Thinking About Development in a Time of New Possibility

This NORRAG Highlights is cross-posted with the spring 2022 issue of ‘CIES Perspectives’ published by the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES).

In this piece, we, a small group of education scholars brought together by NORRAG, an international network of academics, policymakers, and practitioners working in international cooperation and education, many from the global South, reflect on our place and role in the discussion on development unfolding in several parts of the world, and how we might take it forward in generative ways. We will use the word generative repeatedly and use it here not simply to denote the process of reproduction but to emphasize the act of sustaining life and the capacity to respond to its needs in respectful and thoughtful ways. Firstly, we come to this moment with a sense of deep concern about the state of our planet and its many challenges. Our principal concern, is with the inequalities and injustices that characterize our lives as people and the discord that marks our relationship with each other and with our larger natural world. Secondly, we come to it with the deliberate intention of stimulating discussion, debate, and, most critically, dialogue. In seeking to stimulate the discussion, we are conscious of the knowledges we have at our disposal, their endowments and their failings, of what they help us to see, and what they obscure. Our purpose, in the clamour and intensity of the arguments surrounding the discussion of education and development, is to clarify what we, from our positions of privilege, could contribute to that immensely important work activists, fellow-scholars and committed groups and individuals, everywhere in the world, are making towards imagining and making alternative and sustainable ecologies for ourselves.

We proceed in this contribution in a few steps: we begin with a deconstruction of our own positionalities, our loci of enunciation so-to-speak, and, hopefully, situate ourselves in relation to our larger environment. We then talk to the big question bringing us together – the ideas, states and futures of ‘development.’ We bring the contribution to a close in asking how, as scholars, we might be helpful. We open the question of setting an agenda for ourselves while mindful of our positionalities and the presumptions which accompany our passages across and through the pathways of our pasts, presents and futures. We do not claim to have definitive questions or answers. Nevertheless we want to mark ourselves as being present in the difficulties our world is facing.

Positionality, voice and responsibility

We come from different parts of the globe and have very different intellectual trajectories. Many of us are from the political south, an orientational idea we explain below. We come from contexts outside the metropoles of the political north and have in our personal and academic biographies, in different amplitudes and registers, experiences of economic, political, social, cultural, and psychological disadvantage., Some of us, even in our ‘Southern’ experiences, have the privilege of social and economic advantage. Academically, some of us have been formed in mainstream disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and economics. Others have early foundations in general teacher education. We have worked in a number of different places and capacities. From these diverse beginnings, it is important to say at the outset, all of us have become senior members of the academy. We carry, in these terms, relative class privilege. Our social histories, however, are complex. We seek, with respect to these orders of difference, to be respectful of how people wish to identify. Some of us identify with normative understandings of how our biologies are constituted in gendered, racialized and sexualized, and other terms. Our senses of national solidarity differ with some identifying strongly with the idea of ‘our home.’ Some of us love the countries with which we are formally associated while others do not. Our geographies, we acknowledge, find us living in spaces supported by reasonable infrastructures. These identities, in their intersectionalities, are complex, both in our performance of them and in our interlocutory relationships with the structures that produce, enable and police them. Some of us feel the consistent sense of being othered, of not belonging, of being tolerated. Some of us struggle with dominance’s presumptions, of its assignations of who we are, what it entitles and prohibits, what it prescribes for us with respect to our aspirations, desires, obligations and responsibilities. We bear, as a result, on the one hand, feelings of guilt and shame, and, on the other, resentment and anger. We bring these intersectionalities – in their widest complexity – to our membership of the global academy. They qualify our place inside of it. However, we begin this contribution deeply conscious and aware of our privilege inside of it.

Towards understanding our place and role inside the global academy, it is necessary that we explain how it works. It is a place that sits poised ambivalently in relation to structures of power. It is both within and outside of them. It brings to global power the ideological mechanisms through which much of its reproductive capacity is mediated. Its enabling function is essentially that of legitimation. It validates normative order through ‘disciplines,’ what we call the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences. Their explanations bring with them the weight of ‘evidence.’ These explanations are disseminated formally and informally. The university also presents itself to power as its first source of innovation. Power’s demands for growth, expansion, and embeddedness offer the knowledge of how systems of control and ‘development’ work can be improved and implemented.

