Why positionalities matter: reflections on power, hierarchy, and knowledges in “development” research

ABSTRACT

Despite more than two decades of critical scholarly engagement, “development” is far from shedding its hierarchical, patriarchal, and colonial underpinnings. In academic research and teaching, power relations are continuously perpetuated – both implicitly and explicitly. Grounding our arguments on post- and decolonial critiques and our own experiences, we contend that how, why, and by whom “development” research is carried out must remain under constant scrutiny. We propose a reflexive and socio-politically conscious approach of “knowledge co-construction”. Thus, we seek to decouple the myths of objective production of knowledge around “development” and provide (especially) students and early career researchers with a critical gaze.

RÉSUMÉ

En dépit de plus de vingt ans d’engagement académique et critique, la discipline du « développement » est encore loin de s’être défait de ses fondements hiérarchiques, patriarcaux et coloniaux. Dans la recherche et l’enseignement académiques, les rapports de pouvoir sont sans cesse perpétuées – de façon implicite et explicite. Basant notre argument sur une critique post-coloniale et décoloniale, ainsi que sur nos expériences personnelles, nous postulons que les stratégies, les motifs, et les acteurs de la recherche sur le « développement » doivent toujours être mis à l’épreuve et réévalués. Nous proposons une approche réflexive, qui prend en compte les facteurs socio-politiques de la « co-construction du savoir ». Pour ce faire, notre objectif est de dissocier la discipline du « développement » du mythe d’une production de savoir objective, et d’offrir un regard critique sur la situation, plus particulièrement pour les étudiants et les chercheurs en début de carrière.

KEYWORDS:

• Development
• power
• positionality
• reflexivity
• postcolonialism

Once upon a time, an old man used to travel between two countries on a donkey. The guards at the border control thought that he was a smuggler, so they always checked him carefully for any smuggling goods. Every time they searched him from head to toe, but could not find anything on him. This became a routine and the guards started getting frustrated upon finding nothing on him week after week. After almost six months of thorough checking, agitation, and curiosity, they gave up and explained the whole scenario to the old man. They asked him if he actually smuggled goods, and how he managed to do it. The old man listened to them carefully, and then told them his secret. He explained that what he smuggled had always been right in front of them, but they could not see. He asked them if they had ever noticed that he always travelled with a different donkey every week. It was these donkeys that he smuggled. This was his secret. (A tale from the Middle East)

Introduction

The year 2020 marks the 25th anniversary not only of Power of Development by Jonathan Crush (1995), one of the most powerful (edited) books that has challenged the power structures embedded in “development”¹ thinking and practice, but also of Encountering Development by Arturo Escobar (1995), a seminal work on the production of knowledge and power in the field of “development”. Since 1995, and indeed before, there has been a growing concern with examining the linkages between “development” and power as well as the discursive, non-material dimensions of “development” (see Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1994; Hall 1992; Kothari and Minogue 2002; Li 2007; Matthews 2004; McGregor 2009; Petras 2003; Rahnema and Bawtree 1997; Rist 1997; Sachs 1992; Ziai 2016). Critical approaches that challenge the dominant “development” thinking, such as post-development, post-colonialism, and anti-development perspectives, have become more popular and acceptable, even in the curricula of mainstream research and education institutions in Western Europe and North America. These approaches, or at least some of their key components, have found a greater place in the syllabi of more and more undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on “development”, resulting in a rise in the number of master’s and PhD theses written through the lens of the power-development nexus. Similar changes can be observed in the practice of “development” as well. Once considered innovative and progressive for acknowledging the power relations between providers and recipients of “development”, concepts such as “alternative development” and buzzwords like “participation” or “empowerment” have become incorporated into the mainstream. Practically, however, asymmetrical power relations within and among the actors and supposed beneficiaries of “development” remain dominant. “Development” as a concept, a practice, and a field of study is far from having shed its hierarchical, patriarchal, and colonial underpinnings.

In this article, we focus on the question as to why, despite all the reform, repackaging, and rebranding of “development”, the power asymmetries and inequalities that trouble the subject continue to prevail. We focus specifically on the workings of power in “development” research. Drawing on post- and decolonial critiques, we argue that reflexivity in research processes can serve as a tool to dismantle embedded power hierarchies. In a reflexive manner, we are grounding our argument on personal research and practical experiences, first as PhD students at a university-affiliated think tank in Germany, and later on as lecturers and researchers at universities in Germany, Pakistan, and the United States (US). We contend that the dominant forms of knowledge production, which itself is a contested term, should be problematised in every context. Relatedly, we maintain that who researches “development” how, why, where, and when must be constantly questioned. We assert that research that overlooks the power dynamics in “development” must be replaced with a power-sensitive and socio-politically conscious approach of “knowledge co-construction”, which acknowledges, engages, and draws on non-hierarchical ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies.

In addition to taking reflexivity as our guiding principle, we take a discursive approach in what follows. Discourses can serve as powerful tools of practice. Inevitably, the use and repetition of a certain language influences the frames of theory, policy, and practice of “development” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013). The common practice of writing about the theory of power inequalities dictates that we tackle this question with more theory, but this is what we position ourselves against. This, however, does not mandate us to invent the wheel anew either. The most obvious answer to this question comes from the decolonial literature (Bhabha 2012; Fanon 1995) that contests the phenomenon of white colonial gaze. Through experiential data, we find that the white colonial gaze not only works in discourse, but also imprints itself on the bodies of the researcher.

