Contribution short abstract

This auto-ethnography from the global South posits critical development practice (CDP) as an antidote to despair that critical theory often engenders. CDP co-creates new collaborative situated knowledges and hope-ful emancipatory outcomes through grounded, site-specific action in particular locales.

Contribution long abstract

The social science and humanities classroom in universities of the global South is arguably at its most difficult juncture in contemporary times. The polycrisis poses a wicked problem, academic freedom is under siege everywhere, critique is increasingly demonized, and there is a general atmosphere of despondency and defeat. What kind of knowledges can we co-create, and whom can we co-create it with, to keep alive the hope of transition towards a more just and sustainable society? I discuss these challenges from my specific location in the academia and development sector of the global South, occupying multiple positionalities with simultaneous experiences of privilege and vulnerability. I will contribute to this roundtable through an auto-ethnographic account of nearly 25 years of productive tension between my twin worlds of critical theory in the university, and critical development practice in the forest fringe villages of central India. My students have similarly contradictory positionalities, spanning highly privileged socio-economic backgrounds to first-generation learners from families which climbed out of poverty in the early days of neoliberal growth. The pedagogical challenge in this case is to retain complex and critical thinking while birthing and nurturing a robust pedagogy of hope. I contend that a meaningful dialogue between critical theory and critical practice can co-create interdisciplinary learning spaces that produce hope for meaningful social change. This praxis generates hope through the art of observing, documenting, understanding, and participating in the micropolitical strategies through which people make their way in a deeply unequal and unjust world.