Steered as the university is towards fulfilling the functions of legitimation and its maintenance, it remains, , an institution of ambivalence. It is the one institution in our current global order that is structurally capacitated to deal with contradiction. From its earlier, largely-but never entirely reproductive spirit, religious in the main, it evolved to the point in the middle of the 19th century where it was able to declare itself as a space of hospitality for people ‘from all quarters bearing knowledge from all quarters.’ It opened itself to possibilities of abnegation and rebirth – continual renewal. We identify with this understanding of itself.

In identifying with the idea of the university, we acknowledge our privilege, our ability to participate in the multiple circuits of power that control and determine the lives of people, the state of the physical and organic world. Even when we choose not to see ourselves in this political light, we are cognizant of being able to participate in the globalized economy on privileged terms. We speak and write English with confidence, have easy access to intellectual affordances not available to most of the world’s people, we travel widely, see and experience the lived textures of our multiple different contexts. We live with relative comfort.

But we desire, even within our lifetimes, to see an end to dominance, or at least a mitigation of its worst excesses. This desire, does not give us an unqualified entitlement to speak on behalf of others. We acknowledge how membership in the academy has facilitated the conceit of ‘trusteeship’ – the idea that our education, coupled with elements of our social identities, gives us the right to ‘know’ the situation of the ‘other’ and so to tell him/her/them what is in their best interests, what they should aspire towards, how they should manage their lives and what decisions they should make. We are conscious, as members of the international education community, how ‘aid’ and ‘advice’, framed by these dynamics of ‘self’ and ‘other’ work problematically in setting communities and nations on inimical courses to their best interests.

In terms of these dynamics, we recognize how our university membership has come to be used for reproducing power. Nevertheless, we also recognize how it can be used to stimulate opportunities for thinking in new and generative ways. We have, in this ambivalence, the power to choose: to be either on the side of our institutions’ reproductive inclinations or the capacities they have within themselves to encourage deliberation, critique, and imagination. We choose the latter.

It is this commitment to thinking, acting, and dreaming in expanded human ways which bring us to the wish to make this contribution. Our wish carries with it challenging responsibilities. We seek in this contribution to resisting the enticements which come with our institutional positionalities – of untroubled certainty and unquestioning authority. We seek, however, not to be naïve. Our positionalities do not allow the abrogation of taking responsibility or the simple abolition of power. And so, we seek to exercise our responsibility with care and to work with the power which accompanies us with self-awareness and attentiveness to our contexts – to the multiple ways in which we exclude, humiliate and harm, both in our pasts and in what we currently do. We seek to be in solidarity with suffering wherever it arises, to learn from it and to ask how we might be helpful. To certainty we bring, firstly, acknowledgement that our ‘science’ is not total. It is not capable of explaining everything. It has moreover, in its totalising hubris, caused great harm. To postures of absolute authority, we seek life approaches which insistently nurture possibilities of respect and humility. Our authority must come from our commitment to the collective good. Of course, we cannot in absolute terms define what this collective good is in terms of the freedoms, entitlements, and responsibilities we all should have. But we should be striving, constantly, to clarify these questions for ourselves. Our power must not come from our privileged histories but from our commitment to the demand for clarifying and practising the ways in which our world can become a better place. We come then to processes of ‘othering’, amongst ourselves and in relation to the ecology we share with the rest of life, with the simple desire to find generative ways in which we might work for the well-being of the whole of our shared world.

How do we speak into this complexity now, into new possibilities in deeply educational ways? Can we organise our thinking around ‘what if…’ or ‘what would it look like if…’?

The trouble with the ‘development’ question

Our conceptual point of departure is that dominant conceptions of development have been premised, even in what we have come to think of as ‘radical’ forms, on problematic ontological and epistemological understandings of who we are as human beings and what we should be aspiring to. Two distinct realities stare us in the face: while the wellbeing of large proportions of humanity has improved, we are now, amongst ourselves, riven with unacceptable disparity, inequality, and discrimination. We see the rise of inequality, poverty, precarity, and social exclusion throughout the world, resulting in integrated constellations of disenfranchised populations across geographies. The world, conceptually, can be seen orientationally as ‘the North,’ ‘the West,’ ‘the South,’ and ‘the East.’ In these are embedded political, socio-economic, and psycho-social realities most effectively summed up in notions of superiority and inferiority. They hide, however, internal contradictions which have been captured in theorizations of ‘economic Souths in the geographic North and Norths in the geographic South.’ (Mahler 2017: 1). In addition to this, our planet is counting down to the point, now only decades away, where global warming will unleash upon the earth unmanageable devastation.