As “development” researchers, we do not claim to speak for the whole of our profession. We acknowledge that our analyses are inevitably subjective, shaped by our positionalities in terms of race, gender, class, education, and upbringing in three very different social, geographical, and political contexts. However, despite of, or maybe even because of, this subjectivity, we believe that our experiences and struggles relate to that of many of our colleagues. We purposefully do not suggest a universally applicable solution. The tendency to fit all the intricate, even contradictory human experiences under the same umbrella as well as to universalise the concepts, words, and ideas is exactly the problem with the way knowledge (about “development”) is produced. Instead, by using our subjective lens, we aim to contribute towards pluriversal dialogues and decouple the myths of neutral and objective production of knowledge of and around “development”.

Below, we frame our understanding of the concept of “development”. Following this, without limiting our analysis to the critique of a single institution or a university structure in a specific country, we discuss the details of how we have been instructed to research “development” and unearth the underlying discourses of power dynamics that end up producing and perpetuating its practices. Here, the consciousness of entangled positionalities is central to what we think can be done differently in order to make the production of “development” knowledge symmetrical and, eventually, pluriversal. We conclude by emphasising that any research on “development” must inevitably be a re-search of power.

“Development”: a powerful discourse

“Development” is a highly contested term. As a field of study, it seeks to understand and explain the interconnections of global, national, regional, and local processes of change within social, political, economic, technological, cultural, environmental, and gendered spheres (EADI 2017). It is a multi-, inter- or even trans-disciplinary field that incorporates a wide array of disciplines that range from economics, to engineering, political science, sociology, anthropology, and linguistics. As a practice, it refers to an infinite number of actions and processes: infrastructure construction, economic growth, women’s empowerment, institution building, and many more. As an arena of policy, “development” seeks to save whole continents (e.g. Africa), regions (e.g. Southeast Asia), countries (e.g. Malawi) from poverty and transform whole societies (e.g. from traditional to modern social organisations), communities (e.g. from “passive” subjects to “active” agents of change), and people (e.g. from consumers to entrepreneurs). The multiplicity of references attributed to “development” has made the concept an amoeba-like term (Esteva 1992), an empty signifier shaped according to the most vocal and powerful voices (Ziai 2009).

The implications of such understandings and policies are so powerful that states and international institutions have placed a broad array of diagnoses, prescriptions, practices, and projects under the umbrella of “development”, as materialised in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Despite its obvious failings and detrimental social and environmental impacts, “development” continues to be considered normatively good and universally desirable. Any negative implications are explained with methodological shortcomings that require technical fixes rather than fundamental epistemological contestation or political debate. The assumption is that interventions simply need to be carried out more effective, inclusive, just, participatory, and sustainable to work. Not less, but more “development” in different guises is offered as a remedy for policy failures and shortcomings.

Post- and decolonial scholarship has contested such normative assumptions of “development”, exposing the colonial legacy and continuity of “development”. Post- and decolonial critique uncovers the power structures inherent in the production of knowledges and the control of peoples, places, and spaces that are all measured against the yardstick of European modernity (Dabashi 2015; Kothari 2006; Pailey 2019; Ziai 2016). “Development” is deconstructed as a discourse of hegemony that legitimises the control of the West over “the Rest”, establishing binary divides of modern vs. traditional, developed vs. underdeveloped that stand in immediate colonial continuation of civilised vs. uncivilised dichotomies (Escobar 1995). Arguably for this reason, “development” inevitably requires intervention into people’s lives regardless of whether they agree or not with the instructions and prescriptions provided to them. Since state officials and international and national “development” experts speak from a position of power, their relational capacity to negotiate and enforce has not been equal, but superior to, the beneficiaries of “development”. Despite the introduction of participation in “development”, the idea that the push for change has to come exogenously persists, cementing a binary worldview that locates problems in one half the world, and solutions in the other.

The most influential “development” thinking remains within the contours of neoclassical economics and major tenets of modernisation theories (Kothari and Minogue 2002, 7). In its mainstream discourse, “development” thinking is a continuist paradigm that believes in the linearity of relationships among concepts, institutions, states, and similar entities. It leaves no room for breaks, cracks or fissures thereof (Rockhill 2017). It does not take into account the tumultuous nature of the social reality that does not necessarily follow neatly carved pathways, but rather takes many unbeknownst turns, thereby making the processes of predictions all the more difficult, albeit irrelevant. In order to run a smoother flow, the practice of “development” follows teleological and deterministic approaches that take refuge in centralised, universalising, and homogenising tendencies. While these practices are developed in specific socio-historic contexts, their universalising nature necessitates that they are to be implemented across various socio-cultural backgrounds in a standardised manner. The differences, divergences, and fluidities thus become too chaotic, irrational, and uncertain to control; therefore, they are factored out of the “equations” of “development”.

