From field to theory: rethinking development studies through study tours

Abstract

Drawing on the author’s experiences of running study tours to Malawi and India, this article argues that leaps can be made to decolonise development studies from the ‘ground up’ when study tours are centred on pedagogical processes of embodied insights, self-reflexivity and working with difference. Such pedagogical processes offer opportunities where students engage with questions of epistemic violence at the intersections of North/South tensions, while deconstructing their own onto-epistemic positionalities. In this way, study tours offer rich experiential-learning avenues, not only for resisting development studies’ colonial/positivist tendencies but also for opening spaces for teaching and learning centred on a plurality of knowledges. Designing study tours on notions of differences, learning through the body as well as a constant interrogation of our own onto-epistemic positionalities in relation to one and another, allows for this co-creation of vital spaces where plural systems of knowledges – alternative to the modern sciences – can not only be recognised but can also enter into articulations with the latter, leading to crafting new configurations of mutually enriching and transformative teaching and learning processes and practice.

Keywords:

• Study tours
• decolonise
• difference
• embodied insights
• critical self-reflexivity
• positionality

Introduction

Development studies is a highly contested space, when considering the disjuncture between theoretical viewpoints and on-going practice, particularly in relation to the Global South which continues to occupy the role of the problematic ‘field’ the discipline responds to. This disjuncture can be traced to the origins of the field, whose roots, as Sidi M. Omar (2012, 47) posits, are found in ‘state institutions, bureaucracies and academia’, rendering the discourses of development ‘a set of ideas that inform and sustain certain forms of conduct and social and economic practices’. Locating this historical context, Gabriel Jiménez Peña (2015, 38) states that the professional field of development is founded on ‘the European colonial project accomplished by France, Britain, Belgium, Portugal, and Germany, particularly in Africa in the period from 1870 to 1960 … and … consolidated since 1945 with the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the Rostovian Modernization Theory’. This has made development theory and practice align with a modernist paradigm, privileging Western theoretical and methodological orientations shaping not only how development is undertaken in the field, but also how the ‘Other’ – what Petra Tschakert et al. (2018, 187) term the ‘quintessential development subject’ – continues to be (re)produced in discursive paradigms under which development studies is taught and learnt. This has subsequently resulted in the (re)production of the materials, pedagogies and discursive practices in a way that, as Jonathan Makuwira (2016, 1) notes, ‘continues to exist in a seemingly tight world dictated by Western academic thought that legitimizes what is good Development Studies knowledge’. Coupled with perspectives on the persistence of colonial forces on contemporary university structures (Tamdgidi 2013), as well as its operation at the institutional and infrastructural levels (Hira 2015), development studies paints a grim picture of the vast complexities educators encounter whilst preparing field-ready students capable of responding to the burgeoning needs of the development field.

In this article, I examine a pedagogical approach to development studies study tours, with the aim of contributing to growing debates around decolonising development studies. The article focusses on three study tours, one in Malawi and two in India, developed and co-run by the author (see acknowledgements). To do this, I outline a pedagogical approach to study tours shaped on theoretical frameworks of learning through embodied insights (Abram 1996, 2010; Stoller 1997, 2009; Low 2015), engendering reflexivity (Langdon 2009, 2013; Kapoor 2004; Sultana 2019) and an appreciation for working ‘with’ and ‘from’ difference (Sandercock 1998; Anzaldúa 1987). To put these theoretical frameworks into practice, the study tours adopted a methodology of co-crafting the pedagogy with the host community, built around a co-negotiated physical activity involving host and visiting communities, supplemented by preparation during pre-departure sessions, picking learning materials produced within contexts visited, site visits, and debriefing sessions during the study tours. Such a pedagogical approach produces learning processes that are ‘messy’, made up of what Gloria Anzaldúa (1990) holds as theorisation that crosses borders and blurs boundaries, where there is no distinction between conventional academic theorisations and knowledge generated from lived realities existing at the margins, bringing to the forefront multiple histories, narratives, stories and memories and/as praxis – where learning becomes the act of mediating, translating, navigating and negotiating these different onto-epistemic locations. The first section of the article provides a discussion around pertinent decolonial debates outlining the current problematic situation within which development studies sits. The following section analyses the role of study tours in development studies, including the theoretical and methodological challenges emerging from conventional framings of such pedagogies. Then, the article details three study tours to shed light on what the pedagogical approach to decolonising development studies might look like, including ways in which the author weaved in theoretical frameworks, and insights on the methodology through which these frameworks were operationalised within each study tour context, followed by concluding remarks.

As a development practitioner and educator, I do not claim this pedagogical approach to be a ‘one size fits all’ approach. Like Farhana Sultana (2019, 38), I maintain that when working around decolonising development education, ‘there are different methods of teaching for decolonized classrooms and they can’t be prescriptive’, that they ‘have to be configured in context’. In this article, I also work critically though my own context, re-positioning and personal, reflexive engagement of teaching development studies, and offer the possibility that study tours, when centred on the theoretical frameworks outlined here, bring to the forefront questions of positionalities, power and privilege and how they influence and interpret each other in these contexts. Moreover, I suggest that bringing such questions to the forefront within development studies discourses opens spaces where multiple knowledges systems engage in forms of non-hierarchical, inter-epistemic dialogues (Dussel 2013), translating into learning about development studies, from the ground up, or from field to theory.

