Decolonization, Development and Knowledge in Africa: Turning Over a New Leaf by Sabelo J. NDLOVU-GATSHENI, London, Routledge, 2022

In the international development and charity sector, particularly in the UK but not exclusively, crises of safeguarding vulnerable people have driven relatively large-scale investment in risk management and boosted its importance in charity governance. In 2018, British newspaper The Times published an exposé of the international non-governmental organisation (INGO) Oxfam GB and its handling of allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct of its staff in Haiti and the Philippines (known colloquially as the “Oxfam-Haiti scandal”). An investigation into Oxfam GB by the Charity Commission, a government body that registers and regulates charities in England and Wales, found that the organisation’s safeguarding strategy, approach and resourcing were significant areas of weakness that meant “the charity exposed itself to undue risk, amounting to mismanagement in the administration of the charity”.Footnote 1 The lever of exposure to risks – including the risk of causing harm to others alongside reputational risks – led to major sector-wide investment and the growth of teams of safeguarding professionals that introduced new or shored up existing policies, practices, lines of reporting and accountability and engendered behavioural change. By 2022, the international development and charity sector has become well versed and proactive in its management and mitigation of risks within the organisation and those caused by the organisation. These are risks that can be known, boxed into processes attentive to them and contained so that organisations may continue their substantive work. This framework and approach to understanding and managing risk as an operational exercise seems profoundly unsuited to the next great challenge facing the international development and charity sector and the development sector more widely – a challenge that aims to undo its rules and institutions and disrupt its very paradigm of knowing

Being cosmopolitan: Marketing development studies in the neoliberal university

This article unpacks how ‘development’ is represented and sold in postgraduate development studies courses at two UK universities, based on a close reading of the course’s marketing materials and interviews with professional marketing staff within the university, academic leads on development studies courses and current development studies students. It explores the effects of development representations on students and their imaginations of the discipline and the university brand. I find representations of development engender a cosmopolitan desire mainly among international students and project a cosmopolitan virtue of the university through its development activities and associations. Contrary to seeing the cosmopolitan as a progressive political concept in a time of globalisation, I contend these cosmopolitan identities are imbued with the racialised legacies of colonial power

An Introduction to Revisiting Development Studies Education and an Invitation to Rethink Teaching, Learning and Knowledge Production in the Neoliberal University

We are at a moment of growing critical self-reflection in the field of development studies—heightened by debates on decolonization—that is opening up difficult conversations on teaching, learning and knowledge production for development studies education. This special issue augments these conversations and revisits development studies education within the context of the ‘neoliberal university’. It is our contention that we cannot engage with the expansive project of rethinking development studies education, without elaborating on higher education institutions (HEIs) as the site where change is mediated, managed and resourced. The articles in this volume give empirically grounded and interrelated narratives that elucidate the relationships between development studies and the neoliberal university from a range of disciplinary and geographical perspectives. They allow us to make two salient contributions, firstly, on the role of HEIs as a site of engagement and entanglement between development practice and development studies, and secondly, on the ways in which the neoliberalization of higher education shapes development studies pedagogy. It is our hope that these articles are read as a timely intervention and invitation to rethink development studies education in this context

Diasporic scholarship: racialization, coloniality and de‐territorializing knowledge

In considering how knowledge reproduces the dynamics of coloniality in Geography, scholars have looked beyond the Global North and Global South as cartographical sites, instead seeing them as conceptual frameworks and epistemic positions. Building on this rich work, we draw attention to specific issues obscured within it. Whilst geographical scholarship has moved to recognizing how the Global North and South bleed into each other, it frequently continues to locate scholars themselves within specific territories, labelling them of the Global North or of the Global South, thereby re-territorializing scholars and their work and reflecting and revealing processes of racialization within the academy. We ask how those who do not fit into neat geographical imaginations of North and South represent ways to understand and know the world? Specifically, how can we centre the idea of diaspora as part of wider geo- and body political projects that aim to decentre knowledge production? We bring diaspora back into debates on knowledge production to explore how their understanding of the world, rooted in hybrid and transnational ways, can enrich engagements around postcoloniality and decoloniality. We detail how such voices illuminate how racialization, coloniality and difference continue to mark how we know and teach the world. Our argument makes imperative the case for de-territorializing scholars and scholarship

An In Vivo

Infection is the leading complication associated with intravascular devices, and these infections develop when a catheter becomes colonized by microorganisms. To combat this issue, medical device manufacturers seek to provide healthcare facilities with antimicrobial medical devices to prevent or reduce the colonization. In order to adequately evaluate these devices, an in vivo model is required to accurately assess the performance of the antimicrobial devices in a clinical setting. The model presented herein was designed to provide a simulation of the subcutaneous tunnel environment to evaluate the ability of an antimicrobial peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC), coated with chlorhexidine based technology, to reduce microbial migration and colonization compared to an uncoated PICC. Three samples of control, uncoated PICCs and three samples of coated PICCs were surgically tunneled into the backs of female New Zealand White rabbits. The insertion sites were then challenged with Staphylococcus aureus at the time of implantation. Animals were evaluated out to thirty days and sacrificed. Complete en bloc dissection and evaluation of the catheter and surrounding tissue demonstrated that the chlorhexidine coated catheter was able to significantly reduce microbial colonization and prevent microbial migration as compared to the standard, un-treated catheter

Tenure and vulnerability: the effects of changes to tenure security on the identity and social relationships of the urban poor

Directed by the Millennium Development Goal to improve the lives of at least 100 million ‘slum’ dwellers by 2020, national governments and development agencies are driving policy to upgrade and formalise informal settlements. This study is an investigation into the effects of in situ upgrade and formalisation on the vulnerability and resilience of the urban poor in Durban, South Africa. The study examines the relationships between tenure and vulnerability by identifying and exploring how changes to tenure security, introduced through the upgrade process, affect individuals’ exposure to risk and ability to cope, and the ways in which identity and social relations influence those effects. The data are drawn from twenty-four ethnographies of residents living in three low income settlements in/around Durban each at different stages in the upgrade process. The findings of the study show that many residents are better off following an upgrade – ownership claims are better protected, they are more comfortable in their homes and able to improve livelihoods. However, these security and resilience gains are undermined by the high levels of crime and violence that continue post-upgrade and affect the desirability of a location and the ability of people to live there. Furthermore, the manner in which the process is implemented reconfigures local power relations, without meaningfully altering them; thus continuing to tie residents’ wellbeing to social rules administered by informal institutions. These findings challenge conceptualisations of ‘tenure security’ and the conventional orthodoxy of upgrading

Development and racial hierarchy

The Elgar Encyclopedia of Development is a ground-breaking resource that provides a starting point for those wishing to grasp how and why development occurs, while also providing further expansion appropriate for more experienced academics

Global North and Global South

In contemporary development studies the terms ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’, sometimes capitalised and sometimes not, roll off the tongue as a familiar, known and knowable concept that translates easily across development audiences. I refer to ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ as a singular concept because one does not make any sense without the other. Its meaning is derived entirely from being a pair where one part serves as an imaginary counterfoil to the other. As a heuristic device, the usage and utility of Global North/South intends to conjure particular imaginations of difference. Within development studies, a field of scholarship that rests on differences between places and people, I argue the main usage of Global North/South is part of a longer history of racialised sense-making that follows a colonial imprint, and its utility is derived from development scholars and practitioners readily discovering, learning and locating subjects of development