Responsible Learning: Cultures of Knowledge Production and the North–South Divide

In recent years there has been a surfeit of calls within human geography urging that our disciplinary knowledge and praxis become “more public”, so that geography connects more with a variety of political and ethical issues, topical or otherwise (Murphy et al 2005; Murphy 2006; Ward 2005). For many geographers, this injunction is shadowed by the necessity to negotiate the simple fact that one's work is always already public in some capacity; that our social, emotional and political investments in our field sites and communities mean there is always more than just a disciplinary corpus of knowledge at stake at the point of research praxis and dissemination. In this brief commentary we address the implications of this type of public geography and the cultures of knowledge production in which it is embedded. We speak particularly to academics working across the global North and South in some capacity as we are concerned with ways of working with and around a Euro-American culture of knowledge production, and in the issue of bringing disparate cultures of knowledge production into effective relation with one another. Our central premise is that the broad and varied project of producing a postcolonial geography necessitates a more considered engagement with the concepts of responsibility and learning than currently exists in much of the extant literature connecting geographies of knowledge production and postcoloniality (for example, Raghuram and Madge 2006; Raju 2005; Robinson 2003). While the postcolonial critique of the Euro-American academic episteme teeters on the edge of a thoroughgoing engagement with responsibility and learning, here we want to explicitly tackle some theoretical and practical questions to begin to suggest how a notion of responsible learning may usefully infuse our cultures of knowledge production. As researchers we cannot deny that our representations matter to how places are constituted, but what is at stake when a group, a place or a topic is researched, spoken and written about? We (researchers) are always implicated in the production of places/people/communities as we produce knowledge, which necessitates that we confront rather than blithely side-step the politics of representation and distancing. In postcolonial scholarship, Gayatri Spivak (1988) has urged us to consider the political responsibility of “speaking to” rather than “speaking for” subaltern places/peoples/communities, despite the inevitable “representations of” that academic knowledge production entails. Inescapably, however, there are necessary differences in how we write or speak about our research depending on the audiences we address. For example, this short paper would no doubt have been written differently, with a slightly different set of competencies and perhaps even debates in mind, had we intended it for publication in area studies journals correspondent to our own particular ongoing research interests. The key point here is that responsibility is always contingent on the differences that inhere in the audiences and contexts to which our iterations are oriented. But can tailoring work for different audiences lead to forms of misrepresentation, and does this matter? Audiences and speakers, it must be recognised, are always publics constituted through moments of engagement, or put differently, together they are moving horizons of knowledge production in the process of “becoming” through dialectical encounter. However, for many European and North American researchers working transnationally, questions of how to present to, or how to “become with”, differently situated audiences remain pertinent and irreducibly postcolonial questions. Pertinent, because so often the injunction to “speak to” is eclipsed by more strategic necessities to speak across spatially and politically differentiated research communities and audiences. If a certain representational integrity is required to “speak to” questions of politics and praxis in particular field sites, for instance in presentations to “user groups” or area-specific scholars, it is not necessarily required in presenting work to a disciplinary corpus of geographical knowledge whose gatekeepers reside mostly in Europe and North America. In other words, speaking to the discipline bound academy in its myriad forms and speaking to a research site do not demand the same competencies and commitments, and this is not just a trivial problem. It is a problem that, we argue, connects irreducibly back to the pursuit of a postcolonial social science, because if this type of scholarship is not handled responsibly it can have a disabling effect on the production of knowledge. Specifically, there is a danger that the people/places/communities we work with become mere “case studies” in the pursuit of a (de)contextualised theoretical project (see Jazeel 2007). At its worst, this move echoes colonialist, objectifying modes of representation and knowledge production; the very sorts of knowledge production that Said'sOrientalism (1979) so persuasively warned us against over two decades ago. Distance inheres in this conundrum because so often it is distance between audiences (often, but not always, physical distance) that opens the door to misrepresentation for the sake of maximum gain with a given audience. In these often unrecognised slippages where mis-representations and mis-articulations result, relations between our work and that place or those people change in distinct ways, often for the worse as our cultures of knowledge production drift further and further from any type of public accountability. Here, in these moments of slippage the politics of representing and abiding are open to interrogation (see Ismail 2005). Responsibility is always a play between contingency and distance, but as Jacques Derrida argues, anything that acts, thinks and speaks intentionally, everything that does something in the performative mode, must (implicitly) be signed by a responsible“I” (2005:689). Responsibility then, is contextual—not arbitrary—and involves ongoing introspection on the part of the scholar (notwithstanding the growing micro-management of academic practice, it remains a luxury of academia that we are so often accountable only to ourselves). But, it does not necessarily follow that distanciation and the injunction to “abide by” (Ismail 2005) or “speak to” (Spivak 1988) social and political questions in one's research communities exist in a simple inverse relationship to one another. In other words, it is not always the case