In terms of methodology, “development” research draws on various approaches that range from “inductive methods grounded in the observation of field reality to deductive approaches that test theory-based models empirically” (EADI 2017). For years, the approaches inspired by positivism have emphasised the cruciality of staying neutral and impartial in any kind of scientific inquiry in order to produce universally acceptable knowledge. Researchers are expected to make a clear separation not only between their “normal” and “researcher” selves, but also between themselves and their research participants. As if in a controlled experiment in a laboratory, they are expected to leave behind their identities, beliefs, and values even when dealing with sensitive issues with strong political and social ramifications such as global poverty or systemic inequality. The personal biographies of researchers are perceived as obstacles against ensuring objectivity and hence quality research (England 1994, 242). For “development” researchers, however, engaging in reflexivity to unearth the grids of positional power relations is particularly critical because “we cannot remove ourselves from the machinations of power and authority that are articulated by the projects of colonialism and/or development as a whole” (Kothari 2006, 134). This inevitable interwovenness is often pushed aside through claims of objectivity in the mechanisms of knowledge construction. This is where the inherent nature of human experience and complex mixture of all socio-historical, cultural, and political forces manifests itself. We explore this in-betweenness, positionality, further in the next section.

Reflections on positionality

In recent decades, an increasing number of qualitative researchers, from critical, feminist, post-structural, and postmodern perspectives, have challenged the idea of excluding the self from research and employed reflexivity as a methodological tool in their works (Pillow 2003, 176). Reflexivity can be simply defined as “self-critical sympathetic introspection and the self-conscious analytical scrutiny of the self as researcher” (England 1994, 244, emphasis original). By taking a reflexive stance, researchers acknowledge their positionalities and how their characteristics “affect both substantive and practical aspects of the research process – from the nature of questions that are asked, through data collection, analysis and writing, to how findings are received” (Carling, Erdal, and Ezzati 2014, 37). They become aware of what kind of roles their multiple positionalities in terms of their age, class, ethnicity, gender, language, marital status, nationality, parental status, profession, and religious beliefs play throughout the research process (Ergun and Erdemir 2010, 18–19). Thus, they become sensible of the risk of constructing or reinforcing hierarchical power relations in the research setting (Bott 2010, 159–160). As Farhana Sultana states, being reflexive about their positionality allows researchers to see where they are located in the “grids of power relations and how that influences methods, interpretations, and knowledge production” (2007, 376).

The positionality of a researcher is more of a political problem than a technical one. According to Stuart Hall, “[t]here’s no enunciation without positionality. You have to position yourself somewhere in order to say anything at all” (1990, 18). In ethnographic research, the position of a researcher has been traditionally reduced to being either an insider or an outsider. In this dichotomy, insiders are seen as those who study a group with whom they share similar racial, ethnic, language, and gender characteristics whereas outsiders are those who study a group to whom they do not belong ethnically, culturally or socioeconomically (Mullings 1999, 340). Generally, insiders are assumed to have easier access to, and larger understanding of, the culture being studied. In a reverse logic, outsiders are believed to have greater interest in learning about the unfamiliar and more “objectivity” in the eyes of research participants (Merriam et al. 2001, 411). As each position is praised for allowing researchers to collect more reliable data, the pros of one position can be seen as the cons of the other position. Recently, though, critical approaches have increasingly acknowledged that the “insiderness” or “outsiderness” of researchers is not fixed and frozen, but rather fluid and context-dependent. Accordingly, there is no guarantee that researchers will be treated as insiders in their own communities or as outsiders in an unfamiliar setting based solely on their characteristics (Ergun and Erdemir 2010, 34; Kusow 2003, 593). In other words, researchers can be insiders, outsiders, both or neither simultaneously (see Breen 2007; Mullings 1999; Sultana 2007; Till 2001).

At this point, we would like to reflect on our journeys through “development” research. We were in the same cohort in the same interdisciplinary doctoral programme of a university-affiliated research centre in Germany. From outside, we three were similar. We were just any three PhD students in the group of students who came to our institution from all over the world to study “development”. When looked closely, however, we had significant differences that shaped our identities and made us who we really were in addition to being PhD students.

Arda is a male from Turkey, Aftab is a male from Pakistan, and Julia is a female from Germany. We grew up in different countries that could be labelled as developed, developing, and underdeveloped according to oversimplified classifications. We come from families that can be categorised as upper-middle, middle, and lower-middle classes in the contexts of our home countries. Related to this, the power of our passports, which have a significant influence on conference participation and academic mobility, differ disproportionally. Under the same circumstances, German, Turkish, and Pakistani citizens are allowed to visit 189, 111, and 32 countries without a visa, respectively (Henley and Partners 2020). Our educational backgrounds and research interests widely differ as well. Arda holds a BA in International Relations and an MA in International Affairs/International Security Studies. He has focused on the dynamics of technicisation and depoliticisation in “development” in his PhD dissertation. Aftab holds BA and MPhil degrees in Psychology, and has concentrated on the role and psycho-social impacts of language in “development” in his PhD work. Julia holds a BA in Socio-Economics and an MA in Peace Studies. She has worked on the mechanisms and implications of “development” partnerships in her PhD project.

