- Research Article
2- 10.1111/1745-5871.12203
Introduction: critical development studies—critique and radical praxis
- Aug 01, 2017
- Geographical Research
- Paul Hodge
This collection of papers signals a resurgent development studies in Australia, a decade after an earlier long-standing incarnation had fallen away, raising questions of the sub-discipline's ongoing efficacy in geography. Ending this 10 -year hiatus, the Critical Development Study Group of the Institute of Australian Geographers came into being with a rush of new recruits representing a broad array of theoretical lineages and practical appeals. We use this moment of the formation of the study group and joint participation of Aotearoa/New Zealand colleagues to reflect on questions of critique, including debate on what it is to be critical and radical in this important area of scholarship, teaching, and praxis.1 Participants from the inaugural panel session of the study group2 were invited for this themed issue to consider what these questions and debates mean to them as they reflect on their practices and the state of critical development studies. This resurgence, at least in part, mirrors the proliferation of development studies programs across the country at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. And while Australian universities, like those in the UK, Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and elsewhere, contend with 'neoliberal creep' and dwindling budgets, there is an equally strong trend to internationalise curricula and deepen graduates' 'global preparedness' (Cameron et al., 2013) for the cross-cultural workplace in uncertain environmental and geopolitical times. A multi-disciplinary development studies is well placed to respond to these challenges and moves to 'ready' graduates, and in many ways the contributions here reflect both the possibilities and difficulties of this task. The pedagogical focus and questioning of the roles of teaching, research, and, indeed, the part theory could and should play—highlighted by contributors' musings on the nature of critique—map onto a broader literature as academics position themselves vis-à-vis development praxis: as consultants, teachers, and practitioner scholars (see Cameron et al., 2013; Harrison 2013; Mosse, 2011). Unlike those in other disciplines in the development field, geographers have tended to venture more freely into unchartered epistemological terrain in their efforts to engage development in new ways.3 That development remains hierarchical and culturally inflected, operating on racialised, gendered, and class lines, has made it something of an easy target for criticism. Geographers too have had much to say about the pitfalls of development. Yet what lies beyond the safe confines of critique as part of 'engaging differently'? What might 'doing development' look like if academic work was to have more radical purpose? And, where does hope lie when it comes to maintaining a critical distance from neoliberalism and colonialism? Clearly, and this is reflected in the papers that follow, explicit attention to development praxis constitutes the kind of critical engagement geographers are making in contemporary development studies. Radical praxis for these authors is offered by way of critical vignettes that foreground their practice, providing rare insights into how development scholars position themselves as agents of change. Bringing together these commentary papers in Geographical Research, I offer a collection that reasserts long-established calls for 'social relevance' in the sub-discipline (Rugendyke, 2005, pp.315–316). Yet, their preoccupations embody an orientation different from that posed a decade ago; one that is more self-reflexive and eclectic in its practice, but one that nonetheless remains attentive to 'global inequality and its impacts at the local scale' (Rugendyke, 2005, p.306). A decade on from Rugendyke's ruminations about 'the parlous state about development geography' in this country, the sub-discipline has extended its analytical gaze both within and beyond the academy. This introduction provides a brief synopsis of these trajectories and the spaces that the papers open up for critical development studies where development praxis is front and centre. For Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt (2017) and Yvonne Underhill-Sem (2017), racialised and colonial logics are the stubborn things that continue to structure institutional arrangements and power differentials. As attested by Lahiri-Dutt's poignant example of the experiences of contemporary Gender and Development students, development (still) occurs, very much, 'under Western eyes' (Mohanty, 1988, p.61). The enduring relevance of postcolonial criticism—the work of Mohanty (1988; 2013), Marchand and Parpart (1995), Spivak (1988), Tuhiwai-Smith (2012), and others—reminds us all of the lasting significance of a critically engaged feminist geography of development; one where radical practice starts with the very act of development (Cornwall, 2003) and the politics of knowledge production (Longhurst, 2001) that underpins and sustains it. Crucially, development studies inflected with the postcolonial attune us to the uncomfortable reality that race has never gone away (Kothari, 2006). Indeed, development institutions, whether UN agencies, NGOs, or universities where development studies is taught, largely remain strongholds of racialised discourse and practice (see Chatterjee & Maira, 2014). So where to for postcolonial critique as decolonising practice? Lahiri-Dutt (2017) invokes the interdisciplinary language of feminism as a way of coming to terms with and subverting the 'multiple vectors of race, class, gender, and Northern status along which global subjects are imagined and constituted' (p.330). To move beyond the Western women as civilising agent will require 'heightened cross-cultural understanding' (p.327) through an understanding of the self as socially and geographically situated. For Lahiri-Dutt, this vitally reflexive move would help avoid the conceptual traps of essentialism and