Pri's blog

In Duncan Green’s From Poverty to Power blog, Who is an expert?   guest blogger Farida Bena confesses to “hav[ing] many lists of experts on file” and noticing that “it’s usually people from a Northern/Western background, with endless degrees and credentials, most of them English-speaking.”   She asks the pertinent question “What if there’s a whole world of ‘expertise’ that we simply don’t consider?” Interestingly this comes on the heels of the launch of ReCAP’s “ Retaining Rural Access Knowledge of Experienced Rural Transport Sector Experts ”   set of short videos, which, if one was to describe rather crassly, is a collection of snippets on different topics from 17 talking heads who were selected on their seniority and probability of either not being around much longer, or losing it even if they were!! A rather depressing thought considering I was one of them!!    Equally depressing was the fact that of the 17 chosen few, 12 were white and 13 were...

It is amazing how my post on the White Saviour Complex of Development Consultancy reached so many people once I included  it on LinkedIn  and tagged it appropriately.  Over a 1000 reads.. a bit overwhelmed by it all.  Also, given that right now it is at the forefront of my mind, I was pleased to see drop into my inbox an initiative that provides an alternative.  Maybe there is a case to be made for a collection of such alternatives - so here goes. The first paragraph of Kristen Cheney's ISS blog  on Children as Experts could be easily paraphrased to present the problematic of the white saviour way of doing development, or in this instance, development research.  Here's my modified version. My changes in italics. " It is often assumed that social research is the domain of experts - and that those experts are necessarily researchers from the global north. Most development research is northern-led and northern-centric, not only ignoring souther...

photo taken from  https://e11e99.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/identity-in-a-post-colonial-world/ I am sharing some thoughts that I picked  randomly from a relatively progressive Christian facebook page (Sojourners)that I follow, mainly to help me counter the rather misinformed opinions of my true believer Christian friends (brown not white).  The article is called , 6 HARMFUL CONSEQUENCES OF THE WHITE SAVIOR COMPLEX, BY RYAN KUJA  and is so relevant to the northern development consultancy space that many of my (white) friends and colleagues occupy (and that I too sometimes venture into) that I thought to use it to write a blog post that I can share with that community.   R yan Kuja confesses that he was "never a missionary in the standard sense of the word, never proselytized or attempted to save souls"  but admits that "the engine driving [him] was the white saviour complex..... The other Westerners [he] worked with believed [they] had it al...

Went with a friend to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) yesterday, and was excited to find that one of the exhibits to be The Jeweled Isle: Art from Sri Lanka .   My friend, not of Sri Lankan origin, had a connection to whoever it was that curated the exhibit, so we both had an  interest in checking it out.  Some great stuff on display, including a beautiful tapestry loaned from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, some beautiful masks, a carved ivory chest and an inflatable sleeping Buddha, in the style of the stone statue at the Gal Viharaya in Polonnaruwa  - great idea! Coming out of the exhibit and seeing many of the other collections that LACMA had to offer, two things struck me about The Jeweled Isle.  One was how so many of the exhibits were borrowed from collectors or museums in the global North; and secondly how the artefacts and artists featured were not contemporary.   It was as if artistic endeavours in ...