Psy-expertise, therapeutic culture and the politics of the personal in development

Expertise stemming from the psy disciplines is increasingly and explicitly shaping international development policy and practice. Whilst some policy makers see the use of psy expertise as a new way to reduce poverty, increase economic efficiency, and promote wellbeing, others raise concerns that psychocentric development promotes individual over structural change, pathologises poverty, and depoliticises development. This paper specifically analyses four aspects of psy knowledge used in contemporary development policy: child development/developmental psychology, behavioural economics, positive psychology, and global mental health. This analysis illuminates the co-constitutive intellectual and colonial histories of development and psy-expertise: a connection that complicates claims that development has been psychologized; the uses and coloniality of both within a neoliberal project; and the potential for psychopolitics to inform development

Home on the border in Ana Castillo's "The Guardians": the colonial matrix of power, epistemic disobedience, and decolonial love

After 9/11, more than ever in the history of the United States of America, security and domesticity have become paradoxical antonyms in racially and ethnically mixed areas, like that of the US-Mexican border. The borderland‘s history is further complicated by the issue of illegal immigration and its corollaries, such as strict border control and mass deportations of ―aliens,‖ as well as the rising crime rate. Even though it is protected by a fence and monitored by heavily armed border patrols, the area‘s notoriety for narcosmuggling, human trafficking and femicide keeps growing. Paradoxically, the more drastic the security measures used, the more dangerous the borderland becomes. In her 2007 novel The Guardians, Ana Castillo suggests that tighter control itself is responsible for criminalizing the border. Focusing on a Mexican American woman‘s search for her brother lost during an illegal crossing, the novel presents a complex dynamic between security and domesticity. The following article attempts to trace this dynamic through the epistemic lens of decolonial methodology.Después del 11-S, más que nunca antes en la historia de los Estados Unidos de América, la seguridad y la domesticidad se han convertido en antónimos paradójicos en zonas de abundante mezcla racial y étnica como la frontera entre México y EE. UU. La historia de la zona fronteriza se ve complicada, además, por la cuestión de la inmigración ilegal y sus distintos corolarios, como por ejemplo el estricto control aduanero existente, las deportaciones en masa de ―extranjeros‖ o el aumento de los índices de criminalidad. Incluso aunque se halle protegida por una valla y aunque esté monitorizada por patrullas fronterizas fuertemente armadas, la ya notoria reputación del área por el contrabando de drogas y personas, así como por el feminicidio, sigue empeorando. Paradójicamente, cuanto más drásticas son las medidas de seguridad empleadas, más peligrosa se vuelve la frontera. En su novela de 2007, Guardianes de la frontera, Ana Castillo sugiere que el recrudecimiento del control fronterizo es en sí responsable de la criminalización de la zona fronteriza. Centrándose en la historia de una mujer mexicano-estadounidense que busca a su hermano perdido durante un cruce ilegal de la frontera, la novela presenta una compleja dinámica entre seguridad y domesticidad. El presente artículo tiene como objeto explorar esta dinámica a través de la lente epistémica que ofrece la aplicación de una metodología decolonial

Geopolítica, (de)colonialidad e identidad : la conciencia dividida de Rubén Darío / Geopolitics, (De)coloniality and Identity: the Divided Consciousness of Rubén Darío

In this article, I analyze Rubén Darío?s essays, chronicles, and newspaper articles through the framework of the coloniality of power and the coloniality of knowledge developed by Aníbal Quijano among others. I argue that reading his political writings, we observe a subject with a divided consciousness. On one hand, Darío repro-duces Eurocentric thinking that characterizes coloniality and, on the other hand, he criticizes and questions such paradigm. To support my argument, I use the geopolitical divisions ?East/West? and ?North/South? in order to trace the Nicaraguan poet?s concerns and thoughts regarding Europe and the United States. In other words, I examine from where Darío thinks and how his positions align with or deviate from coloniality and de-coloniality.Keywords: Rubén Darío, Coloniality of Power, Coloniality of Knowledge, De-coloniality, Geopolitics, Divided Consciousnes

Decolonizing Information Narratives: Entangled Apocalyptics, Algorithmic Racism and the Myths of History

In what follows, some contemporary narratives about ‘the information society’ are interrogated from critical race theoretical and decolonial perspectives with a view to constructing a ‘counter-narrative’ purporting to demonstrate the embeddedness of coloniality—that is, the persistent operation of colonial logics—in such discourses

