From field to theory: rethinking development studies through study tours

Abstract

Drawing on the author’s experiences of running study tours to Malawi and India, this article argues that leaps can be made to decolonise development studies from the ‘ground up’ when study tours are centred on pedagogical processes of embodied insights, self-reflexivity and working with difference. Such pedagogical processes offer opportunities where students engage with questions of epistemic violence at the intersections of North/South tensions, while deconstructing their own onto-epistemic positionalities. In this way, study tours offer rich experiential-learning avenues, not only for resisting development studies’ colonial/positivist tendencies but also for opening spaces for teaching and learning centred on a plurality of knowledges. Designing study tours on notions of differences, learning through the body as well as a constant interrogation of our own onto-epistemic positionalities in relation to one and another, allows for this co-creation of vital spaces where plural systems of knowledges – alternative to the modern sciences – can not only be recognised but can also enter into articulations with the latter, leading to crafting new configurations of mutually enriching and transformative teaching and learning processes and practice.