What are dominant development’s problematic conceptions?

There are several. Each of us contributing to this piece would easily choose a different issue from which we might proceed in our analysis of the problems. We might assemble the issues differently and so will emphasize and give primacy to the economic, the social, or the cultural and so articulate priorities which make sense for us. Clear, however, is that we have here a moment in our collective social history, and it is almost ten thousand years long, which is born out of a combination of complex economic and ideological factors. It is a moment that produces dominance in a very particular form.

We object, however, to the centering of Europe or the ‘West’ for thinking about who we are as humans and where the world should go in the process of ‘developing’ itself. We are against the idea that in the narrative of Europe, and now by extension ‘the North,’ are to be found all the resources we as human beings, in our intersectional differences, need for fulfilling our potentials as caring, considerate, and creative human beings and as respectful and mindful co-custodians of the wonderment of our planet. We acknowledge what ‘Northern’- oriented learning has brought for our ‘development’ as individuals and communities in which we live and work. We work with it. It is even, we need to say, indispensable for how we speak, think and dream. But we refuse to cede to it the status of being the only, the most appropriate, the final or ultimate authority for facilitating our development. We want to be in engagement with it but not on terms of precedence or superiority. We seek a pathway to our development that will always admit other possibilities for who we have been, are and might become.

Primary in engaging with centered ideas of development is confronting the templates of difference on which have been constructed the figure of our humanness or our personhood. Developed alongside of and in the wake of European colonialism, crude elements of this template present the world in a typology of biological categories ‘races’ which can be hierarchically ordered. In this invented order sit what are called Negroids, trapped forever at the bottom of the story of human development. At its apex stand Caucasoids genetically destined to rule the world. In the middle meander Mongoloid people, constituted in suspicion. This crudity, formally discredited and thankfully no longer in academic use, remains active in creative new explanations of difference, not least in explanations of differences in intelligence, with people of African descent stigmatized as being less capable of higher order thinking, more susceptible to emotional outbreaks. Providing the standard, constantly refreshed in discourses of whiteness, is the construct of the pristine, perfect and pure white body, the form to which ‘non-white’ bodies must aspire. To this idealization are added the vectors of gender to produce a complex hierarchy of preferred identities – dispensable black and brown female bodies versus prized white male ones.

More sophisticated versions of the currently dominant ontological template have retreated from the body and have settled on the ‘mind’. They enjoin the idea of subjectivity to preferred European/Northern ways of being or personhood: a rational and well-ordered mind amenable to discipline and cultivation. It is not available anywhere else in the human experience. This is our ‘Northern’ ontological inheritance. This is what this centredness believes our ‘development’ should take us towards. It is flawed in two respects. Reason or logic, firstly, is not by any stretch of the imagination a European virtue. Secondly, it does not exhaust the complex range of human attributes we could be cultivating. The point hardly needs elaboration.

A critical correlate of this ontologization is thought, consciousness and its organization the notion of the episteme. An episteme is a collective system of understanding the world, how it works, how it can be managed, and, significantly, how in its ideal form it can be imagined. It forms and orders thinking, interpretation and imagination. Of course, because human beings are complex agents, they will always disrupt, disobey and disfigure whatever hegemonic epistemic regime in which they find themselves.

But the impulse of the episteme is to order. We now live in the epistemic order of European modernity – a 500-yearold project. It is multi-facetted. It seeks to explain the ontic, the social, how power works, the mysteries of the cosmos, and how its complexity can be managed. Its subjects are personhood (freedom and self-autonomy), society, truth, justice, nature, the state, the economy, and the relationships that arise out of these. Relevant for our purposes, other inflections and interpretations of how it coheres are available, is its rootedness in what is described as ‘scientific rationality’ – the ‘West’s’ gift to modern development. Scientific rationality – an ‘outlook’ – is the process by which ‘objective truth’ can be determined. From it emanates ‘laws’ which are used to understand and explain all the phenomena, manifestations, and expressions of all of nature – including our social lives. Its method involves observation, hypothesizing, testing and the development of theory. In this inheres the ability to explain cause and effect relationships. Brought to a high point in the middle of the 19th century, it presents itself as the methodology for the development process. For bringing us ‘progress.’ Its strengths and the benefits it has yielded are clearly evident. We, now well into the 21st century, are its undoubted beneficiaries. We are living longer. Our states of health have improved. More people can read and write than at any other time in our history.