Even though “field research” is a problematic concept with many postcolonial implications, it is an essential part in almost all PhD programmes in “development” studies. Our programme was no exception in this regard. As in many other research programmes in Western Europe and North America, students were given green light to do their field research only after they passed a complex of interdisciplinary and disciplinary coursework, exams, and research proposal presentations as well as received ethical clearance from the research ethics committee. Arda would do his field research in his home country Turkey. Aftab would do the same in his home country Pakistan. Julia, however, would not do her fieldwork in her home country Germany. Instead, she would go to Haiti. This was not a single case, but rather an unspoken rule of the institution: students from the global South were expected to research their own or other global South countries while students from the global North had the liberty to choose any (non-global North) country they would conduct research about. For this reason, most of our Western European friends, including Julia, did their research on African, Asian, and Latin American countries, mainly without prior knowledge of, or connection with, the respective countries. After all, they would be accompanied by research assistants, translators, and gatekeepers to make up for this lack. In other words, while students from the global South were expected to go to their native countries for their “insider” positions, students from the “developed” world were expected, even encouraged to go to the global South for their “outsider” positions (see Ziai 2020, 244 for a similar critique). For us, this (not so) small difference was one early sign of the dichotomous thinking that separated the West and the Rest, making the underdevelopment of the latter a research topic for the former in a problematic way. It prompted us to reflect on the entanglements of relationality and positionality as well as on the questions of knowledge production and the authority of different knowledges.

Asymmetries of power became even more obvious to us when we started to learn more about the workings of North–South research collaborations or “partnerships”, especially in the European research landscape. Despite the egalitarian connotations of the word “partnership”, it was the northern partner who had the power to set the agenda for research and decided whether to provide finances for research projects, which had to be designed in the way northern partners wanted southern partners to design them (Grieve and Mitchell 2020, 515). In most partnerships, principal investigators were predominantly northern-based academics controlling disproportionate amounts of resources in terms of access to funds and knowledge regarded as “legitimate” (Gunasekara 2020, 504). Their collaborators, on the other hand, often lacked such resources. For this reason, they were confined to the position of research “beneficiaries” or assistants instead of being seen as legitimate voices in the production of knowledges. Researchers from the North travelled to the South to “mine” data in a setting where they assumed the tasks of research design, analysis, writing, and publishing whereas their southern partners acted like “data mules” who “gather[ed] data that [was] deemed relevant by people who [might] not (for the most part) be too familiar with the physical, political and cultural space in which the research [was] conducted” (Gunasekara 2020, 505). In a way, these outsider researchers were “parachuting” into a community, spending some time within that community, and disappearing forever once the data needed was collected (Breen 2007, 163). Also, research grants were going mostly to the same small number of elite institutions with strong and extensive networks and a cadre of western-educated researchers, creating new exclusions in different forms (White 2020, 492). Such factors were indeed giving research a function of “extraction” and creating a hierarchy of knowledge generation.

Just as many other research programmes in “development” studies, our PhD programme also aimed at producing “development experts” who would return to their native countries with the necessary skills and knowledge to increase the depth and breadth of North–South development cooperation. Even though all three of us were lucky to have supervisors and tutors who encouraged us to critically contest and challenge the very idea of development, in general there was more interest in exploring questions such as: How can “development” be made more efficient? How should “development” be better evaluated? What technical or social fixes are necessary and imaginable? More critical reflections on how, why, and where “development” theories and concepts were invented and spread across the world were usually frowned upon. Similarly, although strongly encouraged by some researchers including our supervisors and tutors, reflecting on our positionalities in our works was largely seen as a formality. Obviously our “personal stuff” did not have a theoretical significance or global reach. For that, we had to refer to Michel Foucault’s power analysis, Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony, or similar “universally accepted” concepts invented by big names, most of whom were white males from the West. Even though this “stuff” was deemed irrelevant or found “unscientific”, it was in fact an essential part of our work. It contained and revealed delicate information on how our positionality, particularly the Western and/or colonial “baggage” we carried due to either being from the West or having been educated in the West, in fact shaped different aspects of our research processes. The examples below illustrate this point better.

