Affective dimensions of teaching and doing development

Abstract

Like the development industry, development pedagogy and practice have begun to take into account the role of emotions and the deeper, affective and embodied experiences of understanding and doing development. In her ground‐breaking piece ‘Emotional geographies of development’, Sarah Wright illustrates how emotions not only create development subjects and associated subjectivities, but also provide a powerful entry point for resistance that may ultimately lead to transformative social change. Post‐colonial and feminist scholars have long emphasised the role of emotions such as anger, fear, shame, joy and hope in discursive construction of the ‘Other’ and the persistence of false binaries that obscure layers of struggle, exclusion and disenfranchisement. In this paper, we (students and educators) reflect on the role of emotions and affective engagements with development, drawing upon classroom discussions as well as reading and reflection logs of those studying for a Master in International Development (MID) at the University of Western Australia. We explore how explicit efforts to be attentive to our own emotions while digesting and deliberating material for this unit allow us to better grasp our own positionality while revisiting our personal entanglements with the ‘Other’ – the quintessential development subject. Making space for ‘more‐than‐rational’ aspects of development enables scholars and educators to experiment with affective options for interdisciplinary teaching in a distinctly more personal way than students may expect from a postgraduate degree in international development.

State of the field: A comparative analysis of international development studies majors in Canada, the United Kingdom and United States

“…Doing so enables students to interrogate their positionality as well as their role in both reinforcing and breaking down neocolonial power dynamics. Drawing on student reflections in a graduate level course, Tschakert et al (2018) call for greater attention to the affective dimensions of teaching and learning. Harcourt (2017) writes that in her class, she gave students the opportunity to critically reflect on development; however, by excluding opportunities for personal reflection, too, she had 'turned their world upside-down' without a way to process that shift (2707).…”

Teaching development studies in times of change

“…At the core of efforts to decolonise development pedagogy is the need to be attentive to our intellectual and personal engagements and entanglements with subject‐making processes and the production of the ‘Other’ (Said, ). How development pedagogies both create and contest processes of othering is taken up in this Special Issue by Tschakert et al, () who explore how personal entanglements with the ‘Other’ can be mediated through ‘explicit efforts to be attentive to our own emotions’ when deliberating on development debates. By drawing on classroom discussions and reflection logs in the Master of International Development at the University of Western Australia, alongside a critical engagement with postcolonial and feminist scholars, they contest what they describe as the ‘false binary’ of ‘rational/emotional’ approaches to learning and doing development (whereby effective and lasting interventions are seen as dependent on setting aside sentimentalities) and instead proffer a pedagogy that ‘embraces emotions and the deeper embodied experiences of understanding and doing development’.…”

Feminist Political Ecology practices of worlding: Art, commoning and the politics of hope in the class room

“…I analyse how students engaged in imagining new ways of living with the Earth based on their own creative self-realization and inventiveness (Singh 2017). I look at how the ideas of feminist political ecology and community economies inform my 'care-full' teaching practices which respect the students' emotions and concerns and desires for new ways of living together and with the Earth (Katz 2001;Tschakert et al 2018;Dombroski et al 2019).…”

“…The courses aim to address the emotions of students who can become disaffected by the critiques of deepening economic, environmental and social crises that pervade much of development teaching which, at times, undermine student's sense that social and environmental change is possible. I have employed drawing and art as a method to open up possibilities for them to find ways to speak about what affects them emotionally disrupting binaries of mind and body, modern and traditional, expert and ignorant, poor and rich, developed and developing in order to nourish ideas that lead to responsibility and hope (Taylor 2004;Bennett 2010;Tschakert et al 2018). In my teaching I have found the iceberg diagram of community economies (Gibson-Graham et al 2015) very useful to open up contextual and imaginative ways of understanding local economies.…”

“…1 As shown I use the iceberg diagram and the affective dimensions of the international classroom in order to explore how thinking together in a university setting can include emotional engagements with the self and the 'Other' in international and community level economic and social development. Such exercises can help build trust and reciprocity that are vital to inclusive development processes of which commoning is one (Tschakert et al 2018). In these teaching practices I visualize commoning as not only practices rooted in one geographical place and culture but also as an interconnected collective process.…”