Decolonising development studies teaching and pedagogy

Recently, calls to decolonise development studies have gained prominence, bringing attention to the discursive and pedagogical ways development studies curriculums continue to promote entrenched colonialist logics within contemporary university structures (Langdon 2009, 2013; Bhambra, Dalia and Kerem 2018; Sultana 2019). These issues get further complicated, with increasing market-oriented shifts within contemporary universities, fuelled by processes of massification, corporatisation, neoliberalism and privatisation, and supported by new-regulatory frameworks at the institutional and managerial levels (Engel and Reeves 2018). Olivia Rutazibwa (2018, 165) notes how these complex intersections of colonial and neoliberal forces influence contemporary development studies curriculums as they retain a certain ‘colonial amnesia’ whilst shaping syllabuses, degree structures, research agendas and funding priorities; and how this poses a considerable challenge to its learning and teaching processes, given ‘that the enslavement/colonial encounter is what created the need for Development Studies, in the first place’. Moreover, Rutazibwa adds that

the problem with Eurocentrism is less that it exists as a place from which to understand the world, than the fact that it has been projected as the neutral, objective, and universal one. Equally important is the concealment of this universalizing move…even more remarkable and unacceptable, given the object of study is so clearly the non-Western condition and its supposed aim – its betterment. (Rutazibwa 2018, 165)

Consequently, such overlaps have amounted to development studies pedagogies and curriculum being ‘based on criteria of efficiency … rather than [to] ensure that students receive the training and knowledge necessary for the field’ (Jakimow 2015, 43).

In response to these interconnected complexities there have also been calls to decolonise development studies at the pedagogical, discursive and institutional levels, calling for a recognition of the ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano 2000) or the operation of modern/colonial and Eurocentric forces at the levels of knowledge production and dissemination and how it is carried forward in practice. Sultana (2019, 33) echoes this call, positing that the ‘­asymmetries in knowledge production and the structural inequalities that exist mean that the very understanding of and teaching about development needs to be re-envisioned and new grammars, vocabulary tools and worldviews need to be fostered’. Such revisioning of how we teach development opens the space for students to engage with questions of epistemic violence, and to analyse distinct phenomena, processes and relations of knowledge production in development studies.

Moreover, echoing the need to link our efforts at decolonising development studies to the critical method of self-reflexivity, Ilan Kapoor (2004, 628) asks, ‘To what extent do our depictions and actions marginalise or silence these groups and mask our own complicities? What social and institutional power relationships do these representations, even those aimed at “empowerment”, set up or neglect?’ Thus, for Sultana (2019), as well as Jonathan Langdon (2009, 2013), Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015), and Rutazibwa (2018), decolonising development studies requires that learners and educators engage in forms of epistemic delinking from hegemonic knowledge structures prevalent within contemporary development studies discourses by working through our own reflexive positionalities, while consciously incorporating multiple, heterogeneous knowledges and ontologies into development studies curriculums.

This raises pertinent questions: How and in what ways can classrooms be transformed into critical reflexive spaces for engagement that serve as a platform to develop new forms of development praxis, responding to the challenges of the field, whilst also engendering a disposition in students such that they can weave into their development praxis a decolonising impetus?

The study tours contexts

Study tours have become popular avenues to engage in learning outside traditional classroom settings, offering students the space for learning through immersion in living contexts, realities and struggles on-going on the ground. Even in the case of development studies, study tours are touted as critical in offering students (usually hailing from Global North, urban-educated and middle-class backgrounds) with vital experience to gain ‘real-world’ insight into the development field and to build intercultural competencies. For this reason, as Nadarajah (2016) notes,

study tours have become a critical part of the curriculum, providing an opportunity for students to get into a particular part of the world and engage more directly with an understanding of how the social, cultural economic or political situations shape development agendas and activities on the ground. (7)

This surge in demand for on-site learning and engagement has materialised a range of avenues, as work-integrated learning (WIL) opportunities, short-term placements or internships with community organisations and other community-based service-learning openings. Moreover, the advent of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT)’s New Colombo initiative in 2017 has formally leveraged study tours as vital spaces where students can bridge classroom-based theoretical learning with practical insights, and deepen methodological and applied understanding of the field. Consequently, development studies study tours are usually located within Global South communities and linked to development questions of local struggle, sustaining community agency, and responding to age-old as well as newly emerging socio-economic and environmental challenges witnessed in these contexts.

Yet, because of this positioning, development studies study tours often end up re-­entrenching certain colonial assumptions and unequal power relations dominating development discourses, primarily around the notion that problems of the field exist in the Global South, whilst solutions are the domain of the Global North. Additionally, such positionings of study tours are no longer tenable as, over the last decade, this narrative of the North–South development axis has changed substantially where new actors and processes are challenging this long-standing binary of the progressive, developed North and the backward, in-need-of-developing South (Mawdsley 2018). How do we engage students in undertaking a grounded, reflexive and qualitative study tour? In Rethinking Development through Study Tours: Interpreting the Field and Negotiating Different Viewpoints, Makuwira et al. (2016) point out that study tours provide challenging and confronting moments for students about ethics and power issues in human relationships and responses, and can become an immediate, powerful way to learn and demystify the ‘Other’ through structured and facilitated processes of listening, talking, understanding and co-working. Moreover, insights emerging from negotiating roles, purposes and processes can open reflexive processes of unlearning and reframing, thereby engendering valuable opportunities for vigorous exchange between critical and creative practice, where the rhetoric of development can be subverted and reconfigured. The following sections will add to debates on the role of development studies study tours and the value they offer towards questions of decolonising development studies.