Between 2013 and 2014, Arda collected data about Turkey’s Southeastern Anatolia Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi, GAP), one of the most comprehensive regional “development” projects implemented in the world (see Bilgen 2018b). His research was considered sensitive for two major reasons. First, perceived or real, there was a link between GAP and Turkey’s long-standing Kurdish conflict, which led to the killing of more than 40,000 people and displacement of more than a million (Bilgen 2018a). Secondly, in Turkey, the “[w]orks that challenge the official state narratives on the issues like Kurdish, Cyprus, Armenian problems are seen as dangerous fields where one is discouraged from working” (Alpman 2018, 85). In order to better understand the project’s characteristics, rationales, and mechanisms in light of a depoliticisation framework, he conducted elite-level interviews with dozens of politicians, bureaucrats, and experts in Ankara and Şanlıurfa. Initially, he naively thought that he was an “insider” and his “insiderness” would make the research process less complicated. However, it did not take long for him to realise that coming to Turkey to complete fieldwork was quite different than coming “home” (see Sultana 2007; Till 2001). One significant factor for this disappointment turned out to be his affiliation with the West, both within and outside Turkey. As someone born, raised, and socialised in the urban settings of western and southern Turkey, his “insider” position reached its limits in the country’s predominantly Kurdish and socioeconomically challenged southeast. He was found “too Turkish” to understand the lived political and social realities of the Kurds. He was “not Kurdish enough” to see through their eyes the Kurdish region. As a Western Turk, he was not just a researcher, but a symbolic representative of the sovereign that carried unfavourable connotations due to the past (and ongoing) practices associated with the politics of denial, oppression, and assimilation (see Bilgen 2018a, 101–101). As someone who had the chance and privilege to be educated at an English-speaking high school and university in Turkey and later on in the US and Germany, his “insiderness” reached other limits in his conversations with the Turks too. This time, he was found “too foreign” or “not Turkish enough” to understand the development policies of different political parties or the project-related viewpoints of various bureaucratic bodies, agencies, and departments. It was unfortunate that most of the interviewees thought of him as a “mouthpiece” of the West due to the political context where western countries were seen as the “dark foreign powers” aiming to weaken and divide Turkey. Numerous times he was asked why he “really” came all the way from “there” to “here”, and was advised to make sure his research serve the interests of the Turkish state, not its “enemies”. In the midst of such implications, it required painstaking patience to maintain the role of a reliable researcher and avoid “biting the hand that fed him” (Adams 1999, 353). In other words, the negative connotations of the West in the eyes of the elites at a national level, and of laypersons at a local level, led to sudden changes and fluidities in identities and power relations during the research process. For this reason, he spent so much energy on constantly negotiating his positionality – insider, outsider, or both depending on the context – to deal with the asymmetries of power, which were sometimes in, and sometimes against his favour. He learned the hard way that “power [was] a slippery thing in research relationships” (Adams 1999, 339) and that research was not following a linear path, contra textbook definitions and standardised research guides.

Aftab experienced similar dilemmas when he collected data about the use and misuse of language as a tool of control in post-colonial Pakistan in Pattoki, Lahore, and Sargodha from the educational and judicial sectors between 2013 and 2014 (see Nasir 2020). When Aftab was a child, he never knew he was living in a small village of a developing country. It was only in his teen years that he came to know the complexities of belonging to a nation that was seen worldwide as a liability instead of an asset. Just as Arda, whenever he wanted to visit the US or a Western European country, he always faced visa problems. He had to complete a whole lot of documents, give all kind of guarantees that he would not run away, and prove that he would come back to his home country. What made a country developed and what rendered another underdeveloped? Over the period of time, it became clear that it had less to do with the way people associated with their countries and more with how other countries perceived them. Before he began his PhD, Aftab thought he knew his society, history, and culture as a lived experience. During his doctoral coursework, however, the first fissure happened when he was “taught” that he had to unlearn his associations and be an objective observer; an outsider to his own social reality and research it as if he did not know the phenomenon and the field he was working in. In other words, he was told that he had to be someone else for the sake of good, authentic empirical research. While nothing seemed problematic back then, later on it became a serious challenge of knowledge production on “development”. This practice of being objective inadvertently meant diminishing his lived experience as a citizen of Pakistani society and putting on the lenses of already generated, often misunderstood, and deeply problematic discourses of power, distinctions, and inequalities. Moreover, it meant that he had to subscribe to the value set of Western thinkers if he wanted to publish his works within the academic world far and beyond the institution he was associated with. Upon his arrival for “field research” in Pakistan, he received a mixed response of suspicion and appreciation. A section of his sample imagined that he had a hidden agenda behind seemingly harmless research since he was working in a country (Germany) that generated data and used it for ulterior motives or political gains. He tried to shatter this myth by disclosing all his research protocols, methods, and questions. Still, he found resistance on the part of many participants who did not trust him. While he considered himself an “insider”, the mere perception of the locals of him being an “outsider” always stood in his way. The appreciation came from a different segment, and was reminiscent of the colonial history of Pakistan. Since the time of British rule, there developed a certain sense of being welcoming and submissive to anyone or anything that was foreign, mostly related to Europe. Since he was affiliated with an institution in Germany, it meant that he was associated with the superior culture and society. Thus, the appreciation he received was actually directed toward the link with all that was white in a more symbolic sense. It represented a post-colonial reality where the colonial power might have left the country, but the existing structures and development schemes still had remnants of inequality, deeply embedded in the functioning of “development” research. However, for Aftab, the dilemma of being either an insider or an outsider, both or none, remained unresolved, a fact that intersects through his research findings and that thickens the debate on positionalities emphasised in the article.