But we wish to stand in clear resistance to its presumption that it does all that we would wish our knowledge repertoires to make possible for us. Apart from questioning its self-narrative, science and philosophy are not European inventions, we respectfully would point to: (i) its dependence on its multiple antecedents, not least of all the almost five-hundred year-long Muslim connection on the Iberian Peninsula, (ii) the multiple times it has been used to dismiss alternative epistemologies and to arrogate to itself sole authority for making sense of our universe, and (iii), the inequality which has come to mark how we live is unconscionable. With respect to the first, our civilizational history is one of extraordinary connectedness, through migration, connectedness, on the one hand, and, also on the other, and we are not naïve about this, on conflict and subjugation. With respect to the second, it has contributed to the erasure of capacious understandings of how our world works which have arisen in many other parts of the world. Its universalist modalities are part of an ontological -epistemological to project our planetary destiny in the model provided by the ‘North.’

This ‘Northern’ way has brought us to the precipice on which we now stand. In its obsessive quest to bend nature to its desire for ‘progress,’ ‘advancement,’ and, pointedly, ‘development,’ it has produced what many now call the ‘Anthropocene’ – the time in our planet’s history when humans have significantly impacted the dynamics of climate and ecosystems. The destruction of forests, the relentless expansion of carbon fuelled industry, the acidification of the oceans, reckless productionist policies, the proliferation of harmful materials for facilitating our consumptionism – all stimulated by the desire for economic growth, have irreversibly damaged our shared world. We are now facing the globe’s sixth mass extinction event. The warnings are that twenty to thirty percent of plant and animal life face the immediate risk of extinction. As is the case already, when the earth reaches its tipping point, it will be the poor of the world who will face climate change’s most dire consequences.

In terms of the second effect it has produced, the gap between the rich and the poor has grown year on year. In 2020 the world’s 2153 billionaires had acquired more wealth than 4.6 billion of the world’s population put together. The 22 most wealthy men in the world have more wealth than all the women of Africa. Seventy-one percent of the world’s population lives in political jurisdictions where inequality has grown. If the richest one percent of the world were to pay just 0.5 percent more tax over the next ten years, they could fund 117 million jobs in sectors such as caring for the elderly, the indigent, and the young.

This is not the ‘development’ we want. We want a world that has the capacity to sustain life. We want a world in which all of us, regardless of difference, will live with dignity and a sense that we will be secure. We want a world where young people can live, learn and dream for themselves in fulfilling and caring ways, beyond the immediate narcissism we now see everywhere, where they will grow into responsibility for themselves and for their wider world in generative ways that recognize and respect difference in all of its physical, figurative and mental forms, and to work with these differences sustainably. We want a world where we can live in a respectful ecological system with other life forms and with our wider environment.

How, then, should we proceed?

Immediate issues to raise

We have to start by decentering the Global North both as the final idea of who we are and should be and how we manage the obligation of sharing our lives with other forms of life on our planet in physical spaces which we care for and respect. We cannot assume the continuity of the house that modernity-coloniality built. We have to think of how we rebuild it.

Key in breaking this continuity is dismantling dominant conceptions of our personhoods. To our current ethnonationalist conceptions of who ‘our people’ are and their inherent inclinations to privilege and oppress some of us in racial, gendered, classed, spatialized and other terms we must deliberately seek to develop languages and theories of complete recognition, unconditional hospitality, unqualified dignity, and full opportunity. Key, too, is developing new knowledge-producing frameworks and practices. We need to find ways of bringing excluded epistemologies into the formal and informal circuits of our sense- and decision-making modalities.

With these foci, automatically coming into view will be the issues of whom we will work with and how we will do so. There is a need to interrogate underlying assumptions about the key notions of ‘partnership,’ ‘cooperation,’ ‘development:’ for whom, towards which goals, to which ends? To patronization and condescension, we have to bring complete equality and also the value of reciprocity.