The first study tour to Malawi

The first study tour analysed in this article took place in Malawi in November 2013. I was invited to undertake this study tour as co-coordinator by my colleague from an Australian university who was exploring ways to shape study tour pedagogies through integrating research, teaching and writing, while centring them on grounded experience and scholarship (Nadarajah et al. 2016, 18). Subsequently a relationship was also established with Professor Damon Kambewa and his academic team from Bunda College (Lilongwe University) in Malawi. The proposed study tour to Malawi provided an excellent opportunity to explore key development ideas that would assess the state of development studies in the wake of the ‘impasse’ the field had reached in the 1980s and the many approaches crowding the field seeking to question the concept of development. In this case, what would a radical rethinking of the field in the context of a developing country like Malawi sound like? What would it contain as its key principles and framework? What would it mean for us to embark on an experiential learning journey, in one of the most aid-dependent countries in Africa, to participate in and question the impacts of development? What would it mean to engage in such critical and cross-cultural dialogues, in ways where we are each politically aware of the histories and knowledge hierarchies already existent between the Australian visitors and Malawian hosts; the pre-departure sessions comprising Australian students undertaking rigorous extended literature reviews of Malawi-focussed approaches to development, kinship, food security, urbanisation, women’s lifeworlds, environment, health and communication. The first assignment was a literature review essay, a major part of which included students working with articles, essays and documentaries produced by Malawian and other African scholars.

Bunda College of Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR) is situated in the central region of the country, 35.2 kilometres from Lilongwe. For the duration of the study tour, 22 students from the Australian university worked with 12 students from Bunda College. On arrival, Australian students met their Malawian counterparts and they spent the next three weeks together, visiting sites, communities, and institutions in and around Lilongwe. Placing emphasis on such visits was a vital tenet of the overall study tour pedagogy as it facilitated several formal as well as informally negotiated spaces where Australian and Malawian students could begin to form relationships with each other. Moreover, for the study tour facilitators, such visits provided rich opportunities where the ‘body’ itself was centred as an agent of gathering experience and knowledge about the development contexts it was immersed in and interacting with. What did each of the Australian and Malawian students feel, emotionally, physically, sensuously and intellectually, as they worked through power issues, differences and experiences in the field? How were they negotiating their roles, purposes, processes and meaning making? All these formed a tapestry of experiences which not only enriched their learning but also opened a space of understanding from various vantage points, an immediate and powerful way to demystify the ‘Other’, and the processes of talking, understanding, negotiating and writing.

As one Australian student wrote in his journal (Makuwira et al. 106),

participating in the study tour with Bunda College students made me reflect on my own thoughts and processes. During our discussions and conversations, I realised the constraints on my own thinking and presumptions towards development. It was very humbling and interesting to learn with them; and it reiterated to me that outsiders do not necessarily know best. (262)

At the same time, these interactions were not always convivial. Occasionally, as course coordinators, we found ourselves running intermittent sessions (what we called ‘intercultural debriefings’), often managing what we increasingly spelt out to students as learning to unlearn in order to relearn. These sessions offered spaces to work through practices of reflexivity, distinctions between colonialism and coloniality, positionalities such as coloniser or colonised, local experts, gatekeepers or global professional elites, and what Hira (2015) historiographically unpacks in development studies as ‘scientific colonialism’. At the same time, I am also conscious of how complex this question of ‘decolonising’ is. It is beyond the scope of this article to try and work through such a complex concept, but I was warned and conscious of Eve Tuck and K. W. Yang’s (2012, 3) call that ‘decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks’.

It was increasingly apparent that the study tour for the students was not only an experience of unlearning through this decolonising pedagogy, but also was a journey of discovering new dimensions of human interaction. This conversation between a Malawian and Australian student testifies to this point (Makuwira et al. 2016):

Student A: I really want to get to the bottom of your email and where you talk about Malawi and accountability. Let me be honest here, that working with your prejudice on me has been a nightmare and torture. Otherwise, let’s keep in touch.