Being aware of the colonial implications of “field research” and feeling uncomfortable with the institutional expectations, Julia focused on the “development apparatus” and looked at the machinery rather than at the people to be “developed”. She focused on the partnerships of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) with local groups and movements and spent several months in Haiti between 2012 and 2014 (see Schöneberg 2016, 2017). Her experiences were different to the experiences of Arda and Aftab for three reasons: As a German in Haiti, she was white, she was female, and she was a complete “outsider”. After reading up on the literature on Haiti, finalising her research proposal (i.e. checking all the boxes required by the PhD programme), and booking her flight to Port-au-Prince, Julia assumed she was ready for “the field”. However, upon her arrival, she was convinced not only that her presence and desire to do research in Haiti was completely misled, but also that there was nothing meaningful she would be able to contribute. In an instant she was (made) aware of her whiteness, something that had been too easy to be ignorant of before. In a country where white was associated with rich businesspeople, powerful diplomats, well-earning NGO “expats” and, above all, a history and legacy of brutal colonial rule and exploitation, it was impossible to remain as ignorant. She went through several phases attempting to deal with the feeling of guilt of being white. At first, she attempted to make herself invisible and play the role of a neutral observer from the detached space of an outsider, failing. Stepping out to the streets in urban areas or visiting communities in rural areas, she was constantly addressed with different (nick)names, referring to her whiteness. “Hey Blan!”, meaning white person or foreigner in Haitian Kreyol, she was often called. Every day, and everywhere, she was continuously reminded of her position as the “Self” in sharp contrast to “the Other”. It reminded her of her (white) privilege and of her being part of the West that has intervened “the Rest” in so many destructive and unjust ways. The names she was called primarily made a reference to her whiteness or foreignness, but they were in fact not just simple descriptions. They held all the implications of violent white supremacy rule, colonial histories and colonial present, and “development” projects to civilise the “uncivilized” or to develop the underdeveloped. This visibility was present regardless of how hard she tried (and failed) to be invisible as a blan. In the next phase, she tried to mingle and blend in, become a somewhat insider. Sharing everyday chores and daily life in the communities, she helped preparing food, swept courtyards, fetched water from the river, and chatted. However, even though people expressed their interest, respect, and established rapport, inevitably she remained an outsider. In the third phase, she felt the best she could do was to move rather too close to a cultural relativist analysis of everything she experienced. All these failures not only increased the depth of the limbo, but also shook the legitimacy of her presence in “the field”. After all, she thought, she would get her rewards in the forms of academic degrees and recognition, but what benefit did her endeavours provide for the people who so readily shared their lives and spent time with her? Did she represent their voices correctly? Would she ever be able to give back? Was she not at all interested in what the subaltern was eating (see Sylvester 1999), but interested just in an abstract and theoretical analysis of discourses, representations, and positions of power and knowledge? In other words, during and after her presence in Haiti, she constantly questioned in what ways her humble efforts could make meaningful scientific, intellectual, and most importantly, practical contributions to people, if at all.

Positionality and knowledge production

What does this debate on positionalities have to do with knowledge production, one might wonder. Despite our obviously different, but nevertheless similar experiences, there is one tension that lies at the heart of it: the white colonial gaze. We conceive of the world in binaries (Pailey 2019, 734), taking the white colonial gaze for granted. Indeed, race has been an elephant in the (“development”) room for long. Gurminder Bhambra has poignantly coined the term “methodological whiteness” to describe “a way of reflecting on the world that fails to acknowledge the role played by race in the very structuring of that world, and of the ways in which knowledge is constructed and legitimated within it” (2017). The colonial gaze is implicated in the circumstances of “going to the field” and the way researchers are taught to extract knowledge, only thinking of it in the singular. At the core lies the question of who gets to be an expert and what kind of knowledge is considered relevant, i.e. academic. For instance, for many PhD students, the process of legitimisation starts earlier in their projects when they start learning how to unlearn and re-learn. This is done in practice through the colonial gaze that turns these researchers into question marks. The gaze bifurcates them, and creates what Homi Bhabha calls “a split between soul and the whole” (2012, 107). It means that researchers enter a reflection mode where they re-search themselves and try to find qualifiers that will make them acceptable, relatable, and adaptable in new academic, socio-cultural, and psychological environments. Researchers are left with limited options other than abiding by the rules of the neoliberal, Western-dominated academy. The random mass of “misfits” – researchers who come from various countries, especially outside the West – go through the processes of legitimisation by shedding their (black) skins and learning to wear new (white) masks as the gaze “politely” implies (see Fanon 1995). Therefore, it is the discourse of whiteness, of knowing more and more authors from the West that makes researchers fit for pursuing their academic goals with legitimacy. This gaze forces researchers to look at themselves in newfound “enlightened” ways, i.e. of producing knowledges, and at their research in the way that looks objective, scientific (read: positivist), and above all apolitical. The universalising process becomes complete when researchers convince their peers and seniors that they, too, have the skills to conduct research like they do and that they, too, can see through their eyes – through this over-arching, all-encompassing gaze that primarily installs and cements the hierarchies and asymmetries of power.

The above-mentioned universalising tendency lies at the root of all academic research, training, and practice happening in the field of “development”. First and foremost, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, scholars

who shape the nature of social science have produced theories that embrace the entirety of humanity. [However], these statements have been produced in relative, and sometimes absolute, ignorance of the majority of humankind – that is, those living in non-Western cultures. (1992, 3)

Relatedly, researchers are generally trained to take concepts like power, empowerment, and order as a given and to focus primarily on the “general behavioural patterns or trends” of these concepts. They are tasked to apply these concepts in their work, validate these findings through empirical data, and disregard the “deviations”. They are also encouraged, especially by the funding agencies, to think of research as an “ordered, rational process that should progress in a linear fashion in clearly defined steps and with sensible hypotheses and feasible objectives” (Fraser 2012, 292). In such a research setting, positionalities are of crucial importance to prevent the overpowering universal from suffocating the particular. Otherwise, “the monoculture of knowledge” would produce non-existence by turning scientific knowledge into the only criterion of truth (Santos 2004, 238–239). Similarly, the “monoculture of the universal and the global” would produce non-existence by rendering the local and particular as an inferior, noncredible alternative to what exists globally and universally (Santos 2004, 238–239). When research is conducted in this universalised fashion, the end result becomes a market-oriented, sellable product that must attract the gaze of a potential “buyer”. Interpreted this way, producing a thesis or an article becomes hardly different from any other practice of modern-day neoliberal economics. The commercialisation of research, accompanied and reinforced by the publish-or-perish culture that has permeated the increasingly precarious academy, makes researchers “voluntarily” leave their intuitive knowledge behind and rely on the “real”, “legitimate”, and “universal” knowledge to be counted.

