Spatial practices and imaginaries: Experiences of colonial officers and development professionals

Abstract

This paper explores the spatiality of colonial and postcolonial power and discourse as produced, performed and imagined by former British colonial service officers and contemporary UK international development professionals. It focuses on two key aspects of spatial practices. The first addresses the spaces inhabited by these colonial officers and development professionals overseas and how their locatedness, embedded or enclavic, shapes relationships to others. The second explores this distinctive social and spatial distancing through their relationship to, and imagined geographies of, home and away and how these are embodied in their institutional and cultural capital. The paper examines the regularities and consistencies that stand out from numerous individual practices through which both former colonial officers and development professionals negotiate the situations in which they live and work. It also specifies how authoritative management, privilege and distance informs their spatial practices despite changing global contexts and a more diverse composition of those who articulate contemporary relationships between 'first' and 'third' worlds. Finally, the paper suggests that the cultures which travelled over colonial space through being performed by colonial officers have been reworked throughout the postcolonial period, belying epochal historical periodizations that conjure up a clear disjuncture between colonial and development eras.

Which migration, what development? Unsettling the edifice of migration and development

“…The teleology of development, and the power of certain kinds of knowledge about what constitutes development, must be continuously secured through the embodied knowledge practices of migration professionals. Kothari's (2006) analysis of the practices through which development came to be played out through colonialism and post-colonial periods provides us with one example of how the mobility of development offi cials was a necessary part of developmentalism.…”

Taking post‐development theory to the field: Issues in development research, Northern Thailand

“…This subject takes shape around the expression of particular ethical values, a particular approach to development work, and, by extension, a set of universalising ideals. The majority of previous analysis considering development professionals focuses on their position as agents of neocolonialism or as conduits for the imposition of Western-defined development norms (see Townsend et al, 2002Townsend et al, , 2004Kothari, 2005Kothari, , 2006Nightingale, 2005). I argue that the story is not so straightforward in northern Thailand (see McKinnon, 2007, 2008.…”

Social Mobility via academic mobility: reconfigurations in class and gender identities among Asian scholars in the global north

“…Creese and Wiebe 2012;Man 2004;McDowell 2006;Nowicka 2014;Wright 2006). On the other hand, migration and other form of mobilities can add to the class resources among (mostly Western/White) 'privileged migrants', 'expatriates' or 'mobile professionals' (Beaverstock 2005;Findlay et al 1996;Kothari 2006;Leung 2013). This paper grows out of this body of literature to investigate the impact of migration on class, gender and racial/ethnic positions and identities, which plays out in complex, contextualised and intersecting ways.…”