Student B: And yes, I found it annoying that you have not been meeting deadlines for our collective task. But probably more annoying is when such lack of professionalism is excused as something ‘cultural’ that must be tolerated. I find this the most damaging kind of essentialism, or neo-paternalism if you like, that absolves people from accountability. (270)

To capture these epistemic confluences, tensions and differences, and those transformative interactions that herald a new bond between human actors that I knew would emerge from such a decolonising pedagogy, I suggested to my colleague the idea of pulling together an edited book. I also wanted to move away from yet another lot of reflexive essays, which often produces a lot of navel-gazing, not necessarily enabling a space to work through a heterogeneity of viewpoints, approaches and normative concerns. A book entitled Rethinking Development through Study Tours: Interpreting the Field and Negotiating Different Viewpoints grew out of this desire to provide an opportunity for the students to articulate their understanding of what they were experiencing, where an embodied task of writing a book chapter would allow for bridging these insights to development theories in ways to capture the struggles and knowledge not just of students but also of the people living in the region of the study tour. The Australian and Malawian students formed groups based on key themes that were identified during pre-departure sessions and worked together to present their interpretations and contestations. As the students started drafting their chapters together, they also began to meaningfully interact with dissonant contexts and perspectives, broadening their understandings of others and themselves and assessing their contributions to the chapter as a reflexive undertaking of their own interpretations and perspectives. The experiments and insights emerging from such experiential tours are critical in the unfolding of unlearning about development and the field, as it calls for flexibility to continually interrogate deeply held assumptions, mental models and understandings. It was not always an easy process, and several times as study tour facilitators we had to step in and work through the whole messiness of whose knowledge and whose voice was domineering or made invisible. Yet these experiences also helped students from both cohorts to challenge the epistemic dominance of conventional development studies discourses, whilst also generating rich discussion amongst the coordinators.

The result, after almost two years as editors, maintaining communication and providing feedback to students, was certainly tumultuous, but also a defining process for the study tour coordinators. Increasingly, as students negotiated their shared writing outcome, the book opened a pedagogical process where students were ‘breaking down false binaries in their own critical thinking and appreciating the dialectical tension between ideas and action, between interpreting and framing, listening, and narrating’ (Makuwira et al. 2016, 9). As one Australian student remarked in her journal (Makuwira et al. 2016),

having tangible conversations with Malawians and specifically young Malawian students really added a depth of emotion that academic resources and literature could not possibly provide. Our ways of life and our beliefs were very different, but essentially, we were both two youths trying to work out where we belonged in our own countries and also generally in the world – there was so much that we could learn from each other. (256)

The multi-authored book was launched by the students in their respective universities. In their accounts, students spoke of their shared writing as a journey of labour, critique and creativity. It had also re-energised for them the field of development as a transforming space of collective analysis through their own reflexive processes and working with deep differences, unravelling the everyday-lived roles, realities and effects of locally based organisations, institutions and communities. From this, it also started to emerge for us development educators how such a study tour pedagogy, one that was centred on a shared activity benefiting both cohorts, can give rise to theoretical perspectives to development studies, from the ground up, where engaging through the body and working to achieve outcomes through negotiating such spaces with a range of lifeworlds could reveal ways in which entrenched epistemic violence can be challenged and reframed in our thinking and practice.

The second study tour

In 2016, the opportunity presented itself again to undertake a study tour. In this, I was determined to continue exploring ways in which study tour spaces could be transformed to offer rich avenues to build meaningful relationships between the academy and the local that were mutually enriching. How can a study tour open a pedagogical space for an inter-relational, multi-epistemic orientation to a way of working that would seek to unsettle the hegemony of conventional Euromodernist methodologies? The quest for learning with indigenous cultures is vital in the decolonising journey, and this second study tour offered an opportunity to develop a curriculum that recognises that, while the university is a historically white institution that continues to be affected by legacies of coloniality, it is also a space where we could push to work more critically and reflexively about the geopolitics of knowledge production.

I approached one of my longstanding research partners in the field, Centurion University,¹ in Odisha, India, and elicited their interest in co-developing a study tour programme in their remote campus. The programme would enable us to bring together a group of Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (RMIT) students with a similar number of students from Centurion University. For Centurion University, this also meant a new course which would then be open annually as an opportunity to do study tours with other partnering institutions. As one of its initiatives, the university had allocated five of its 100 acres to the Saora² tribal community, inviting their co-location as part of the university’s learning trajectory, seeking ways to integrate tribal knowledge systems in its curriculum, research and training programmes. I was also keen to create an opportunity to bring together diverse knowledge traditions, creating a learning environment that valued the messiness and complexity of encounters and relationships while simultaneously deepening processes of reflexivity – not just with binaries, but also with other dimensions of meanings derived from the natural, physical and spiritual worlds.

It also presented an excellent avenue to address the critical gap in indigenous knowledges in development studies programmes in Australia that are visibly absent; this issue is all the more problematic given ‘Australia’s geographic positionality between the north and south and our own Indigenous population which has the oldest continuous culture in the world’ (Engel and Reeves 2018, 222). Indigenous and tribal people’s relationships with the environment, often demonstrated through deep ecological and place-based knowledges, offered a challenge to see beyond categories and labels, to shift from the language of the colonisers and to engage in an activity that might provide the students with embodied insights into cultures very different from their own.

It was also in this study tour that the idea of moving away from a purely development-focussed approach to an interdisciplinary one began to take shape. This presented yet another way to work through development studies’ discursive boundaries and deepen forms of learning and teaching centred on working with differences – not just through our own contextual focus of working at the intersections of Global North/South tensions, but also in attempting to situate the study tour pedagogy in the in-betweenness of disciplinary and institutional structures. For these purposes, I also invited a colleague from my university located in the Languages Department, teaching Spanish and migration studies. Her emergent work on migration and identity, particularly through her own reflexive positionality as a refugee from El Salvador, was critical to deepening how I was constructing and managing the shared activities for this study tour. In this, her input not only provided the opportunity to interrogate ways that language and culture shaped discussions, methodology and responses to development issues but also highlighted for us the invisibility of subaltern languages in conventional development cycles.

