Epistemic communities and coloniality in the Gender and Development apparatus

Romina Istratii is a multi-disciplinary scholar and activist whose work currently focuses on developing community-grounded research approaches to domestic violence that are embedded in the religious worldviews and values frameworks of communities in the Horn of Africa and the United Kingdom. In this interview she explains how, through ethnographic research and applied work informed by decolonial theory, she has developed a critique of the dominant theoretical paradigms and models used within Gender and Development, adapting the concept from International Relations of “epistemic communities” to problematise their practices of knowledge legitimisation.