Archive for the ‘development studies’ Category
evidence – and evidence of what and for who?
so what is the nature of evidence in the academe – who is required to provide what evidence and why…
how may you be made ready to hear the voice(s) you ask me/us to reveal to you?
why do you want us to reveal that “authentic” voice to you?
who decided that if I put something in quotes it becomes his authentic voice?
how may you be made ready to hear the voices you think you will hear if we reveal his words to you?
how would you know his “authentic” voice when you do not take the trouble to go there and hear it as a voice in context?
why do you wish me to pull forth his voice for you to pull forth with the click of a mouse
how does that make you the judge of whether or not it is really his voice
why is she assumed to be voiceless
when the conceptualization of “voice” is in your control
still
(k)no(w) you
we will not “give” you her voicings
you will just have to make the effort of trying to understand within what we write
or come down and try to translate it yourself – but be assured you are being watched as you
confident of your ability to translate
invade, capture and preview
hers
and
his
voice
so that they may be pulled up and analyzed and understood
even as you take their daily living away as in the capturing and replaying
you take no note of what they seem to be asking for
because the complexity of what they say cannot be captured, recorded, shifted and replayed
outside
de-contextually
where
all so that you may feel you are a part of the community of protest
you have replayed, captured and colonized his meaning
yet again.
Protected: journeying back to Rajavolu…
For Phyllis and Candice – so we can continue
why dont we ask this when you walk into a levi stores or a lifestyle mall?
Note – sometimes posts and pages on this blog are password protected – if you are interested in reading and participating in those select discussions – email me and I might consider sending you a password.
If not – keep guessing:)
Usually – I leave most posts unprotected for about 5 to 6 hours (sometimes even more hours – sometimes not at all) after I post them before protecting them.
Protected: continuing conversations …. finding the ruptures
Protected: quote – relevant to dialogues with s, l, sh and a – thinking through representational practices and voic[e](ings)
in mid-conversation again…
….always seeking a conversation with multiple locational contexts contributing to it – while it is important at this stage for you and me to work out our speaking positions (although I dont mean individual speaking positions – even though, sometimes the language is making us seek that in relation to this particular context) and also to try to understand where what we say is feeding into some sort of framework – a framework/audience that IS feeding into what is being labelled as a generalized “development praxis” and it is through seeing multiple ways in which the externallabel is mobilized in particular contexts that we may gain and understanding of how the work being done at DA departs and connects…
back to the Bant Singh discussion
J writes on that discussion (see url linked in a previous post – if I put the url here it pings back to the site in the comments section and I dont want to link all my thoughts directly via that site once again in another comments post – even though people may very well travel here from there anyway because of the previous ping):
†what is the kind of politics that can be generated through online exchange of images such as this? If left at the level of individual viewing it would perhaps, at best, be an act of critical conciuosness–I continue to be optimistic that that is in itself a valuable part of education. At its best, it will become part of a collective source of action.â€
I responded on that site – but am still uncomfortable – I would have so easily agreed with this 8 years ago. The team at DA has literally shown me – through taking my hand and actually travelling me through – allowing me to work and go to the villages with them whenever I went to H’bad these past several trips… this is what we are trying to now articulate.
Yes there will be collective action – but what forms will it take – is action without engagement in the context in itself productive.
The point though is exactly that – the “kind of politics that [may] be generated…” while I am sure that in that statement is implicit an optimism abou the kind of politics possibly generated – there is no guarantee that the culture of globalization within which internet-speak as it is today will yield the kind of politics assumed by the optimistic reading of that statement…
enough said for now – this feeds so much into the work I am currently writing/dialoguing on – which is why I found myself caught up in discussing it so much. L looked at it today and thankgoodness she got it. So we will go back to talking about a certain documentary maker and enunciation within “global” contexts – where global is set up in a particular hierarchy which is conveniently erased as soon the global is spoken of with very specic “globals” pitted against it as local. More on this later.
We have to develop multiple notions of what it means to act – collectively – and when which collective contributes what…
enough said for this morning…
L emailed me her re-construction of the memory from last november – perhaps as we write that I will be able to get back to this nagging sense I have about seemingly unproblematized or unpacked notions of collective action through these interfaces.
Senior center talk on Climate Change and thoughts on rickshaws and livelihoods…
more later…
[dialoguing with my thoughts from yesterday at the Great Decisions talk that C gave]
just had to put the header up to remind myself to blog those thoughts sometime…