A Neocolonial Warp of Outmoded Hierarchies, Curricula and Disciplinary Technologies in Trinidad’s Educational System

I re-appropriate the image of a space-time warp and its notion of disorientation to argue that colonialism created a warp in Trinidad’s educational system. Through an analysis of school violence and the wider network of structural violence in which it is steeped, I focus on three outmoded aspects as evidence of this warp--hierarchies, curricula and disciplinary technologies--by using data (interviews, documents and observations) from a longitudinal case study at a secondary school in Trinidad. Colonialism was about exclusion, alienation, violence, control and order, and this functionalism persists today; I therefore contend that hierarchies, curricula and disciplinary technologies are all enforcers of these tenets of (neo)colonialism in Trinidad’s schools. I conclude with some nascent thoughts on a Systemic Restorative Praxis (SRP) model as a way of de-stabilizing the warp, by stitching together literature/approaches from systems thinking, restorative justice and Freirean notions of praxis. SRP implies that colonialism (and this modern-day warp) has rendered much psychic and material damage, and that any intervention to address structural violence has to be systemic and iterative in scope and process, include healing, be participatory, and foster an ethic of horizontalization in human relations

Does foraging efficiency vary with colony size in the fairy martin Petrochelidon ariel?

Colonial breeding occurs in a wide range of taxa, however the advantages promoting its evolution and maintenance remain poorly understood. In many avian species, breeding colonies vary by several orders of magnitude and one approach to investigating the evolution of coloniality has been to examine how potential costs and benefits vary with colony size. Several hypotheses predict that foraging efficiency may improve with colony size, through benefits associated with social foraging and information exchange. However, it is argued that competition for limited food resources will also increase with colony size, potentially reducing foraging success. Here we use a number of measures (brood feeding rates, chick condition and survival, and adult condition) to estimate foraging efficiency in the fairy martin Petrochelidon ariel, across a range of colony sizes in a single season (17 colonies, size range 28-139 pairs). Brood provisioning rates were collected from multiple colonies simultaneously using an electronic monitoring system, controlling for temporal variation in environmental conditions. Provisioning rate was correlated with nestling condition, though we found no clear relationship between provisioning rate and colony size for either male or female parents. However, chicks were generally in worse condition and broods more likely to fail or experience partial loss in larger colonies. Moreover, the average condition of adults declined with colony size. Overall, these findings suggest that foraging efficiency declines with colony size in fairy martins, supporting the increased competition hypothesis. However, other factors, such as an increased ectoparasitise load in large colonies or change in the composition of phenotypes with colony size may have also contributed to these patterns.

Imperial inventories, “illegal mosques” and institutionalized Islam: Coloniality and the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Looking at the architectures of governance that have characterized the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), this essay explores the ways in which imperial inventories of colonial institutions come to influence and arbitrate contemporary debates over what constitutes legitimate practices of Islam in Bosnia–Herzegovina and Austria. Examining the larger political context in which these debates emerge, including the criminalization of Muslim communities that refuse to submit to the authority of state-sanctioned Islamic religious institutions, I detail the ways in which colonial histories are recruited to curate a homogenized, continuous representational mandate for Muslim communities and practices in Austria and BiH. Attending to nostalgic invocations of the late Habsburg governance of Islam and Muslims, I argue that these discourses serve to legitimate specific Muslim institutions and actors in Austria and BiH that privilege the Habsburg legacy through the exclusion of outlawed/illegal Muslim communities and practices in both countries

Editorial: Decolonising the University

Therefore, in its variety, the contributions in this special issue share theorisations, auto-ethnographic reflections, and pedagogical experiments of decolonisation, politics of knowledge, and activism informed by Feminist, Gender, and Queer studies but also by non-Eurocentred epistemic geo-genealogies grounded in embodied experiences of racialisation, discrimination, and resistance in the academia. Inserting what are inevitably profoundly political contributions, which question the foundations and limitations of hegemonic knowledge creation, into the mould of an academic peer-reviewed special issue is a complex and, at times, seemingly impossible exercise. As the guest editors and editorial board negotiated the process of this issue’s production, we ourselves were challenged to engage with tensions around what constitutes a ‘proper’ scientific contribution, by which and whose standards. As a reader of this special issue, and perhaps a student, teacher, researcher, activist, or a combination thereof, it is likely that you also find yourself addressed and challenged by some of the critiques and proposals articulated in the articles and essays that follow