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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.