Poverty Pimps in the Academy: A Dialogue About Subjectivity, Reflexivity, and Power in Decolonizing Production of Knowledge

Abstract

The authors often talk about the moral and ethical predicaments they experience working with marginalized populations. But such conversations, confessions, and verbalized doubts happened in intimate settings, often with out office doors closed or when the hallways are quiet and empty. This is not a whisper of secrecy or conspiracy but one of self-reflexive contemplation about the privilege differential between the authors and the humans they encounter in the streets as they conduct action research or simple walk around as citizen observers. Through this dialogue, the authors attempt to capture some of the conversations they have had about the unspoken internal conflict faced by the scholars, including the authors, doing forms of action research with fellow humans who continue to suffer under the self-righteous ideologies of justified domination. The central force behind this dialogical article is not to offer solutions but to problematize the lack of narrative space and language for the colonialist reenactments every poverty scholar have to live with, even as they aim at decolonizing and empowering scholarship. The authors hope this dialogue is evocative enough to invite others to further explore similar dilemmas of decolonizing scholarship.