instead enable finely grained and nuanced beginnings of an anti-racist practice. Locating the 'complexity of identities' (p.329) at the centre of these nuanced beginnings constitutes the kind of praxis-based moral discourse Lahiri-Dutt advocates. Radical purpose emerges out of these 'richer ways of thinking about individuals, agency, and the inequalities, in which they live and operate' (p.330). To deal head on with the structural ways in which 'difference' and 'positionality' have been constructed in development and academia, Lahiri-Dutt invokes Ram (1999, p.213) to highlight the 'deadening habits of thought' that are (always) ready to prevail should we not actively partake in and transcend our disciplinary boundaries as a precursor to a decolonised anti-racist praxis. Providing a personal and embodied account of what it is to enact decolonising practices, Yvonne Underhill-Sem (2017) reflects on her journey as a woman of strong Pacific heritage as she negotiates 'the intersecting gendered, racialised, and sexualised configurations of the academy' (p.333), a task made even more difficult by the neoliberal university. Tracing her experience of 'getting in' (to academia), 'creating a space', and 'not giving up', Underhill-Sem describes an embodied ongoing radical practice where questions over who gets to decide who teaches in universities, and in what ways, represent the battle grounds of a decolonised academia. To craft critical postcolonial spaces is to reconfigure the very pedagogies that have for so long delegitimised and marginalised certain knowledges and ways of knowing and learning. Underhill-Sem foregrounds the relationship between subjectivities and power, and reflects on the kinds of critical pedagogies that create spaces where existing hierarchies are challenged. By reference to examples of multi-lingualism and carefully developed collaborative group work students are armed with various strategies of hyper-reflexivity, thus enabling a sensitivity to social relations and power dynamics, while also fulfilling key skills for these future development practitioners. 'Not giving up' among other things means working hard to retain critical postcolonial spaces in the academy despite pressures that privilege individualism and auditing regimes. To Lahiri-Dutt and Underhill-Sem building alliances and carving out agendas that embrace concepts and practices that simultaneously challenge and transform relations of power in the academy constitute the kind of radical praxis that aims to decolonise the institutional spaces which, for too long, have served those best placed to benefit from the status quo. Radicalism in this sense must involve illuminating 'theoretical erasures' (Lahiri-Dutt, 2017, p.328) and working with 'intellectual allies' (Underhill-Sem, 2017, p.336) to subvert the racialised discourses and practices that continue to structure the academy. Decolonising academic and development institutions, in the first instance, might just mean that established luminaries 'step back' thus enabling space for new practices and epistemological horizons to appear with fresh knowledge claims and grounds for legitimacy. While the kinds of radical praxis and critique outlined by Lahiri-Dutt and Underhill-Sem remain crucial to forging decolonised spaces in the academy, critique as a formative gesture of what academics do has come under fire over the last decade or more. Michael Hardt (2011, p.19) declares that the various modes of critique today face the charge 'that they are insufficient as political methods' insofar as, he says, they lack the capacity to transform 'existing structures of power' and 'create alternative social arrangements'. In a self-reflective mood, Bruno Latour (2004) questions his own complicity in valorising uncertainty and off-loading social construction onto generations of students. He muses: have we in fact 'behaved like mad scientists who have let the virus of critique out of the confines of their laboratories and cannot do anything now to limit its deleterious effects; it mutates now, gnawing everything up, even the vessels in which it is contained' (p.231). For J.K. Gibson-Graham (2008, p.618), the problem is to be found in the enduring academic performances of the discerning critical subject asserting rather the need to 'disinvest in our paranoid practices of critique and mastery', while in a similar vein Woodyer and Geoghegan (2012, p.206) problematise normative judgments of the detached critic and the way these preclude 'more affirmative modes of critique'. Sarah Wright (2017) and Katharine McKinnon (2017) take up such a challenge by re-imagining a different critical sentiment, one that opens up spaces of engagement rather than closing them down. Wright (2017, p.338) begins her analysis by reference to Aristotle, for whom criticism means 'judging well' and in a way that 'should delight a reasonable reader'. Referring to formative work by Sedgwick (1997), Stewart (2008), and Gibson-Graham (2008), Wright reflects on what it might look like to step 'outside paranoia' (p.339) as a defining analytical mode of critique with its reifying and totalising, constraining, and normalising denunciations. This is not a call for trivialising or ignoring 'deeply non-delightful power relations' (p.339) but rather a way of exercising judgment differently, with a generative or reparative purpose. Reparative approaches understand critique as constituted by practice so, for Wright, it is academic work itself that plays a role in naming and validating some realities while also silencing others. This performative element grounds her notion of 'mucking in' where academics also engage directly and indirectly in development praxis, although she is very careful to note that reparative impulses can control and organise. 