Gender, Power and Knowledge for Development

Global norms and heterogeneous development organizations

“…However, differentiated positions not only exist between Western countries and countries in the Global South. As Narayanaswamy argues (2017), in the Global South the spaces of dialogue and contestation from which gender norms are perceived to emerge are increasingly occupied by professional elites. This has implications for who is represented and how and the ways in which gender norms are articulated in mainstream development, to the detriment of the voices of the most marginalized, often women, who suffer most from gender-blind development practices.…”

Critical information literacy: Adult learning and community perspectives

“…Proliferation of propaganda and fake news in online platforms; restrictions or financial barriers to access information (paywalls, digital rights management); and overwhelming amounts of information that can be hard to sift through for relevance (see also Narayanaswamy, 2017;Zuboff, 2019). Such challenges are concerns for those engaged in the related field of "civic literacy" (Morden, Prest, Hilderman & Anderson, 2019) since political awareness and democratic participation require analysis of news media in a variety of forms that exists in 'a challenging information environment which includes a wealth of unvetted information and potentially malevolent forces online deliberately sowing confusion and even anger' (p. 8).…”

“…Within community development practice, the transformation is variously framed with catchphrases such as K4D (knowledge for development), knowledge translation or mobilization-terms that often appear to represent knowledge as a commodity that can be transferred to marginalized communities in need (Narayanaswamy, 2017). This needsbased approach very much resembles the concerns raised by new literacies scholars who argue that such deficit mindsets disempower learners (Tett, Hamilton & Crowther, 2012).…”

Interrogating how we know the world - Starting the conversation ...

“…world. Yet how we 'know' the world is underpinned by notions of 'expertise' that are meticulously framed as part of the perceived 'rigour' of Western academic engagement and developmentalist thinking (see Kothari, 2005;Narayanaswamy, 2017). The role played by Western higher education (HE) sits at the heart of that system: 'Far more so than Coca-Cola or Disney, it is the frameworks of knowledge, encapsulated in the academic disciplines, which have become universalized' (Lal, 2005: 124).…”

“…The most blatant and persistent concern here is about the hegemony of English across the academy, an issue that surprised precisely no one and is reflected in a range of literature in this area (see Lins Ribeiro 1998;Mawdsley et al 2002;Powell 2006;Nagar 2008). And not just any English, but a professionalised English, full of inaccessible jargon designed explicitly to underpin the expertise that Western academia is perceived as uniquely placed to nourish and cultivate (Narayanaswamy, 2017;2019). But alongside this concern about language was revealed subtler or even invisible forms of control, both of what we know, and how this knowledge is both validated and communicated.…”