This study tour, in 2016, was entitled Culture, Intercultural Relationships and Development Practice. Shared discussion with tribal elder Srinivas Gomango, members of the Saora tribe and our Indian counterpart prompted the idea of co-building a traditional Saora mud house on the five-acre space. For us educators, an activity such as building a mud house, and being led by the traditional owners of the land, opened the space for dealing with critical development themes around tribal lifeworlds and knowledges, and challenges they faced in attempting to preserve their traditional and sacred ways of life against increasing state-led and global/modern interventions in the Indian context. Importantly, it served as an opportunity to embed within the study tour pedagogy forms of co-constructing development knowledges centred on the ‘voice from the borderlands’ (Sandercock 1998), that

belong to people who dwell in cultures of displacement and transplantation, to cultures with a long history of oppression, to people who have been marginalized for hundreds of years, but who are now insurgent, who are turning their very marginality into creative spaces for theorizing. They challenge familiar/dominant notions of theory and practice, of epistemology and ontology, of what we know and who we are. They challenge us to pay attention to – acknowledge and respect – difference and diversity in our theory and practice. If we listen to these voices, then we need to revise our radical emancipatory models of planning (or development) from its epistemological base to its theory of practice, to incorporate – but not uncritically – the concept of ‘difference’. (111)

Given we were working so closely with a tribal lifeworld, whose epistemic and ontological frameworks were so divergent from those of us exposed to modern/Western ways of being and knowing, the study tour pedagogy once again adopted a methodology focussed on embodied insights to further challenge the dominance of rationalist–positivist epistemologies shaping development discourses that retain mind/body, text/orality binaries. A focus on engaging and learning with and from the local, through the body, with a diverse group of lifeworlds also served as an important avenue within the study tour for sowing a seed in learners and educators, an ability to embed self-reflexivity – to initiate forms of unlearning and relearning that often revealed the operation of ‘inadvertent Eurocentric’ forces within our own thinking, being and practice and how we related to the ‘Other’ and the ‘field’ we found ourselves in (Tamdgidi, 2013).

The 2016 tour was shaped by incremental learning, unlearning and relearning processes that emerged as students from both RMIT and Centurion University immersed themselves in building this mud house with the tribal community. Unable to communicate verbally, the students and tribal community resorted to highly imaginative ways to interact over the four days. In this, the dialectical tension between understanding and building, and knowing and un-knowing, gave rise to an embodied process of doing over the analytical intellectual. As one Australian student put it,

While enjoyable and interesting, it was also challenging to try and work together without a shared language. There was also no plan set out, but only what was emerging brick by brick. The tribal elder was immersed in ensuring we were doing what was needed; but at no time did we stop to look and see if we were working to plan. Yet, this mud house was being built slowly – and at the end of four days, we had all contributed to building 8 feet high four outer and 8 inner walls. I had never participated in such a development activity before. Yet I was amazed at how I had learnt in those four days about the way things can be done, what I could manage even without a shared language – and how much what I was doing with my hands and interacting with others was making me see things in such a different way. I felt so emotional yet so free – everyone was the same but also different. It is so hard to explain.

At the same time the experiences for many of the Indian students brought challenges and new insights to their own epistemic locations in different ways. As one Indian student put it (Nadarajah et al. 2022),

I have never taken part in something like this and with students from a Western country. They are so different; they speak so well and answer their lecturers so strongly. Yet after these days, building the mud house with my own hands (my parents would have been shocked; we don’t do such jobs), I was so surprised to see how same we were. I knew things that they did not, and I felt great that I could share my knowledge. (89)

Another activity was also crafted for the Australian and Indian students to work together and present their inter-cultural learnings at the end of the tour in the form of a video, song, dance or art. Through this, the programme introduced the idea of ‘exegesis’ as a representation of alternate forms of expressions in the decolonial landscape in which students could craft creative expressions of their learnings. Much of this activity was linked to the experience of building the mud house together, where they were able to reappraise the place of language, knowledge and processes of knowledge-making – one that allows us to critically trace and locate how power-driven cultural frameworks can also be witnessed operating in our contemporary context, a practice that Kothari (2006) calls ‘mapping colonial continuities’. These experiences were not particular to the Australian students, but also encompassed Centurion University students and Saora community participants.

