{"id":801,"date":"2020-09-22T10:04:55","date_gmt":"2020-09-22T08:04:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.developmentresearch.eu\/?p=801"},"modified":"2020-09-22T10:04:55","modified_gmt":"2020-09-22T08:04:55","slug":"towards-a-non-extractive-and-care-driven-academia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.developmentresearch.eu\/?p=801","title":{"rendered":"Towards a Non-Extractive and Care-Driven Academia"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Vijay Kolinjivadi, Gert Van Hecken, Jennifer Casolo, Shazma Abdulla and Rut Elliot Blomqvist<\/em><\/p>\n

The white gaze permeates many aspects of even the most critical disciplines. In this piece, we\u00a0offer some thoughts on how we might reclaim what the university could be\u00a0 \u2013 a place that equips people with the knowledge they need to unlearn\/unmake\/dismantle the knowledge framings and worldviews that lend themselves to white supremacy and other forms of oppression more broadly.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Around the world, people are coming out to denounce systemic racism in their institutions and in society more broadly. The Covid-19 pandemic has offered a magnifying lens to the deep-rooted inequalities and injustices prevalent in society. It has also shown how inequalities, such as those along racial, gender, and class lines, are reinforced and compounded in a relatively short time span in the efforts to return to \u201cnormal\u201d. Returning to business-as-usual is precisely what institutions, governments, and corporations are so desperately seeking. Yet, the world before and during the pandemic was\/is premised on white supremacy, colonial legacies of natural resource extraction and bondage of cheap labour. Consequently, returning to \u201cnormal\u201d is not something that we should ethically and politically aspire for. As Indian writer Arundhati Roy<\/a> writes, the pandemic should be a \u201cportal\u201d to deconstruct, and transform the world that we knew before. This does not mean making business-as-usual more comprehensive, holistic, or inclusive. Rather, it involves the harder work of \u201cun-learning\u201d and \u201cun-doing\u201d the current model of productivist and extractivist development disguised as modernity and \u201cprogress\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Responsibility of Universities and other institutions of higher learning<\/strong><\/p>\n

Universities and institutions of higher learning have an important responsibility in these \u201cunlearning\u201d and \u201crebuilding\u201d processes as they offer privileged spaces for enhancing critical thinking in dialogue with constant societal change. Even if scholars have advanced many long and fruitful discussions on how to break free from colonial legacies and extractive development models, these initiatives risk losing their meaning if they are inscribed into an academic environment which is both principled and conditioned upon competition and a growth-oriented knowledge economy. Much of the wealth of academic insights get sucked into the aspirations of an expansionary university in competition within a globalized academic industry. Academics have a notorious tendency to pensively sit back and comfortably theorize on ways to dismantle systems of inequality, even as we paradoxically benefit from those very same systems in perpetuating the knowledge economy. Consequently, our privileged capacity to self-reflect risks replicating the very structures some of us write so vehemently against, particularly in the competitive arena of instrumentalizing academic relationships for the purposes of career advancement. \u00a0The pressure to aspire for growth within academia risks knowledge getting detached from its situated context, losing its meaning, and instead becoming an end-product in itself.<\/p>\n

This highly uneven process generates cultures of distrust, hierarchy, competition, and fast-scholarship in the race to produce more in the least amount of time. While obviously reflecting different contexts of privilege, the underlying mechanisms and logic behind this production process is no different from the discipline of a factory floor, in which researchers extract knowledge and are themselves the subject of extraction. In addition, knowledge production in academia is reserved to those who are the best-placed to compete in this game, which is often to the disadvantage<\/a> of women, people of colour and junior researchers, and those without academic credentials (including local community members who are often the \u201csubjects\u201d of research with whom especially social science scholars interact with in advancing either theoretical or applied knowledge). The competitive tendency takes extraction and instrumentalization of relationships in academic collaboration as a normalized starting point and then builds on this mode of operation as a way to gain a greater share within the knowledge economy.<\/p>\n

The instrumentalization within academia extends beyond internal collaborations within academia to historically colonial relations of academics and their research \u201csubjects\u201d in the field. Bhambra and colleagues state<\/a> that \u201c[t]he foundation of European higher education institutions in colonized territories itself became an infrastructure of empire, an institution and actor through which the totalizing logic of domination could be extended; European forms of knowledge were spread, local indigenous knowledge suppressed, and native informants trained\u201d (p.5).<\/p>\n

