- Convenors:
-
Annalena Oppel
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
Jite Phido (Results for Development)
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- Format:
- Experimental format
- Stream:
- Creativity, participation and collaborative co-production in methods and practices
Short Abstract
This panel uses creative methodologies to interrogate what development's success metrics render invisible: slow transformation, relational knowledge, and generative failure. Cultural workers and arts-based researchers reveal alternative ways of knowing and valuing change that resists measurement.
Description
Development knowledge production remains structured by Western meritocratic logics that privilege rapid results, quantifiable outcomes, and scalable interventions. This panel interrogates what becomes invisible under these metrics: slow transformation, relational knowing, affective shifts, and the generative potential of failure and refusal.
Drawing on creative methodologies including visual ethnography, fiction, performance, and collaborative arts practice, this experimental panel invites cultural workers and arts-based researchers to present knowledge that resists conventional measures of success. When development projects 'fail' by standard indicators, what do they reveal about whose futures matter and which forms of change count? When transformation occurs across generations rather than project cycles, or circulates through story and image rather than policy briefs, how might we recognize and value it?
The panel wants to bring together scholars and practitioners whose work operates at the intersection of creative practice and development critique. Contributors are invited to explore photography that captures what reports cannot, fiction that reveals ideological structures in development encounters, performance as both methodology and outcome, and collaborative projects that prioritise relationship over deliverables. These approaches challenge not only who produces development knowledge, but the temporal, epistemological, and political assumptions embedded in how success itself is imagined. In an uncertain world demanding new ways of knowing, this panel seeks to find answers about: What futures become possible when we attend to what does not count? What do we learn from dwelling in ambiguity, honouring slow knowledge, and when valuing unmeasurable transformation?