Study tours provide the most exciting and radical promises for development studies, where learning, unlearning and relearning are anchored in practice, deepened by negotiating differences and crossing boundaries that are often less known, conflicting and contesting. Pertinent to students in this study tour was the fact that, as Langdon and Agyeyomah (2016) point out,

The conversations and reflections that come out of this space of real engagement are much more complex than those emerging from enactments of development programming. For instance, students begin to actively unpack how certain ideological stances taken by these organizations/movements have implications on struggles and see that there is much more grey to pushing an agenda derived from a given marginalised community than there is in the linear simplicity of a development project. (57)

The third study tour

In 2019, the third study tour, entitled Land, Language and Development, was conducted once again in Odisha, India, with Centurion University. In this time from 2016, the development field was also experiencing more turmoil and debate, with calls to decolonise universities gathering momentum. Movements such as ‘Rhodes Must Fall Oxford’ (RMFO) that started at Cape Town University, then spread across South Africa to Oxford University in the UK, the UK’s National Union of Students’ (NUS) ‘Why is my curriculum white?’ and Georgetown University’s calls for slave reparation drew much critical attention to not just racial discrimination but also institutional racism. The 2019 study tour provided an excellent opportunity to explore the remarkable constellation of thinking around decolonising university curriculum and construct a study tour programme that would deepen the way students experience how the visual and performing arts (for example) were also passing on knowledge and giving meaning to such movements. The conceptual deck of development studies is often, if not always, stacked in favour of text-based epistemologies, methods and strategies, and I was keen for students to more deeply experience and then question whose interests are served by the textualisation of development practices.

I drew on the work of Dwight Conquergood (1995, 2002) in performance studies and the process of ‘performativity’ that privileged action, agency and transformation. In this, Conquergood’s work was aimed at decentring positivist modes of knowledge production that retained visual/verbal prejudices over other nonverbal or embodied modes of inquiry, and to also challenge its tendency around ‘textual fundamentalism’ which de Certeau refers to as the ‘hallmark of Western imperialism’ (de Certeau 1984 as cited in Conquergood 2002, 147). Thus, a conscious weaving of performance studies frameworks into this study tour methodology attempted to embed forms of learning and engagement centred on epistemic pluralism that celebrated ‘the whole realm of complex, finely nuanced meaning that is embodied, tacit, intoned, gestured, improvised, co-­experienced, covert and all the more deeply meaningful because of its refusal to be spelled out’ (Conquergood 2002, 146). This provided not only the space to build on working with differences and embodied insights but also a self-reflexive process in which attention was placed on how ‘one’s assumptions and norms [could be] destabilised and remain under constant review; preparing the ground to be able to listen to others, including the subaltern in a way that honours, rather than appropriates, these voices’ (Langdon 2013, 390). In this study tour, I once again invited my university colleague from the Languages Department to be a study tour co-coordinator, who at that time, was also beginning to grapple with ways to embed a framework for decolonising languages into how she was teaching Spanish and migration studies. For my colleague and me, this study tour gave us a dialogical space to engage within a decolonial framework, with questions of our own onto-epistemic locations as Global South women of colour, seeking to expand our consciousness and generate innovative insights and questions that challenge binaries, discourses, language hegemonies, rigid disciplinary impositions and the invisibility of women of colour within dominant colonial, racial and western feminist development frameworks.³

The shared activity in this study tour consisted of Australian students engaging with local primary school students from years 5, 6 and 7 at the Centurion Primary School⁴ at Parlekhemundi, Odisha, who came from tribal Odisha, from the neighbouring state of Andhra Pradesh and from varying caste backgrounds. For this activity, Australian and Centurion Primary School students were divided into groups and asked to co-create exegetical work in the form of dance, music, painting, photography and pottery, guided by local primary school teachers who taught these art forms at the school. The Australian students and the Centurion primary students presented their work at a general school assembly at the end of four full days of working together. There was a traditional folk dance, a classical musical piece, a display of Saora, other traditional folk art and the painting of Australian cultural images on two allocated school walls as large murals, a photo gallery of local flora and fauna, and, finally, a display of collaborative efforts at sculptures representing both Australian and local cultural artefacts and household items – with each exegetical piece being accompanied by a narrative. This reinforced for both development educators and the students, as Clammer (2015) reminds us, that

Stories, narratives, images, and expressive performances are central to human life … that imagination, rather than reason is the main faculty of human interaction with the world, and imagination expressed in myriad forms, many of them artistic, and which in turn spill over into what might be termed ‘social imaginaries’. (8)

In this, the study tour offered a wonderful opportunity for students to decentre, but not necessarily discard, the textualism pervading dominant regimes of knowledge, where a plurality of epistemologies influenced ways of thinking about cultural practices and knowledge making. Although it was challenging for them to work through language differences, inter-generational tribal and non-tribal and contemporary lifeworlds and local culture, these shared exegetical tasks forged creative and analytical avenues in which learning and engagement within the study tour transgressed into a space of ‘knowledge as a mode of being-­together-with’ (Said, 1978, 36). Importantly, being immersed within such ambiguous and multiple-epistemic spaces reinforced a learning process within the study tour pedagogy, where students were confronted with the important point raised by Sultana (2019) that

All knowledge has to be contextualized and different ways of knowing and being in the world valorized to expand knowledge bases, not invisibilized in the institutionalization of Western hegemonic knowledge. Disagreement is often the underlying premise of decolonial theory as it rejects the universality of knowledge produced in the West … so [students must learn to] deal with contradictions, disagreements, and incommensurabilities in epistemology and ontology in contextualized ways. (37)

Debriefing sessions I ran at the end of each day during all three study tours, mapping key learning and unlearning moments, much like a landscape of the unravelling mind, the felt impressions of the body and the interactions with the Other – all became junctures and disjunctures of what were now reflexive visibilities. Moreover, it reinforced for me what I had myself experienced when I delved more deeply into my own development work with communities, that (Nadarajah, 2005)

