Race and a decolonial turn in development studies

Abstract

This paper reviews and revives a longstanding conversation about race and development studies, which was prominently explored in a collection of papers on race and racism in the journal Progress in Development Studies back in 2006. This revival is timely in the context of a global call to decolonise higher education. Given the central logic of race and racism in European colonialism, and the decolonial argument that colonialism continues in the production and value of knowledge, I examine the presence and absence of race and racism in discussions of decolonising higher education and in development studies. Through a systematic review and content analysis of papers published in six major development studies journals over the past 13 years, I identify where and how race is present in current development scholarship and explore the implications of this for a decolonial turn in development studies.

Keywords:

• race
• decolonisation
• development studies
• higher education
• whiteness

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my daughter Gaia, who is homebound due to COVID-19 related nursery closures and has kindly given me the time to complete this paper and asked for very little in exchange. I also thank the anonymous reviewers and editors of Third World Quarterly for their invaluable comments and suggestions that have undoubtedly improved this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The campaign was initially unsuccessful. The statue remained in Oxford and was publicly defended as a matter of free speech. In a blurring of symbolic and material anti-racist action, defenders of the statue withdrew financial pledges to donate to the college. See Espinoza (2016). Following a global mobilisation around Black Lives Matter and renewed focus on the statue, in June 2020 the college announced their intention to remove the statue.

2 The two other areas Rhodes Must Fall Oxford tried to address included removing colonial iconography and the underrepresentation of black, minority, ethnic (BME) students. Of the three areas, curriculum reform is most widespread as a focus for action by students and academic staff across the UK.

3 Henceforth, I integrate these terms into ‘race’.

4 I used four different advanced search engines for the six journals (SAGE Journals, Taylor and Francis Online, Wiley Online Library and Elsevier/Science Direct). There is some difference in functions among the engines; for example, the date range in some engines was by year only, while in others it was given by month and year, meaning that the total number of papers surveyed is approximate.

5 It was not possible to search abstracts in the advanced search feature for Taylor and Francis Online, which may have affected the number of papers captured for review from the Journal of Development Studies and Third World Quarterly.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kamna Patel

Kamna Patel is an Associate Professor of Development Studies at University College London, UK. Her research activities fall within two themes: (1) housing, land tenure and citizenship in the urban Global South; and (2) reflexive and postcolonial scholarship on practices of ‘development’. Under this second theme, she increasingly engages with race to understand the politics of representation in development studies education and practice.