{"id":2161,"date":"2025-02-18T09:43:36","date_gmt":"2025-02-18T08:43:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.developmentresearch.eu\/?p=2161"},"modified":"2025-12-02T10:51:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T09:51:08","slug":"the-role-of-critical-poetic-inquiry-in-decolonising-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.developmentresearch.eu\/?p=2161","title":{"rendered":"The Role of Critical Poetic Inquiry in Decolonising \u2018Development\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Nita Mishra<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Development Studies (DS) to truly decolonise itself, it must include the voices that do not find their way to its dominant narrative. To locate these hidden voices, and amplify them, DS scholars must embrace newer ways of doing research. Newer ways of doing research means adopting newer tools or methods of doing research with the aim to identify sources of forgotten or hitherto ignored knowledge. Whose voice is heard and whose knowledge counts, in essence, is therefore a call to facilitate a more inclusive process of knowledge creation. For instance, while discussions on intellectual decolonization underly all four schools of DS<\/a>, it still begets the question \u2018what research methods are best suited to advance the \u2018de-colonial\u2019 imagination of \u2018Development\u2019 especially when knowledge-production is still influenced by privileges of race?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Creative arts-based methods of doing research, including critical poetic inquiry, provide DS with an array of research tools foregrounding different ways of knowing and relating with the world. This is especially true for those who have something to say but are shy to use dominant forms of knowledge creation. These may include groups of people who are better skilled in expressing their lived experiences of inequalities, of gendered violence or of displacement due to conflict, using poetry, art, storytelling, quilting, theatre-performances, or writing in their mother-tongue. Alison Phipps\u2019s \u2018Manifesto for Decolonising Multilingualism<\/a>\u2019, speaks of breaking away from colonial ways of seeing things by citing works of indigenous peoples, displaced, asylum seekers, refugees and diaspora whose known worlds have disappeared and those who read and write in multiple languages. Some voices may have been silenced because of social and cultural inequities. For example, Irish Traveller feminist scholar, Rosaleen McDonagh, writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHistorically we have been associated with oralism as being our forte. That the page or the book would seem too sophisticated, too educated for the likes of us. This ideology is in fact racism. As a Traveller with a speech impediment my argument is that there\u2019s room for both and many more methods of expression\u201c<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poetry as a sense-making tool is as old as humanity itself. However, in recent times, scholars such as Sandra L. Faulkner<\/a>, Patricia Leavy<\/a>, and Monica Prendergast et al<\/a>.  argue that the International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry, in 2007, had a key role in establishing poetry as an authentic form of research methodology. The Symposium continues to be held whereby international poets and scholars from diverse contexts and interdisciplinary fields share their work. It was established by Monica Prendergast and Carl Leggo at the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia. This aligns with feminist ethical practices and multiculturalist calls for inclusion of diverse voices and leads to a collaborative and inclusive approach to knowledge production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poetic inquiry requires research to be done with participants and not \u2018on\u2019 them. All participants are researchers in that sense and control the final poem produced in the research process. And it is transformatory in this sense, as McDonagh ruminates:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFrequently our community [Irish Travellers], minority ethnic women, are the object of the settled gaze. In this anthology we are the subject. We narrate our own experience which edits out the settled exotic exploitative engagement\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Camea Davis<\/a> argues that \u201ccritical poetic inquiry is an entry point for minoritized scholars and participants to protest dominant, euro-centric epistemologies, research texts, and societal injustice\u201d. It thus has the potential to bring issues of social justice to the forefront through the production of diverse counter-narratives, multiple and competing realities fuelled by imagination and lived realities. For example, using the concept of \u2018counter-storytelling\u2019 through poetic inquiry to study migrant homelessness, Regina C. Serpa<\/a>  concludes that it enabled \u201cthe authentic voice of migrant groups negotiating the complexities of homelessness to be clearly articulated and heard\u201d. Earlier, using poetic dialogue, Susan Finley<\/a> had concluded: \u201ca radical, politically grounded statement about social justice<\/a>\u201d  lies at the core of such arts-based research methods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It, therefore, has implications for policy makers. For instance, in the Irish context, poetry has been commissioned by university grants, Arts Council, and migrant organisations<\/a>, to understand migrant lives better. Through this reciprocal exchange, poetry as a research tool has become a vehicle for reflexivity, enabling researchers, policy makers and participants to engage in an evidence-based policy making process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Critical poetic inquiry is more than the sharing of voices in workshops or poetry collections. It is action-oriented and foregrounds transformation as its ultimate aim. Linking it to Freire\u2019s argument that voice alone is not <\/em>sufficient to achieve liberation, as the goal is for voice to inspire action to create change, those engaging in poetic inquiry argue that all research is political. Davis argues that raising voice to protest\/take action against social injustices is core to critical poetic inquiry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being radical and transformatory, foregrounding the lived realities of the marginal through \u2018voice\u2019 and  agency (re)claimed through poetry can be decolonial! Qualitative development research in post-colonial societies continues to have colonial undertones<\/a>, as western conceptualisations, methods, and attitudes have been carried over to the \u2018development\u2019 narrative<\/a>. Decolonizing at the level of research methodologies means to learn, think, listen, and work in ways that are \u201ccentered\u201d in community. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes<\/a>, \u201cNaming the world according to an indigenous worldview might be called a methodology by researchers, but it is also Maori centric research. This form of naming is about bringing to the center and privileging indigenous values, attitudes and practices\u201d. This privileging of a localized, community- based way of \u201cnaming\u201d the world distinguishes indigenous approaches to research from dominant ones. The assumptions of dominant or western research methodologies generally prescribe objectivity, neutrality, or a universal one-size-fits-all. By comparison, the values or priorities of what guides indigenous research activities and analysis are grounded in place and centered in community; and they are generally linked directly to the culture of the community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making fluid the lines between the researcher and the researched, critical poetic inquiry workshops enable participants to explore their positionality, and long-held assumptions collectively. Davis challenges (knowledge) power dynamics between the researcher and the researched whereby both sides reveal their vulnerabilities in the process of co-constructing new knowledge \/ meaning, taking into consideration their own cultural contexts. For example, in a Dublin workshop with Traveller and nomadic women poets, reflecting on their positions, the workshop facilitators – white, western educated women feminist poets -, reflected as follows: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI feel deeply uncomfortable about facilitating this workshop. For me, I think it was impossible to create a space with settled people in the room that made it possible for them to be comfortable. We did our best, but given the stories shared and what many of them have been through and witnessed, I think they\u2019re rightfully wary of going deep because of our presence, like two well-intentioned censors book-ending the table. I felt on a day that was for them; they were censored by our presence, having to soften words about settled folks and discrimination to protect us\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Critical poetic inquiry thus offers a way to advance a decolonial approach to issues in development by validating and sustaining the epistemologies, literacies and languages which embody the lived experiences of marginalised groups. The task for DS is to acknowledge these pluriversal platforms of knowledge creation to move forward its call for decolonising development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note:<\/strong> <\/em><\/strong>This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the EADI Debating Development Blog or the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Nita Mishra <\/strong>teaches in the Department of Politics & Public Administration at the University of Limerick. Her poetry has been critically acclaimed as the future of Irish feminisms, and can be read in Irish migrant anthologies amongst other collections. Nita is also vice president (Education & Next Generation) of EADI<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image<\/strong>: Dublin poetry workshop<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Nita Mishra For Development Studies (DS) to truly decolonise itself, it must include the voices that do not find their way to its dominant narrative. To locate these hidden voices, and amplify them, DS scholars must embrace newer ways of doing research. Newer ways of doing research means adopting newer tools or methods of … <\/p>\n

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