Deepening into such a ‘space of engagement’ takes effort as well as attentiveness and empathy. It also requires the building of skills that subsequently enable the practitioners to deepen into more than one ‘space of engagement’. It enables the engaged to contemplate the unpredictable, the irregular, and the almost unimaginable, and to create images and a rich language that can be interpreted in different ways by different people. It also reminds us of the importance of carefully examining both the actions and the assumptions that make up our everyday life. (72)

Thus, by shaping the study tour pedagogy on a methodology that was dialogical, embodied, plural and contingent on place, the students were able to develop the ability to reflexively engage with their processes of learning that often occurred amidst discomfort, vulnerability and struggle, both in the field and within their own ontological beings. And it was in recognising the means to address these feelings of vulnerability and unrest that the students were eventually able to unlearn and relearn several dominant theoretical frameworks and assumptions that they had been exposed to in a conventional Western university. While study tours can often end up re-entrenching certain colonial assumptions and unequal power relations dominating development discourses, the practices emerging from these three study tours challenged this. They rekindled the possibilities for opening spaces for epistemic emancipation and challenging epistemic violence, enabling students to think critically about their positionality and their own epistemic privileges and limitations. In this article, I did not comment on the differences that emerged from two very different study tour contexts. This would require a much more comprehensive focus and detailed analysis, given the complexities as well with patterns and approaches to learning, and study processes that have been in interaction with each of our own national, cultural, political and educational environments.

Conclusion

Colonialism has shaped our world. Although study tours have from the start regarded themselves as rich experiential learning avenues, they are inevitably entangled in coloniality by the fact that they are focussed on ‘providing students with opportunities to work with the materials and social manifestations of poverty inequality and conflict in countries labelled “developing”’ (Nadarajah et al. 2022, 4). Study tours, in the end, are really about questions of power, knowledge and position and are ultimately linked to their contexts. So, this inevitably means that study tours, particularly in development studies, need to first address the question of how to decolonise their materials, pedagogies and discursive practices. Study tours are usually presented as seeking to provide a ‘direct experience through a shared area of development activity, encouraging reflection on the issues this raises and deepening cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary understanding of development processes and outcomes’ (ibid). But by and large, and inevitably, the study of the South by the North, the village by the city, leads to situating the student and the staff in an untenable position of the outsider within seeking to find a solution to a problem raised by those on the inside. This reminds me of Makuwira’s (2016, 3) point of caution that ‘development is a political process loaded with power dynamics, teachers of development studies need to crack out of their cocoon of comfort and reassess not only their pedagogical philosophies but also to be conscious of their positionality and its effects on development studies graduates’. These study tours, that have brought to the fore my own entanglements with coloniality, remind me of what Ndlovu-Gatsheni (cited in Omanga, 2019, 21–23) notes – that

The greatest impediments to decolonization are the very people who are supposed to lead the decolonial struggle because they are products of colonization. They will need to first liberate themselves before they can do anything. It becomes a lifelong relearning process. The leading academic voices on decolonization are also products of westernized universities, which taught them to think in a particular way. What they are engaged in is self-unlearning and there is, therefore, the need to unlearn and then to relearn … We need to be honest and say we are products of these processes and structures of power that we are fighting to change. And the potential for contradictions and ambivalences are endemic to the exercise, and we must not fear confronting them. Despite the contradictions being inevitable, we must still act and fight.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s words certainly reaffirm for me that more than the students themselves, it is the teachers who have to commit ‘ourselves to chipping away the edges of entrenched discourses. And this is often more complicated and challenging than one would envisage for the teachers involved’ (Nadarajah et al. 2022, 86).

In this article, by elaborating on three development studies study tours, I have attempted to make visible and more apparent the enormous efforts that are needed from us as development teachers and practitioners to engage a pedagogical approach that has the capacity to incorporate some of the key tenets from perspectives promoting calls for decolonising development studies. I argue that when study tour pedagogies are centred on theoretical frameworks of embodied insights, engendering reflexivity and working with and from difference, this produces forms of learning where one’s positionalities and how they are influencing and interpreting the ‘Other’ and context come to the forefront, opening critical spaces for engagement in which multiple knowledge systems can get into non-hierarchical inter-epistemic dialogues. This in turn throws open forms of learning about development studies that are anchored in principles of, as Sultana (2019) notes,

undoing and redoing, of unlearning to relearn, of questioning, reconsidering, and being open to different possibilities. It is not a singular pursuit, but one grounded in contexts and epistemologies with multiple outcomes. It first starts with unshackling our minds, decolonizing our senses, cultivating a consciousness of ethics, and practicing critical hope, rather than accepting the normalization of colonialist ideals, scientific racism, Eurocentric hierarchies, hegemonic constructions or dominant tropes. (42)

These tenets bring to the forefront the value of reflexively encountering questions of one’s positionality, power and privilege (Sultana 2019; Kapoor 2004), deepening the capacity to engage in multiple-epistemic dialogues (Langdon 2009; Dussel 2013) and refining the ability to analyse, interrogate and deconstruct knowledge hierarchies conventionally shaping development discourses (Rutazibwa 2018; Langdon 2013; Sultana 2019). In this way, study tours offer rich experiential-learning avenues, opening spaces for teaching and learning centred on a plurality of knowledges.

