Abstract
This article considers the Institute of Development Studies’(IDS) concept of ‘engaged excellence’ from a postcolonial perspective, interrogating notions of ‘excellence’ determined in the global North, and calling for deep, long-term and mutually constitutive ‘excellent engagement’ between institutions in the global South and North. It offers a case study of how excellent engagement has developed over a decade-long relationship between researchers from IDS and from a partner organisation in Uganda, the Refugee Law Project, and how incrementally these have extended to include intensive engagement with the lives and advocacy commitments of an association of male survivors of sexual violence. Engaged excellence, it argues, can only be the outcome of excellent engagement, itself a process that is challenged by structural arrangements related to funding from and academic enterprise within the global North.
Highlights
Information, Knowledge and Power Susanna DaviesArticle first published May 1994, IDSB 25.2
The Institute of Development Studies (IDS) has defined engaged excellence as meaning that the quality of the Institute’s work is dependent upon it linking to and involving those who are at the heart of the change they wish to see
The IDS Bulletin is published by Institute of Development Studies, Library Road, Brighton BN1 9RE, UK This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol 47 No 6 December 2016: ‘Engaged Excellence’; the Introduction is recommended reading
Summary
Information, Knowledge and Power Susanna DaviesArticle first published May 1994, IDSB 25.2. The article itself involved a collaborative writing process between the different partners: IDS, RLP – with specific inputs from the Gender and Sexuality and Media for Social Change programmes – and MOHRAU.
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