how the crisis of social change in postcolonial development is always in the making. Reformulation of experiences as stories is also a political act of re-reading and unlearning that can stimulate reflexivity in knowledge production on development and social change.

The workshop calls for stories or narrative vignettes that open up reflexivity as a critical approach encouraging knowledge-making on social change as granular, relational, ongoing and unfinished. We also look for stories that challenge the very idea of reflexivity that often privileges ‘speaking for or representing’ the community. Through the workshop, we aim to find commonalities and divergences between stories across geographical spaces in the Global South. We hope to develop a reflexive writing toolkit on narrative building about the crisis of postcolonial development that is critical and creative in scope.

This Workshop has so far received 1 contribution proposal(s).
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