Bottom-up perspectives are made less visible or less accurate through similar mechanisms. As our stories show, the data we generate “do not simply exist ‘out there’, [but] are a product of the relationship between the researcher and her informants” (Adams 1999, 360). Researchers are the ones who write up the results and “way forward” sections of their studies. However, none or only a tiny percentage of research participants can access these studies. Even if these works are published and distributed in the native languages of participants instead of English, most of these people are not literate, let alone formally educated. Even if the participants are educated, these works are published in expensive books and paywalled journals, a situation that turns a collective good into a commercial asset (White 2020, 500). If participants wrote their own narratives, these narratives would be quite different. Their emphasis would probably not fulfil the specific guidelines of scientific research. What if, for instance, power is not at all anything as Foucault foresaw it to the farmer who enjoys his work in the field and likes the fact that he is a part of a natural order in which his relation to the mother earth is closer and more direct than any economic gains he might have by exploiting it most? How shall we quantify these experiences? Similarly, what if today’s mantra of social construction of reality is actually a socially conditioned response to a very specific socio-historical context of modern and post-modern experiences of a Western society? Researchers do the laborious work of wrapping such practices in appropriate and catchy academic phrases that appease the participants’ doubts, serving the purpose of knowledge production centres that are most of the time located in the North. Power structures leave little or no space for researchers to let things present themselves openly, chaotically, and randomly. Quite ironically, the habitus of critical thinking is structured in a way that it leaves no room to think critically about the concepts like habitus in the first place. For such reasons, it is actually necessary to rethink our perceptions and reflect on our positionalities in every phase of our social scientific inquiries.

Conclusion

“Development” is never neutral, and always political. Power relations continue to shape the way “development” is understood, implemented, and researched. The problematisation of, and the reflection on, these structures has once again demonstrated that our positionalities as well as our privileges, values, beliefs, interests, and experiences influence the process of how we perceive the reality and study developmental issues. As researchers, we play the role of “data-churning midwives”. We give birth to a baby created of data. We cut its umbilical cord from its mother, the context, and slowly baptise it with the holy waters of theoretical knowledge and sanctify it in a specific technical and/or disciplinary language. The truth is then rather imposed upon it instead of organically emanating from it, but the optics are designed to give an impression of an organic spectacle. As researchers, we become the catalysts that enhance the process of data production. We are entrusted with a task that makes us responsible for keeping the links, or rather enforcing the links, onto the data generated around a certain topic. However, the way we approach these tasks and the tools we turn to guide us are much dependent on our positionalities.

Indeed, becoming aware of our positionalities requires the willingness to encounter discomfort and the courage to reflect this in the words we write down as academic contributions. However, having such an awareness (about the self) is an essential step towards reconceptualizing research as a “co-construction” of knowledge as well as conducting research “with”, rather than “on” or “about” a group or area of interest (see Breen 2007, 164). This awareness is crucial especially when we seek to understand, and propose solutions to, the issues that involve political, social, and humanitarian elements. Failing to acknowledge these intricacies means to commit to the acts of epistemic violence and perpetuate the injustices with regard to the acknowledgement of diverse knowledges, cosmovisions, and epistemologies that reach far beyond a (Western) positivist stance of research.

Despite the bleak analysis of the status quo, not all is lost. There are pockets of resistance, communities, and movements that are already challenging the white colonial gaze of “development”. For example, according to Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2013), relational accountability asks the following questions at the outset of every research process:

Whose research is it? Who owns it? Whose interests does it serve? Who will benefit from it? Who has designed its questions and framed its scope? Who will carry it out? Who will write it up? How will its results be disseminated?

There remains the question of how to go about. For any research that involves interaction with people, including and exclusively “development” research, the aspects of positionality, relationality, and reciprocity should be fulfilled. “Development” research cannot be legitimate if one of them is neglected, because it inevitably means that power asymmetries are glossed over and that power hierarchies are accepted, and even perpetuated.

Similarly, decolonial thinking and black feminism teach us that knowledges are always contextual, relational, and intersectional. Keya Khandaker and Lata Narayanaswamy (2020) demand that “without action on structural inequality, we will forever be tinkering around the edges of the intersectional challenges both created and nurtured by how we frame ‘development’, which is intrinsically both a gendered and a racialised construct”. Walter Mignolo (2011) proposes the “decolonial option”, an option that calls to question the structures and institutions, the coloniality of power that is inherent in “development” to try to break the structures of epistemic injustices by listening to voices beyond established realms, to acknowledge their contestations and resistances, to acknowledge the continuation of colonial structures still present, of which, as researchers and human beings, far from being neutral, we are part, whether we like it or not. Such an understanding requires an epistemological shift to acknowledge the value of non-positivist traditions of knowledge production, a methodological shift to see people as co-researchers rather than mines of information to be extracted, and a lexicon shift to construct a language that is comprehensible for many instead of a few.