This white gaze<\/a> of a singular understanding of the world gets reproduced through the production metrics and standards imposed by the knowledge economy (e.g. journal impact factors, departmental performance criteria, etc.). Implicit extractivism in\u00a0 academia operates by failing to recognize and then act upon the asymmetrical ways that knowledge extraction preys upon the precarious positions of more vulnerable scholars. As scholars in Development Studies in particular, we acknowledge how insights from the so-called \u201cGlobal South\u201d have historically served and continue to serve Northern universities and research institutes. This process of translating diverse knowledges into a singular easy-to-digest narrative is precisely how white supremacy circulates, even unconsciously, in reproducing the homogenizing and simplifying patterns that have shaped colonial development since the 15th century. The factory-house model of organizing and optimizing knowledge generation follows the tradition of resource exploitation since colonial times and as such, carries with it the white gaze of what counts (and doesn\u2019t count) as legitimate knowledge.<\/p>\n

\u201cDecolonization\u201d \u2013 the making of a Buzzword?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Having recognized these tendencies,\u00a0 academia\u2019s approach to responding to these challenges has been to performatively showcase universities as being \u201cinclusive.\u201d \u201cDecolonization\u201d becomes a topical buzzword for which academic pursuits can be channeled to tap into new sources of knowledge outputs for more socially-just economic growth in the knowledge economy. This new \u201cdecolonial frontier\u201d is violently at odds with what decolonization is actually about; the frontier becomes a new way to extinguish any possibility of real transformation. As Tuck and Yang have argued, decolonization is not a metaphor<\/a>; it must never be co-opted by being restricted to a checklist composed of \u201cdiversity and inclusion\u201d statements by the university, institutionalized \u201ccodes of conduct\u201d, or integrating \u201cdecolonial\u201d curricula<\/a> into more holistic graduate programs and the like. For Tuck and Yang, decolonization refers specifically to restoring native lands that were violently usurped in the process of settler colonialism. Elsewhere, it refers to dismantling the structures of European imaginaries that have come to shape how \u201cdevelopment\u201d is defined and understood.<\/p>\n

How do we then build counter-power to address the exploitative logics underpinning the academic endeavour and to subvert any attempt to tokenize what decolonization of academia is about? Changing current academic culture and its underlying perverse incentive structure requires us to collectively stand up against an unfair system, while taking into account that any type of fundamental change is slow, therefore placing the onus particularly on the more established scholars with more or less fixed positions to change the rules of the game. Given the privilege of established scholars, this is of course a delicate process that must be conducted with great transparency and accountability to avoid reproducing new forms of inequality. Building resistance to business-as-usual does not require reinventing the wheel. We must join with feminist scholars<\/a> who unequivocally state that \u201ccultivating space to care for ourselves, our colleagues, and our students is, in fact, a political activity when we are situated in institutions that devalue and militate against such relations and practices\u201d. Likewise, \u201cslow scholarship<\/a>\u201d, which refers to transforming academic institutions from the ground-up, by actively resisting against \u201cthe culture of speed in\u00a0 academia and ways of alleviating stress while improving teaching, research, and collegiality\u201d, offers a path for fundamentally transforming the power relations of knowledge production.<\/p>\n

Moving forward<\/strong><\/p>\n

This intervention is not targeted to the specific actions of individual scholars (though these do need to be held accountable), but is rather exposing a systemic problem. As academics ourselves, we are equally complicit, and feel that it is our duty to support any type of alternative that confronts the root-causes of extractive practices in\u00a0 academia. While saying this, we also recognize that writing an intervention like this comes from a position of privilege, which would not be afforded to many others, but this is precisely why we do this.<\/p>\n

There is an increasing wealth of resources, strategies, and alternatives that are being advanced to stimulate fundamental structural changes in how\u00a0 academia operates. By no means an exhaustive list, below we identify some key examples of how to move forward. These examples are even more relevant in a context of deep uncertainty and increasing precarity as a result of the global pandemic.<\/p>\n