Decolonisation Panel Part One

Historical Perspectives

Historical Perspectives a Scottish-based postgraduate ran network, fostering discussions on historical-based research by PGR students.

This session in our 2022/2023 seminar series features two speakers. The aid industry’s knowledge production has defined one part of the world as problem-solvers and the other a problem for generations At the crest of African decolonization, ODI, founded as the Overseas Development Institute in 1960, was created by an assembly of sugar plantation and copper mine barons, colonial propaganda officers, and economists to collate the “knowledge and experience of industrial, commercial and financial concerns interested in development… for consideration of the continuing relations of the United Kingdom with those underdeveloped countries which in the past form a part of the British Empire” (Robinson and Blackett, 1959, p.1-2). Today, it is one of the most cited think tanks in the world, still solving problems in the still-problematic Global South. And they now want to decolonize. How can neocolonial gatekeepers of post-colonial knowledge about a colonizer’s former colonies begin to this? To what ends? Using Quijano’s (2007) coloniality theory to explain the persistence of colonial holdovers, I will frame ODI’s role in perpetuating North/South power dynamics as an agent of empire. I will outline how ODI’s recent campaign to decolonize development reflects similar aid reform for localization in the late 1990’s and participatory development efforts in the 1970’s to problematize the capacity of an organization with a colonial mandate to decolonize. This presentation comprises the early-stage PhD research of Desiree Acholla, a History PGR at the University of Southampton and the University with the SWWDTP. Her research will explore the contemporary history of decolonizing international development through a Collaborative Doctoral Award with ODI.Desiree Acholla has spent more than 10 years in the international development sector, primarily in education, most recently publishing a background paper for UNESCO’s 2021/2022 Global Education Monitoring Report. With her social impact consultancy, Inararibonye Advisors, she helps globally focused and social benefit organizations establish clear, relevant approaches to embed equity across their work in different contexts. She is also a Senior Fellow with the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies. Desiree holds a certificate in Diversity and Inclusion from Cornell University, a Bachelor of Arts in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Montana, and an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree in Education Policies for Global Development from the University of Amsterdam, the University of Malta, the University of Oslo, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Desiree is currently a postgraduate researcher with the University of Southampton under a 2022 History Collaborative Doctoral Award with the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. The outputs of her research will be available on DecoloniseDevelopment.org, a digital resource that unpacks how historical colonial power dynamics in contemporary international development practice are perpetuated and can be upended.“How do we represent those who cannot be written about but whom we know were present?” (Bressey, 2013). This interdisciplinary comics-based PhD responds to the wider debates, interventions, and renewed attention concerning the decolonisation of museums which have risen in popularity. It explores creative techniques that can produce a rethinking of the dynamics of power that have left very little space for the unrepresented and underrepresented enslaved ‘other’ (Aldrich, 2010; Cubitt, 2012; Dresser &amp; Hann, 2013; Giblin, et al., 2019; Drayton, 2019). I examine the affordances of comics’ cartographies, that is the conceptual as well as functional commixing of comics with mapping (Moore, 2009; Peterle, 2021), as an active way of learning about colonialism beyond the boundaries of the bound comics’ pages, in time and space. Using both walking and drawing to follow in the footsteps of John King, an enslaved boy who during the eighteenth century ran away from what is now Benjamin Franklin House, London, to Suffolk, this research maps the conceptualisation and deployment of a comics-based methodology as a contemporary form of decolonial resistance.Kremena Dimitrova is a London based illustrator-as-historian, lecturer in visual culture, and practice-based Ph.D. researcher in visualising history through comics at the University of Portsmouth. She specialises in socially engaged and site-specific creative interventions and visual storytelling in the museum and heritage sector. Her commissions often involve working with archives and collections and using a mixture of creative approaches such as walking, character development, humour, rhymes, words, and images to bring hidden and marginalised narratives to life.
To find out more about Historical Perspectives, find us on social media, or at our website 	https://histperspectives.wordpress.com

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Decolonisation Panel Part One

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Decolonisation Panel Part One

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