Another helpful frame for resisting, contesting, and even subverting this gaze is provided by the concept of pluriverse. In contrast to Euro-modern universality, the Zapatistas famously pledged to seek a “world in which many worlds fit”. Arturo Escobar (2016, 15) has put forward that the crises we face are foremost of a particular “set of world-making practices […] that we usually refer to as the dominant form of Euro-modernity (capitalist, rationalist, liberal, secular, patriarchal, white, or what have you)”. Pluriverse requires us to transcend borders both geographically and mentally beyond narrow disciplinary confinements, while paying respect and giving recognition to diversity and otherness. A thought-provoking example is provided by the edited volume Pluriverse (Kothari et al. 2019) which offers a wealth of concepts, cosmovisions, and practices showcasing the utopia of a “world in which many worlds fit” in contrast to the Western monoculture. While the alternatives described source from all over the world, they share fundamental commonalities as to what a good life and well-being entail: the unity of human and non-human, community and interdependence, sovereignty and self-government. All of them critique the logic and impact of the Anthropocene, (neo-)extractivism, and uncritical belief in Euro-modernist ideologies of progress and growth.

In hindsight, we wish we could more overtly challenge the structures that produced and implemented inequalities and injustices, the apparatus that was “doing the developing”, and the historical traces on which it was built. This article can be read as an effort to make up for our past neglect of the critical gaze. We hope that current and future PhD students as well as early career researchers take inspiration from the ideas presented here. It is promising to see that an increasing number of researchers engage in reflexivity today. More and more books, theses, and articles explain in detail, or at least briefly mention, how the positionality of the researcher influences the research process (see Acar, Moss, and Uluğ 2020; Baser et al. 2018; Crabtree 2019; Idahosa and Bradbury 2020; Millora, Maimunah, and Still 2020). We also hope that a greater number of higher education institutions that control financial, human, and other resources become more aware and sensitive of the structural problems in this field and take action, at least by preparing the next generation of researchers to face and negotiate the issues of power throughout their research processes, especially if the research takes place in delicate environments such as postcolonial settings or traumatised places. This is crucial “to avoid exploitative research or perpetuation of relations of domination and control” and, hence, for ethical research (Sultana 2007, 375).

Going back to the tale of the old man told in the beginning of the article. As of 2020, we still witness that, on any given day, there are many conferences arranged, workshops held, and meetings convened on how to alleviate poverty, increase net enrolment, secure food, and so on. These practices end up producing more conferences, workshops, and meetings on how to achieve all the above-mentioned tasks. “Development” practice is the donkey in our story. Most of the time, what “development” experts actually succeed in developing are the practices of doing “development” at national, local, and regional levels. The old man’s secret was not to hide his goods, but to put them so up front that no one would even notice them. This resembles how “development” is being done, and the secret to its success: the very rampant, always present nature of its object, power hierarchies, and asymmetries keep it away from the lens of an analysis at any given point. This is partly the reason why “development” research, policy, and practice are so much focused on “fixing development” rather than contesting the very concept and on finding alternatives of “development” rather than alternatives to “development”.² As a contribution to these efforts, we repeat our call to challenge and disrupt the universalising, homogenising, and colonising (material and non-material) practices that are well-ingrained within and around “development”. Doing so is neither utopian nor unrealistic, and it is never too late to do that.

Acknowledgement

The authors thank the two anonymous referees for their helpful and constructive comments and feedback.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arda Bilgen

Arda Bilgen is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of International Development, Community, and Environment at Clark University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the politics of natural resources, the politics of infrastructure, and the governance of development.

Aftab Nasir

Aftab Nasir is an Assistant Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Sociology at Forman Christian College University. His research interests are post-colonial epistemologies, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, political sociology, and development studies.

Julia Schöneberg

Julia Schöneberg is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department for Development and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kassel. Her research focusses on practical Post-Development, social movements and resistances, as well as decolonial approaches to knowledge co-creation and pedagogy.

Notes

1 The word, the concept, and the practice has been (ab)used for a broad variety of specific agendas, all of them structured by the hierarchies and asymmetries of power. Depending on fashionable fads, “development” has come to be conceptualised as development-as-growth, development-as-progress, and many more, becoming an “amoeba” term that lacks any real meaning (Esteva 1992). To highlight its contested and ambiguous nature, we will use “development” in inverted commas throughout the text.

2 One recent effort to mitigate all of this on the level of knowledge production is the Convivial Thinking Collective, which Julia and Aftab have founded in 2018 and Arda has been a supporter ever since. The collective brings together a group of scholars who embrace post- and decolonial approaches when thinking, speaking, and writing about “development” and beyond (Convivial Thinking 2020). With creating space for convivial thinking, the collective attempts to break the cycle of the binary constructions we have mentioned throughout this article. According to the collective, the route towards knowing the unknowns cannot be confined to traditional academic mediums. Therefore, it provides an open-source, decentralised platform to initiate and enrich debates about “development” through more informal mediums such as visual art pieces, poems, personal anecdotes, and opinion pieces that would otherwise be lost in the hierarchical spaces of formal academic publications.