And yet, even as we seek to promote these principles, we need, to constantly be attentive to the specifics of our different contexts. In reaching out to each other, issues to be borne in mind are the easy ways in which we homogenise our pains and privileges. Can we assume commonalities in and of oppression? Clearly not. And if not, how do we broach, each time, the charge of making solidarity? How may our responses be differentiated? For example, those who attend to the specific circumstances of disadvantage, wherever and however they take expression, without, either homogenizing suffering and imputing to this suffering, , characteristics and features, or, conversely, claiming for specific experiences of suffering priority over others. We are mindful in this complexity of the need for deep and ongoing understanding. In our Covid-19 context, we have been forced to think about the contextual dynamics giving character and substance to the disadvantage people are experiencing in different parts of the world. As governments are closing their national borders, stockpiling vaccines, and practicing vaccine nationalism, how do we, in opposition, demand the development of approaches which hold the imperatives of equity, justice and unconditional respect for life in full view?

Difficult too in thinking about our complexity is coming to terms with mortality. Covid-19 has brought its imminence to the forefront of our imaginations. It heralds, if we are attentive, the prospect of living in a time of extinction. It asks us how we will engage in the task of development and all its ancillary activities, such as international cooperation, in the context of the climate, ecological, economic, and social crises? How will we come to pursue goals broader than the human and in ways that recognize the finite resources of the planet and our own finite futures? In this, we ask, should we be refocusing our work towards the project of survivability rather than thinking about sustainability? Is the idea of a hospice, a space of pure caring, that which we should be clarifying for ourselves? In a world that is dying, how do we learn to live and die well?

In this, we have, as issues to consider, the power relationships which will always be present in our dealings with one another. We have to think of our institutions and how they present themselves to themselves and to the wider world. We are all caught within the frameworks and practices that we want to displace. How do we work in the ‘colonial’ structures from which we speak? Is it possible to use them for good, and create other types of spaces? Can we uphold, reform, hack or hospice the institutions concerned? Rather than abolish what modernity has introduced, how can we, firstly, seek to enlarge, to frame, and bring in what modernity has left out, and secondly, hold it to account for what it has done wrong? We can start by elucidating the ways in which formal education has operated as an inherently exclusionary project along lines of social class, race, gender, citizenship? Schooling as an exclusionary project operates not just through the ‘Project of International Cooperation,’ but also within ‘colonizing’ powers as well in the name of ‘development’ or ‘progress’ in ‘colonized’ or settler-colonial countries. Thus, education – ‘schooling’ – is a colonizing project. As an immediate task, we have the large challenge of developing principled and ethical approaches to power and its institutionalization within formal structures and informal norms that will guide the ‘Cooperation Project.’

Concepts to consider

In proceeding on this journey of developing the points of departure, the sign-posts and guidelines for cooperation and education and development, such as we, this inaugural cohort of senior fellows in NORRAG, are embarking upon, we have to problematize everything – our own positionalities, the place of our institutions, the terms of our ‘trade’ – our vocabularies, interpretive schemas, and analytic procedures – and the objectives we take to the development project. A place to start is to subject to scrutiny and begin the process of redefining what we say and how we say it: International,’ ‘research,’ ‘development’ are all concepts that hold together many of the institutions in which we and our universities are positioned. How we proceed with these concepts require that we pause and think again. The decolonization moment in which we find ourselves provides us with one opportunity to think about the issues we are facing. It is by no means a single, stable and coherent point to which we come. There is in the concept a debate about what to do with the pain inflicted by modernity. There are also differing perspectives about subjectivity and solidarity. Where it will take us is also a question that is by no means clear. It is insistent, however, that the logocentrism of the global North is no longer tenable. It is insistent too about the urgency of recentring inquiry around the full historical, ecological and cosmological experience of the planet. Imperatives in this insistence include attending to

• the integrity of the voices of the marginalized,
• the worth and value of all the places of the world and particularly the dehumanised ‘South’ as places to learn with and from and not for,
• learning in modalities of generative curiosity in postures and approaches of openness and humility, and
• the principles of justice, freedom and equality courageously everywhere and in/under all circumstances.

These imperatives and the principles they carry are central in guiding then how we manage the task of partnering, cooperating and developing ourselves. They make the questions of who we are, how we understand our relationships with one another and the goals we set for ourselves as opportunities for ongoing consideration and dialogue. Through this arises the potential to reset our world, to interrogate our ideas of humanism (even ‘new’ humanism), and to place these ideas at the heart of the great project of education.

Developing an agenda – Not theoretical only!

