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Paper short abstract

This presentation offers a multimodal response to the ongoing debate between critical studies of and technocratic drives underpinning development. It offers a kind of critique that attends to the moments when the binaries enabling both sides of the camp to crystallise yet crumble at the same time.

Paper long abstract

This presentation discusses our collaborative efforts of engaging people in imagining their development futures through imagistic and embodied approaches, focusing on rural Sumba Island in the eastern side of Indonesia as an empirical site. Drawing on a long-term ethnography that is both experimental and immersive, we reflect on the role of multimodal engagement in speaking towards the perennial debate between critical approaches to and technocratic views of development, and the possibilities of reframing what constitutes a critique of development. In doing so, the multimodal insights emerging from our work have illustrated the need of holding development in both affirmative yet negative terms, hence ambiguously. As we will show, people’s everyday forms of imagination allude to the possibilities for development encounters to remould their sense of self in relation to their human and non-human counterparts, resulting in some forms of empowering effects. Yet, those potentialities remain uneven, for which the vision of development continues to be the leverage as well as the barrier for such an otherwise future to materialise in practice. These ambiguous insights, we argue, allow us to pay closer attention to the ethical and moral implications whereby the binaries that make such a critical (and technocratic) pursuit possible, are reified and blurred at the same time.