I also particularly focus on how we bring the relationship, voice and role of the South into the way we rework curriculum and pedagogy. This included re-centring the curriculum to bring to the fore literature written by Global South scholars, partnering with a Global South higher education institution, and teaching collaboratively. Partnering with a higher education institution also meant we could engage with interrogations of North–South development hierarchies with their development studies staff and students.

In the discipline of development studies, where knowledge and power are inextricably linked, framing the study tour pedagogy by deepening relationships of differences led to rethinking questions around how theoretical and methodological paradigms could be reframed in development. By engaging with multiple voices of difference, questions of how knowledge is produced, what it means to know and what counts as valid knowledge in localised contexts became visible. This helped to draw a critical lens towards the over-reliance of the Western canon of knowledge as being the sole proprietor of producing solutions in the field and questioned the hegemony of positivistic methods on shaping development theory. But designing study tours on notions of differences, learning through the body as well as a constant interrogation of our own onto-epistemic positionalities in relation to one and another, allows for the co-creation of vital spaces where plural systems of knowledges – ­alternative to the modern sciences – not only can be recognised but can also enter articulations with the latter, leading to crafting new configurations of knowledges or what Boaventura de Sousa Santos, João Arriscado Nunes, and Maria Paula Meneses (2007, xx) term an ‘ecology of knowledges’ in the field of development.

As one Australian student so eloquently summed it up for us,

As co-creators of our own learning, we found meaning in the process itself, instead of having an outcome-driven focus looking for a meaning beyond our experience. This process signified for me a reframing of mind from linear thinking dependence to embracing the messiness through the grounding sense that the contact with the earth and the field can facilitate. Moving from the position of an outside observer to being an active participant translated to a shift from the intellectual to embodied learning … In this sense, the value I gained from an academic perspective lies within the experience of my ‘displacement’ from the classroom to an experiential way of knowing. At the same time, I came to realize the transformative potential within a collective by subverting my individual identity as a student to the identity of a community of co-learners.

Acknowledgements

These study tours would not have been possible without the concerted efforts, collegiality and shared commitment to scholarly collaboration of my colleagues Dr Glenda Mejia, Senior Lecturer at the School of Global Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, Australia, and Professor Jonathan Makuwira, now Deputy Vice Chancellor at Malawi University of Science and Technology, Malawi.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yaso Nadarajah

Yaso Nadarajah is currently Associate Professor of International Development in the School of Global Studies at RMIT University, Australia; Adjunct Professor at Centurion University, India; Affiliate Professor, Research Centre for Indian Ocean Island Countries (RCIOIC), South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China; Island Studies Foundation/Trust Board member of Fróðskaparsetur Føroya/University of the Faroe Islands; Elder, Kukukuku tribal community, Papua New Guinea; and Deputy Editor, Island Studies Journal. Her research, teaching and practice, particularly in Papua New Guinea, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Australia, is grounded through critical reflexivity and practice, seeking ways that theory, method and praxis is attentive to lived realities, locally engaged and committed to multiple ways of knowing. She has several publications and is currently working on two books: Dis-Locating Theory in International Development and The Rage of the Kumalu River – Across Rivers, Place and Ancestors, Papua New Guinea.

Notes

1 Enacted by the State Legislature of Odisha in 2010, Centurion University of Technology and Management was set up in Gajapati district, Odisha. The university, as part of its charter, has a School of Vocational Education and Training aimed at creating alternative employment pathways for young formal education drop-outs; and has also set up a number of social enterprises that serve as community–university integrated learning laboratories intended to build resilient networks between Centurion staff, students, alumni, and the local populations such as tribal farmers or women entrepreneurs, ensuring that learning is ‘ground-up’, ‘local’ or ‘context specific’ (Singh and Pattanayak, 2019, 38).

2 Odisha has one of the most diverse tribal populations in India, with 62 tribes. The Saora, variously pronounced and spelt as Sabara, Sa-ara, Saura and Sora, are one of these 62 tribes of Orissa. An ancient people, there are references to them in many of the great epics and ancient Sanskrit literatures of India. The tribal community that Centurion University has started working with live on the hills amidst forest in the Parlekhemundi and Gunupur areas of southern Odisha. Many have been resettled through various state and federal government schemes into the more rural and peri-urban centres of these districts. For many, these resettlement schemes have resulted in a loss of connection to their lifeworlds, and especially their languages (Nadarajah et al. 2022).

3 These discussions emerging from our shared space within this study tour led me, along with my colleague, to develop an article entitled ‘அறிவின் உரையாடல் (Ar-ivin- Uraiyāt.al)/Un Diálogo De Saberes/Discourse of Knowledges: Between Language, Knowledge Making and Development Studies’. This article is a work in progress.

4 The Centurion Primary Public School at Parlekhemundi, Odisha, was established by Centurion University in 2006. This was in response to the low access to primary school education in this remote tribal area. The school is a co-educational institution, affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). It is managed by the Jagannath Institute for Technology and Management Trust, which also oversees Centurion University.