With this analysis, what are we to do? How could we begin to develop an agenda for ourselves? As might be expected, we do not have ready-to-hand solutions. In this we are not alone. We are struggling alongside countless others all over the globe who want to do something about changing the conditions under which we live and work. In this community of people, we acknowledge, is debilitating demoralisation. Dominance, the impetus behind it, its structural weight and ideological ubiquity, some feel, cannot be stopped. Catastrophe, systemic failure is the now no-longer avoidable reality that faces us. There is no other way. On the other hand, there are examples of extraordinary courage, thoughtfulness and action everywhere. Individuals, groups, communities and whole societies are building alternative ways of being and living. The stories of these struggles – of failure and success – are deeply instructive. They go a long way to temper our frequent episodes of despair and give us hope. In thinking then about what we, NORRAG Senior Fellows, can do, we have decided the least we can do is keep open dialogue amongst ourselves. This is the minimal line of action we can take. We will do so through conventional channels and media, and also put together a short volume in which we make clear the positions and perspectives we hold. Nevertheless, from the places in the academy in which we find ourselves, we will robustly advance opportunities for looking at the challenges in generative and new ways. We do so in the spirit of hope and the spirit that we are all able to learn, unlearn and learn again. Learning is an act of humility. It acknowledges that we do not know everything. It forces us, in this vulnerability, to be looking where we habitually choose not to.

In this dialogue we begin with the explicit intention of exploring pathways to the alternatives that are beginning to emerge in different parts of the world. We begin also, most immediately challengingly, by confronting all our epistemological and ontological assumptions about ‘connectedness’, ‘solidarity’, ‘distinctiveness’, ‘obligation’, ‘entitlement’ – about who the ‘we’ are for whom we will speak and how we will speak about this ‘we’ to whom we owe immediate obligation. What sociological, economic, cultural and philosophic frameworks will we use in defining and describing ourselves? What moral tone and register will we use in talking of inclusive, tolerant and sustainable normative orders? In this immediate task, which we have begun, we are debating the concepts of reparation, recuperation, redress, rectification and redistribution. We spar with each other how these terms promote justice and the possibility of futures beyond the conditions of our present dominance. How they might return us to dominance’s classificatory and discursive frameworks or not. Implicitly, as we debate with each other, we grapple with the significatory and even determinative freight of our language. Can we, we ask, develop new languages, new signifying gestures and modalities which will, firstly, engage all of our imaginations, and, secondly, pierce deep into the veil of certainty and the telos which sits behind it?

As a result of this debate amongst ourselves, in invoking the prefix Re on the great acts of finding our humanness, we insist on thinking not of a return to anything, to any stasis, either that which now dominates us or that which dominance has sought to erase, but of beginning afresh. Beginning afresh is building on ALL that is good around us. Looking with appreciation and respect to that which has been forgotten or deliberately displaced and thoughtfully and thankfully recuperate what we need to. We will resolutely dismantle that which obstructs, impairs, and harms our world, reminding ourselves repeatedly why we seek to move on from the damage and hurts we have inflicted on each other and trying to understand better what reparations are appropriate. As part of this agenda, we will be exploring ways of entering discussions where we can, inserting discordant notes where they are required, playing with and celebrating the cacophony that exists in the world. To foster dialogue and looking for opportunities to provoke. We are, simultaneously, open to and invite critique. We are open to thinking afresh and anew about old ideas that may no longer be fashionable; about new concepts and approaches of which we are not aware; about imaginations that lead us into the troubled zones of our collective inheritances – our discourses and practices – and which open pathways to new possibilities. For all of us on this planet. For all that we have inherited and need to sustain and protect. In stepping into this space, we seek to nurture and cultivate, as part of a zeitgeist distinct from the hubris and conceit of dominant understandings of development, comportments of wonder, curiosity, anticipation, and above all, respect. We wish to be active participants in imagining and building our new world.

The NORRAG Senior Fellows are Vanessa Andreotti, Radhika Gorur, Catherine Odora Hoppers, Tavis Jules, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Iveta Silova, Crain A. Soudien, Arathi Sriprakash, Prachi Srivastava and Keita Takayama. See the full list and biographies at https://www.norrag.eight-id.com/senior-fellows/

Crain Soudien (crain.soudien@uct.ac.za) is an Emeritus Professor in education and African Studies at the University of Cape Town and an Honorary Professor at the Nelson Mandela University and works in the area of social difference and inequality.