that the more one “abides by” the less distance exists between researcher and researched. “Speaking to” an issue, a power relationship, or questions of social justice may entail making theoretical choices and manoeuvres that politically intervene in real ways with real effects; so in this sense responsible knowledge production surely demands that we do not make our theoretical choices lightly. Theory and responsibility, then, must be performed as inseparable from one another. Put differently, committing to research in a place means realising the inalienable connections between (your) theory and (their) politics (however one situates “you” and “they”)1—the always already “public-ness” of academic knowledge production. Abiding by the questions of politics through the course of research means researchers may well alienate themselves from some of their research subjects, particularly those to whose politics we may object. Responsible social scientists must tackle this from the point wherein research is conceived. None of this is meant to simply suggest that research must just be more relevant to those “on the ground”, or to deny that tailoring research to different audiences is a crucial part of academic engagement. Rather, this is to draw attention to the slippages between abiding and distancing, between knowledge and representation, and the connections between theory and politics that, we argue, any research project that takes its cue from the challenge to postcolonialise knowledge production must take seriously. The process of tacking back and forth between these guardrails in the transnational landscapes of knowledge production across a North–South divide is central to the production of responsible postcolonial knowledges. But, practically, what questions does this raise? The practicalities of responsibility and of the project of postcolonial knowledge production more generally require, we suggest, engagement with the terms through which learning is conceived and conducted in research. An important issue at stake in thinking through these kinds of responsibility in practice is the appropriation of subaltern knowledge. Spivak (1988), writing about the relationships between European leftist intellectuals and “Third World” knowledges, famously argued that the subaltern cannot speak, so imbued must s/he be with the words, phrases and cadences of “Western thought” in order to be heard. This is to say that the subaltern cannot be heard as a consequence of the privileged position that, for example, Euro-American academic researchers occupy. This can entail “epistemic violence”, wherein ways of knowing the world outside the language of “Western” science, philosophy and development are invalidated or trivialised. Thus, “the subaltern must always be caught in translation, never truly expressing herself, but always already interpreted” (Briggs and Sharp 2004:664). The relations between learning and unlearning outline a formulation of ethics in this regard (Spivak 1993). “Unlearning” involves “working hard to gain knowledge of others who occupy those spaces most closed to our privileged view and attempting to speak to those others in a way that they might take us seriously and be able to answer back” (McEwan 2003:348). For Spivak, learning from one another is an ethical imperative. Learning in this sense is not about speaking for an individual or group in order to produce something like a notionally more cosmopolitan geographical knowledge. Instead, this learning seeks to develop new positions through interactions between researchers and people in disparate locations (see Spivak 1993, 2003). This requires a “greater sensitivity to the relationship between power, authority, positionality and knowledge” (McEwan 2003:351); an ethic that demands consistent critical reflection in efforts that seek to learn between different contexts and constituencies (McFarlane 2006a, 2006b). It entails a commitment to a different sort of epistemic violence—a rupture of the episteme of the Euro-American academy, or what Foucault may have referred to as an insurrection of subjugated knowledges (1980, [1976] 2003). In his 1976 Society Must be Defended lecture series, Foucault reflected upon the proliferation of social critique that had emerged in the previous 15 years. These had, in part, taken aim at “global theories” such as Marxism and psychoanalysis. He names these “local critique”. These multiple perspectives (criticising things, institutions, practices, discourses) are characterised by Foucault as the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” ([1976] 2003:7). By subjugated knowledges he was referring to two processes: first, the excavation of historical contents that have been buried in formal systematisations, and, second, the bringing forth of “nonconceptual knowledges”—hierarchically inferior knowledges; naive knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity of the (Western) academy (“knowledges from below”; 2003:7). A genealogy of subjugated knowledges is only possible, Foucault contends, through “the removal of the tyranny of overall discourses, with their hierarchies and all the privileges enjoyed by theoretical vanguards” (2003:7). A central question, then, is what happens to subjugated knowledges once they are brought into play? As Spivak poses, “[t]he most difficult thing here is to resist mere appropriation by the dominant” (2003:11). Subjugated knowledges are not of “equal” power and clearly it is not satisfactory to merely enshrine them within a Euro/American theoretical episteme, however cosmopolitan that theoretical episteme may be. So what effects do they/can they have? For McGee (1995:205), tackling the “vice of Eurocentricism” involves an epistemological transformation that privileges indigenous knowledge over a hegemonic “Western” conception of reality. But while the subjugation of local knowledge must be sensitively addressed, it surely should not be romanticised. We do not offer any straightforward solutions to these difficulties here—these issues are context specific and need careful attention—but responsible learning is a central and urgent methodological issue that urges those who work across a North–South divide to confront basic, often overlooked questions, such as, why do we produce knowledge, and for whom do we produce it? What kinds of knowledge predominate, and what work does knowledge subsequently do? What modes of representation do particular forms of knowledge production entail? But what this does suggest is that a postcolonial approach to learning requires that we retain a measure of uncertainty