Unlearning development

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Decolonising Development in Education: Rethinking, Reframing and Reimagining Possibilities

Proposal

There has been no shortage of critical reflections on the “lessons learned” from international development experiences by different stakeholders. Whether stirring controversy or rehearsing the status quo, these countless lessons do not seem to have produced any fundamental shifts in the international development practice, its logic, and its predetermined trajectory. Even the harshest criticism seems to be blatantly ignored, quickly forgotten, or carefully swept under the rug.

In this essay, we propose to shift attention from the lessons learned – a topic which has occupied the attention of both international development experts and its critics for decades – to what should be unlearned from ongoing development practice. In this context, ‘unlearning’ does not mean the incremental improvement of the existing systems, processes, and practices (e.g., through ‘lessons learned’). Rather, it entails a more fundamental questioning of and reconfiguration of the established assumptions underlying the development project, one which has been officially institutionalized as a “right” and historically naturalized as the only way to become, the only way to do, the only way to know, and the only way to be. Writing from a decolonial perspective, Madina Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo (2012) explain that “learning to unlearn” is one of the most powerful ways of deconstructing the modern/colonial architecture of knowledge by deliberately delinking “from the illusion that knowledge in all spheres of life is bound to one set of categories that are both universal and Western” (p. 198, emphasis added). ‘Unlearning’ thus opens the space for recognizing the limits of the status quo, while exploring and articulating alternatives.

Author

• Iveta Silova, Arizona State University