The Matter of Context – an embodied perspective on (de)centering whiteness in international education research and praxis

• In Event: Race, Ethnicity and Identity in Politics, Policy and Practice

Proposal

While there is an assumed increase in connectedness that the digitalization offers, we must also think about how conflicting (and sometimes competing) contexts actually cause discontinuities. Using performance autoethnography, I engage my body as the site where knowledge is created and share a critical perspective on my training and work as a development scholar-practitioner – tracing my journey from my recent transition out of a leadership position I held at a community organization in Kenya, to the context of my education and training in an international education graduate program at UMass, Amherst. I draw on my lived experience as a white, “betweener” (Diversi & Moreira, 2016) who has worked extensively between the United States and Africa, to share an embodied critique of how academia and the development sector continue to center and perpetuate whiteness and extend the racial and racist logic of colonialism. While struggling to (de)center whiteness in my own work, I explore the question of whose context matters in international education, as well as why and to whom. And similarly, whose context avoids scrutiny by much of the scholarship in our field.

Until recently, I moved seamlessly between two roles and contexts that couldn’t be more different: a doctoral student at UMass, Amherst in Amherst, Massachusetts and Executive Director of Jitegemee Children’s Program, a community development program in Machakos, Kenya. And then the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Flights stopped; work that could, shifted online; we were confined to our homes; travel was out of the question. This externally imposed time to isolate and be inside, separated me physically and contextually from my colleagues. It also brought opportunity for reflection and considering new ways of working and being. This moment fundamentally challenged my ability to simultaneously inhabit these two very different roles.

In the same year, the international development sector had its own overdue moment of reckoning about the problematic ways race and power operate in the sector following the re-energized BLM protests in summer 2020. New spaces for voices and perspectives from the global south opened as we were able to communicate and collaborate online in more expansive ways; the calls for urgent reform in the sector, particularly around issues of race, took center stage. A flurry of anti-racism statements and internal reports resulted from development organizations taking stock of their own failings in terms of racial equity, particularly between teams working in the global south and north. That summer, I too was involved in my own personal moment of reckoning as a white development scholar-practitioner, born in apartheid South Africa, working between Kenya and the USA. How could I effectively lead an organization halfway across the world, situated in a completely different context, much less during a global pandemic that rendered visits also impossible? My inability to hop on a plane to Kenya and physically occupy the professional role I was employed to play increased the urgency of conversations that colleagues and I had previously started at Jitegemee. How could we start our transition to ‘local leadership’, by then a tired sector buzzword that was rarely actually implemented, in ways that would minimize disruption and harm to the organization and children we supported?

This work of both (de)centering whiteness in Jitegemee’s leadership and transition to local leadership took over three years and was driven by collaboration and reflexive conversations across the organization. In December 2023, we reached a significant milestone when I fully transitioned out of my role as Executive Director and Jennifer, our former Country Director who was born and raised in Machakos, assumed this position. For the first time since its inception in the late 1990s, someone from the community where Jitegemee operated was leading the organization. This should not be as extraordinary as it felt, but unfortunately in this sector of international development, white people from the global north too often lead or dominate organizations in the global south.

As I transitioned out of my role as Executive Director, I shifted to my role as scholar, specifically as a PhD student with a dissertation to write. I found myself struggling to extend this work of (de)centering whiteness to my research. I was searching for a methodology that would allow me to engage a decolonial approach to this work. Specifically, I did not want to do research that would require me to observe, collect and analyze “data,” and write about the so-called “other.” I found my answer when I was introduced to Performance Autoethnography by Claudio Moreira, in a Monday evening graduate class at UMass, Amherst. Claudio encouraged our class to challenge the notion of “I and the other” and instead encouraged research with “I as the other” (Moreira, 2019). This methodology allows me to contest the assumed position of researcher-as-“expert,” and instead invites me to approach my scholarship from the perspective of error. This approach to research allowed me to take a deep breath, give a jab to the ever-present imposter syndrome, and dive into my dissertation work, knowing I was doing research I could “sleep with at night” (Moreira, 2019).

One of the mantras of international development work and scholarship is that “Context Matters.” As I asked myself, “Which context matters? Whose context matters? Why does it matter and to whom?” I felt my gaze shift from the context of the “other”over there in Kenya to that of my own body over here in Amherst. I found my research returning to the context of where I trained as a development scholar-practitioner: the first semester of my Master’s in Education at UMass Amherst’s Center for International Education. In this paper, I offer an embodied critique of how whiteness was centered in this educational program that structurally mirrored the logic of coloniality, particularly with regards to race, gender, socio-economic class, and nationality. At a moment when whiteness is fighting loudly and publicly for continued supremacy, I even dare to allow myself to hope - to envision the change in international education scholarship, teaching and praxis, if we (de)centered whiteness in this context and beyond.

Author

• Verity Norman-Tichawangana, University of Massachusetts Amherst