ID 258--Special Topics: Beyond Tokenism: Indigenizing, Feminizing, Queering Development

International development has been an overwhelmingly white, heteronormative, and patriarchal project. That is to say, it has been informed ideologically, epistemologically, and in practice by hegemonic Eurocentric norms, priorities, and “expert knowledge.” In this course, we focus our attention on the shifting but near-permanent criticisms of normative, hegemonic development projects articulated by LGBTQ people, people of color, Indigenous scholars and activists, Pan-Africanists and African feminists, transnational feminists, Chicano/a historians, and more. We give particular attention to elucidating alternative imaginaries of “progress,” “empowerment,” and “development” for meaningful, livable futures that emphasize wellbeing, ecological balance, and buen vivir. In this way, the course is explicitly forward-looking as we seek to move beyond critique towards the active imagining of new horizons

Social Licence to Operate

In this intervention article, we cultivate an anti-colonial critique of the ideational genealogy and conceptual materialisation of the social licence to operate (SLO) in the extractive industries in order to open a conversation about the racialised and colonial logics underlying its enactment and discursive practices. SLO functions to restrict the emergence of imaginary political potentials within communities impacted by extractive projects. We focus on the role of academics and social science researchers within and beyond the space of the university in engineering, shaping, and promoting dominant SLO frameworks, and endorsing the power and mythology of SLO. We do so in conversation with decolonial orientations that simultaneously analyse the colonial logics within corporate practice and galvanise epistemic justice beyond colonial and epistemic extractivism. The university, as a site for the refinement and promotion of hegemonic concepts like SLO, is an important space for post-extractive struggles

'What kind of witchcraft is this?' Development, magic and spiritual ontologies

This collection represents a significant intervention in the space cohabited by witchcraft, spirit worlds, and development – a realm frequently marginalised by development practice. Through a diverse set of scholarly and methodological orientations, the contributions draw on contrasting case studies (spanning the local, national, and borderlands) to explore the current and possible future co-productions of development through various forms of spirituality. They do so with attention to the paradoxes, nuances, and complexities of these intersections. This introduction explores some of the cross-cutting themes arising from these complexities, including: scale; limitations of Euro-dominant conceptualisations of development; Othering of polytheistic, multi-theistic, and non-theistic spiritual ontologies; entanglements of spirituality, politics, and power; and co-productions of new forms of development. We argue that thinking through these various cross-cutting themes provides a multitude of possibilities for decolonising the development project

Constant questioning on-and-off the page: Race, decolonial ethics and women researching in Africa

© The Author(s) 2019. Drawing from emergent scholarship in feminist political geography on discomfort feminism and the literature on decolonial ethics for research more broadly, I argue that further work is necessary to deconstruct the artificial barriers between ‘the field’ and ‘non-field’/home and that this project remains particularly acute for research ‘on Africa.’ Motivated by the conversations inspired by this volume—which importantly consider the possibilities, challenges and tensions of woman-researchers in Africa—I argue that our exchanges must be simultaneously attuned to the racial politics of doing research in contemporary African societies. The adoption of decolonial ethical orientations is valuable in pushing such a project forward.https://fount.aucegypt.edu/faculty_book_chapters/1099/thumbnail.jp

A decolonial political geography of resistance and digital infrastructural harm in Cameroon and Ethiopia

In the decisive responses to protest movements in Ethiopia and Cameroon between 2015 and 2018, state control and repression were facilitated by colonial-corporate digital infrastructures and neo-imperial techno-political configurations. In both cases, resistance was met with pervasive state-initiated and corporate-sanctioned internet shutdowns and disruptions. I situate these techno-political practices within the longue durée of coloniality to argue that the state suspension of internet connectivity is a form of infrastructural harm; an intentional violence made socially and structurally possible by the colonial configurations of infrastructure. My analysis draws from five years of digital ethnography and ethnographic fieldwork, including 13 months in Jimma, Ethiopia and nine months in Yaoundé, Cameroon. I mobilize a decolonial praxis that unmasks practices of authoritarian control within global racial coloniality, and seeks to foster cross-fertilizations of struggle and resistance praxis

Lifescapes of a pipedream: a decolonial mixtape of structural violence & resistance along the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline

People's narratives, interpretations and understandings of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline and pipeline actors emphasise the uneven exercise of power through which structural violence is effected and experienced. The complexity of the processes of structural violence along with local socio-political context and peoples' dynamic understandings thereof play major roles in shaping resistance practices, in complex ways in Kribi and Nanga-Eboko. Working from these narratives, I offer a theoretical re-articulation of structural violence as (i) tangible through the body, (ii) historically compounded, (iii) spatially compressed and (iv) enacted in a globalised geopolitical nexus by actors who are spatially nested within a racialised and gendered hierarchy of scale. Drawing from critical interdisciplinary work on violence, my theory of a triad of divergent, often interrelated and co-existing, distinguishable indexes of structural violence includes: infra/structural violence, industrial structural violence and institutionalized structural violence. The particular processes and mechanisms of uneven power within structural violence, local socio-political contexts and the epistemologies through which power is conceived (in this case I consider epistemologies of la sorcellerie, or witchcraft) inform resistance practices; I illuminate key operations (within geographies characterised by high levels of infra/structural violence) within the spatial practices of power that influence the tendency for resistance struggles to be quiet, spontaneous and/or labour-based. I conclude with a discussion of the political and intellectual value of academic work on life and being amid structural violence, emphasising the need to move beyond the invisible/visible dichotomy that has often informed intellectual work on structural violence.</p

Conversations from Jimma on the Geographies and Politics of Knowledge

Drawing from decolonizing scholarships that call for a reorientation of knowledge-making that is more inclusive and reflective of oral modes of communication, this article takes the form of a performance autoethnography between two friends. This approach allows a rich complexity of subjects to emerge—from “decolonizing” pedagogies and curricula to university administration and the geopolitics of knowledge globally—at the same time that we retain a specific attention to our university in Jimma, Ethiopia. Our intention is to challenge conventional academic modes of writing through a contextualization of the contemporary struggles that young professors face while teaching in semi-rural Ethiopian universities. Although our discussions reflect our personal struggles, they are reflective of larger general trends in Ethiopian higher education. Academics working on the African continent often confront intersecting material, ideological, linguistic, financial, and political factors that work to exclude African knowledges from global or transnational knowledge exchanges. Our conversation allows us to reflect on the broad tapestry of the current moment, including interactions with administrative staff, violent histories of knowledge colonization, racial and gendered politics, the potential for social science knowledges for social justice, and more