Academic work as radical practice: getting in, creating a space, not giving up

Abstract

This paper makes three key points. First, beginning with a personal narrative on the radical practice of getting into the academy, it argues that scholars with non‐traditional academic trajectories must still be able to be competitive in employment rounds. Second, it outlines three particular pedagogies of radical practice: focussing on subjectivities; using local languages; and developing peer learning. Finally, it argues that active scholarly citizens bring intellectual agility that allows for creative, imaginative, and just development thinking and practice.

The audacity of the ocean: Gendered politics of positionality in the Pacific

“…While a slow pace is one recognizable feature of an explicit feminist ethics of care, this is more than just a time issue—it is about ‘how’ we think from our ‘issues of concern’ (Dombroski, 2018). There are particular, gendered geographies and politics of knowledge which requires shifting between various worlds of knowing—that is from our marked and racialized bodies located in marginalized places (Underhill‐Sem, 2003) to the radical work of academic practice (Underhill‐Sem, 2017). The disciplinary authority to work with gendered geographies that are fluid, embodied, unplanned and metaphorical still need to be claimed as knowledge making (Basnet et al ., 2020; Ingersoll, 2016; Longhurst & Johnston, 2014).…”

Introduction: critical development studies—critique and radical praxis

“…For Kuntala Lahiri‐Dutt () and Yvonne Underhill‐Sem (), racialised and colonial logics are the stubborn things that continue to structure institutional arrangements and power differentials. As attested by Lahiri‐Dutt's poignant example of the experiences of contemporary Gender and Development students, development (still) occurs, very much, ‘under Western eyes’ (Mohanty, , p.61).…”

“…Providing a personal and embodied account of what it is to enact decolonising practices, Yvonne Underhill‐Sem () reflects on her journey as a woman of strong Pacific heritage as she negotiates ‘the intersecting gendered, racialised, and sexualised configurations of the academy’ (p.333), a task made even more difficult by the neoliberal university. Tracing her experience of ‘getting in’ (to academia), ‘creating a space’, and ‘not giving up’, Underhill‐Sem describes an embodied ongoing radical practice where questions over who gets to decide who teaches in universities, and in what ways, represent the battle grounds of a decolonised academia.…”

“…To Lahiri‐Dutt and Underhill‐Sem building alliances and carving out agendas that embrace concepts and practices that simultaneously challenge and transform relations of power in the academy constitute the kind of radical praxis that aims to decolonise the institutional spaces which, for too long, have served those best placed to benefit from the status quo. Radicalism in this sense must involve illuminating ‘theoretical erasures’ (Lahiri‐Dutt, , p.328) and working with ‘intellectual allies’ (Underhill‐Sem, , p.336) to subvert the racialised discourses and practices that continue to structure the academy. Decolonising academic and development institutions, in the first instance, might just mean that established luminaries ‘step back’ thus enabling space for new practices and epistemological horizons to appear with fresh knowledge claims and grounds for legitimacy.…”

“…Now, a vibrant and rejuvenated sub‐discipline is represented by calls for: sustained efforts to decolonise institutions and knowledge production, especially at a time of neoliberal intensification (Lahiri‐Dutt, ; Underhill‐Sem, ; see also Hodge & Lester, ; Jackson & Crabtree, ; Pain, ); a re‐imagining of what purposeful engagement might mean for ‘critique in practice’ as a pedagogical impetus for hope work and activism (McKinnon, ; Wright, ; see also Gibson‐Graham & Roelvink, ; McKinnon, ); and the mobilisation of more‐than‐human thinking and research agendas in the Anthropocene (McGregor, ; see also Cook et al, ). …”