Public imaginaries of development and complex subjectivities: the challenge for development studies

Abstract

This paper argues that Development Studies has offered limited critical engagement with the complex ways in which development shapes the subjectivities of citizens in the Global North. Campaigns and experiences such as Make Poverty History, the "gap year" and the mainstreaming of fair trade all shape the ways in which Northern publics understand and respond to development issues. This is significant as established ideas of rich and poor are challenged and reinforced through austerity in the Global North, discourses around the "rising powers" and the closing of spaces for critical public debate on development. Research with the NGO CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development) illustrates the ways social relations and identities interweave with development imaginaries in the Global North. A drawing together of postcolonial and cosmopolitan perspectives provides a starting point for rethinking scholarship and curricula in this area.RÉSUMÉ Les études du développement ont offert peu d'engagement critique vis-à-vis les manières complexes dont le développement influence les subjectivités des citoyens du Nord global. Ce point est pertinent comme les définitions et les notions de « riche » et de « pauvre » sont remises en question à la lumière des politiques d'austérité dans le Nord, la montée des discours sur les « pouvoirs émergents » et la disparition des espaces publiques pour les discussions critiques sur le développement. Le programme Connect2 de la Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), basée au Royaume-Uni, qui met en relation des paroisses britanniques avec des communautés du Sud, illustre bien à quel point les identités et les rapports sociaux s'entrecroisent avec les imaginaires du développement. L'auteur fait appel à une combinaison des perspectives postcoloniale et cosmopolite comme point de départ pour interpréter cette initiative et pour repenser, de manière critique, la recherche et la pédagogie en études du développement.

Understanding and Engaging with Development through International Volunteering

“…All of this reiterates a key message from the literature; that deep reflection on both the self and the other is essential for volunteers to negotiate the many contradictions bound up with this work (e.g. Simpson, ; Palacios, ; Baillie Smith, ). It was clear that international volunteering can both perpetuate and disrupt stereotypes and attitudes (Diprose, ), suggesting there is a need for development education to analyse the development industry more thoroughly, using a postcolonial perspective.…”

“…This is fraught with contradictions regarding the relationship to colonial history and tensions regarding how volunteering ‘encounters’ with the ‘other’ act as an educative experience (Diprose, : 187). There is also a danger of conceiving of the ‘global South’ as a ‘playground for northern volunteers' personal development’ (Baillie Smith, : 404).…”

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

“…One student was a ‘World Vision child’; several others have been development bureaucrats; and yet others had been NGO activists, both in the global north and the global south. Subjectivities in development studies have always been complex (Underhill‐Sem, ) and increasingly scholars are critically embracing postcolonial and complex approaches to subjectivities (Baillie Smith, ; Baillie Smith et al , ; Kothari, ).…”

Nexus of Emotional and Development Geographies

“…Baillie Smith () argues, however, that the analysis of emotions and development in many of these works remains at the level of how development is represented by institutions, rather than at the level of how individuals and groups in the Global North engage with these representations. In development scholarship, this lack of in‐depth analysis of complex, changing, and contradictory subjectivities results in a limited understanding of

how factors such as class, locality, gender and religiosity come together in different ways at different times to shape the specific ways citizens in the Global North engage with and act in relation to development issues (p. 401).

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