in learning, a sense that knowledge, ideas or theory may be altered, transformed or even rejected through responsible engagements with different constituencies—a contrapuntal reading (Said 1993) not of the archive but of research knowledge production generally. This kind of learning, we think, cannot take place without the kinds of responsibility that we sketch here. The hegemony of Euro-American forms of knowledge production in the institutional make-up of the contemporary social sciences betrays what Appadurai (2000) has called a “weak internationalisation”. Appadurai refers to the implication that the only kinds of knowledge that are taken seriously by the Euro-American academy are those that conform to its own particular formats of writing, citation, and history. This relates to the operation of established communities of judgement and accountability which insist, for example, on a privileged role for a particular community of experts who precede and follow any specific piece of research. In the global landscapes of knowledge production then, “learning” in the global North is too often driven by the processes of translating the “field experience” into a ringfenced Euro–US model academic code, and not by more uncertain educative gestures that stand outside that code (Spivak 2003:25–70). Desbiens and Ruddick (2006:4) similarly talk about the connections of people, places and relationships that the hegemony of the English language in geography enables: “… the term ‘international’ can fall short of its goal when exchanges between people from different cultural settings are foregrounded by a good dose of English as a point of reference, not just linguistically but also in terms of content and meaning”, including terms like “gentrification” and “blue collar”. While Appadurai's “weak internationalization” refers particularly to US Area Studies, the questions he raises are crucial to the debate about postcolonial social science generally: “Can we find ways to legitimately engage scholarship by public intellectuals here and overseas whose work is not primarily conditioned by professional criteria of criticism and dissemination?” (Appadurai 2000:14). This involves ways of imagining more effective modes of internationalisation in social science research. Interrogating the tendencies to separate the social sciences of a North from those of a South that mitigate the opportunities of learning, then, necessarily involves critically reflecting not just on how those categories are conceived, but on the very apparatus of social science research. This process must be part of asking how learning may be conceived and take place between different contexts in responsible ways, and it requires a critical epistemic interrogation and reworking, such as in Appadurai's formulation of “strong internationalisation”: [“Strong internationalization”] is to imagine and invite a conversation about research in which … the very elements of this ethic could be the subjects of debate. Scholars from other societies and traditions of inquiry could bring to this debate their own ideas about what counts as new knowledge and what communities of judgement and accountability they might judge to be central in the pursuit of such knowledge (Appadurai 2000:14). Strong internationalisation embodies a responsible approach to the possibilities of learning between different spaces and constituencies. It requires an openness to distinct and discrepant forms of knowledge production that may productively be at odds with, for instance, Euro-American traditions of academic knowledge production. This involves a particular and reflexive engagement with, for example, indigenous conceptions of development and environment, activist-intellectual forms of knowledge about the lives of people living in forests or informal settlements, or regimes of academic knowledge production formulated through distinct patterns of data collection, citation or judgement. The challenge here is for academics to connect more closely and more frequently with the worlds and vocabularies of disparate scholars and activists. This is an image that involves bringing subjugated knowledges into a more equal relation with more privileged, influential knowledges in the Euro-American academy. Strong internationalisation signposts a postcolonial challenge to work between disparate cultures of knowledge production on an even playing field, asking that we critically reflect not just on our representations, but on the terms through which they are produced. What we are arguing here is for particular care in the making public of academic knowledge across a North–South divide. We believe that one route for doing so involves a broad commitment to responsible learning, through which the uncertain glimmers of a postcolonial social science might be discerned. We are not seeking to prejudge the kinds of research projects geographers working across a North–South divide embark on. Rather, we are concerned with the kinds of literacy and engagement that can be brought to the formulation, implementation and communication of that research (see Mufti 2005; Spivak 1999). Part of this work requires researchers to actively seek out different forms of knowledge production and ways of knowing, whilst retaining a sense that these modes of difference remain central within their own subsequent iterations. Another part of this is working through the inalienable connections between theory culture, knowledge production and politics. We do not seek to be prescriptive about how responsible learning should take place; in practice it could take any number of substantive forms. For instance, a commitment to theorising the city through a renewed, international urban comparativism that pulls together disparate forms of intellectual and popular knowledge in a continually reflexive manner; or, engaging southern ecologies in ways attuned to the specific non-Euro/American biorhythms that themselves persistently deconstruct any sense of a nature/culture opposition. As we have signalled, these kinds of commitment require responsible forms of introspection on the part of researchers themselves, such that we may engender a social science more connected to more people; such that we may speak more effectively across South and North, in whichever direction. Postcolonialism has posed important challenges to geographical knowledge production—were responsible learning to be routine rather than exception, then perhaps we could be a little further advanced with that challenge. We are grateful to James DeFilippis, Mustafa Dikeç and Matthew Kurtz for valuable comments.