'Mucking in' is to be a participant in social movements for transformational change both in the majority and minority world—here is Wright's critique as delight, and it 'is indeed tentative, reflexive, and evolving, that mucks in, but with care and responsibility and as an embodied, aware participant rather than an external observer' (p.341). McKinnon (2017, p.345) also finds habitual preoccupations with familiar narratives of 'neoliberal devastation, or neo-imperialist dispossession' and the quest to unveil objective 'truths' to be limiting and self-referential. Offering instead an engagement with Latour's (2004) matters of concern, through her work with the Community Economies Collective, McKinnon recasts critical scholarship as less a search for certainty and fixed objects and more an attentiveness to the manner in which we cultivate our engagements. Like Wright's 'mucking in' where scholars help create the worlds they wish to participate in, McKinnon's advocacy is for a close alignment between critical practice and our own (academics') intentions. Speaking of the performativity of our writing and teaching, and of the ways we 'connect them to the world constructed within our texts' (p.347) McKinnon poses the question, do we want to enact 'rooms full of hopelessly enraged students and colleagues, or do we want them to be hopefully engaged?' (p.347). McKinnon invokes Hardt's (2011, p.33) discussion of the militant life of the Cynics in Ancient Greece, where exposing hypocrisies through scandalous acts was the (practical) lifeblood of 'prefiguring a new world'. To engage hopefully as an act of critical practice might just involve the academic equivalent of walking naked down the street: for McKinnon it is 'exposing and embodying what we hold as our truth, what we love and wish to foster and multiply in the world' (p.348). What is to be multiplied is the performative power of inclusive engagements, whether 'creating joy and laughter around workshops' (p.346) or simply engaging people in positive ways. In other words, it is in the 'doing' of development, for these geographers, that constitutes critical practice. Yet, as Wright and McKinnon both caution, the enduring demand is to continue to question the very practice of the 'doing' as well as maintain a certain judging mind and curiosity as to what is to be held as our truth. To muck in and walk 'naked' is to be hyper-sensitive and ever-vigilant to the ongoing flaws and colonial logics that continue to animate development in its variegated forms. 'Judging well' should never jettison the practice of alerting to the unacceptable. Indeed as Wright suggests, and as Lahiri-Dutt and Underhill-Sem make clear, it remains important—following feminist, queer and post-colonial theorists—to retain a capacity 'to discern, to endeavour to name, and to undermine racist, patriarchal, [and] colonising … practices' (p.339). Whether or not it can be unequivocally stated, mounting evidence suggests that we have indeed entered the Anthropocene, including that which points to the 'very real' lived experiences of people feeling the brunt of more severe weather events (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). As Castree (2014) and others have made clear, the relatively stable conditions that for millennia have provided a life sustaining environment for human existence no longer prevail. For Andrew McGregor (2017) the Anthropocene poses a number of challenges and opportunities for a more-than-human critical development studies. The unequal effects of this new geological epoch pose a particular challenge for critical development researchers, a point made by McGregor when highlighting the impacts of planetary change and reflecting on how this 'will be felt unevenly, with marginal groups, those who are generally the least responsible for planetary degradation, likely to be most impacted' (p.352). For McGregor, the urgency for action stems from these heightened disparities wrought by carbon-intensive economic systems where wealthier countries continue to contribute more to global emissions but avoid (up until now anyway) the worst of the outcomes resulting from these harmful practices. According to McGregor we need to radically rethink human-focused development as a way of 'challenging modernist human-nature dualisms' (p.353). This more-than-human agenda aims to decentre modern ontologies to foreground the interconnections and diverse non-human agencies that make things happen. Challenging 'human exceptionalism' (p.353), while at the same time recognising human-induced climate change, might just provoke the kind of action that extends core concerns within critical development studies—such as power, justice, and equity—to a broader audience. The emergent climate justice movement is one such rally point and it provides an opportunity for critical development studies 'to contribute to this endeavour [to broaden development studies' remit] through ongoing collaborations with diverse communities that transcend North-South divides' (p.353). These several contributions show that critical engagement in contemporary development studies entails both a fundamental rethink of what constitutes scholarly endeavour, including reviving critique as a generative practice and embarking on more-than-human reframing in a climate changing world, but also one that makes clear the persistent and necessary task of cultivating anti-racist development processes and practices, especially vital given the field's enduring power-laden colonial legacies. The sub-discipline's resurgence, made even more promising with a strong post-graduate presence in the study group, bodes well for a praxis-oriented critical development in the country. The development edifice, while stubborn and plagued by inertia, is also a site of hope practice and vitality. What is needed more than ever is an opening up of the possible through multiple engagements with a plurality of actors—our Earth is already demanding it. Thank you to the two anonymous referees and especially the editorial team for supporting the publication of this collection of papers. I also like to thank our many students, family members, research collaborators, colleagues, and friends who continue to inspire and nurture practices of care despite, and in response to, the corrosive neoliberal capture of the contemporary university.
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