Living Deoloniality, practical examples of decolonial
re-existence through the aid sector,
a podcast by Carla Vitantonio with the support of the Centre for humanitarian leadership.

Welcome to a new episode of Living Decoloniality. My name is Carla Vitantonio
and the sounds and noises you hear in the background
are from the city where I live and work Havana, Cuba.


Today you will hear the voice of Michelle Lokot. I have a little
serendipitous story with Michelle. In fact, I was working on myrecent paper called “Reflexivity Coloniality and Do Know Harm”
and I found a couple of articles written by Michelle
where she was transparently and effectively explaining the complexity
of positionality through her personal and at times frustrating
experience as a researcher. During the same period, I advertised the podcast on LinkedIn
and Michelle contacted me. I was happy, and talking to her was for me as
talking to someone whom I knew rather well. This is Michelle’s introduction.
My name is Michelle Lokot. My pronouns are she, her.
I’m a researcher and practitioner and I currently work as Assistant Professor and
co-director of the Health and Humanitarian Crisis Center
at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
I also do some consulting work for NGOs. I’m Sri Lankan in ethnicity
and Australian in nationality and my work as a practitioner has involved
managing gender-based violence programs and providing technical advice
on gender equality related issues. I’ve been involved in monitoring and evaluation
and research for gender equality, women’s empowerment and gender-based
violence, and a lot of my work as a practitioner and now as a researcher,
involves thinking through how to generate evidence in data.
I hadto share something has worked to measure effectiveness and impact
especially among conflict affected populations.
I explained to Michelle that I was interested in knowing
how she frames coloniality, and this is her answer.
What is coloniality for me? I think it’s specifically among populations affected by conflict
thinking about gender-based violence, gender equality issues and evidence
can often have these kind of threads of coloniality running through them.
And I felt discomfort with this when I was a practitioner but it was only really
during my PhD where I found language for how to frame and understand this.
And so for me coloniality is a key power structure that shapes
all ways of thinking, behaving and being and it intersects with patriarchy,
with capitalism, with other power hierarchies.
And I think within the aid and development space also with
this dimension of northern and southern actors, international and local actors.
And the aid and development space is really where I began my career and began
thinking through these issues and really where I saw not just implicit
traces of coloniality, but sometimes also quite explicit threads in the space of
gender equality, work, gender-based violence work.
And I really see and continue to see this coloniality in the moral outrage,
the moral judgments that are embedded with narratives around gender.
And the assumption is that people, women especially don’t know about their rights
and that we can give them knowledge and that this knowledge is power.
There’s this idea that training or going through this kind of set curriculum
can have a transformative effect. And written within these narratives as assumptions
about what knowledge people already have, they, for example, are always
disempowered until we empower them. There’s narratives about women and girls
being vulnerable by default as always lacking in agency.
And I think these narratives around helping and even rescuing women who
experience gender-based violence can be sometimes quite paternalistic.
And there’s this almost voyeuristic tone to descriptions of violence that is
experienced by others elsewhere.
As Sara Meger talks about the fetishization of sexual violence during conflict
and this kind of fixation from the West on gender-based violence, especially
sexual violence. And the kind of outrage it generates among us when we observe this
happening during conflicts, during war. And I think we see this reflected in how
NGO reports will describe violence. And alongside that in contrast we see
this kind of white, savourous tone then that comes alongside
and that presents activities as being able to reform the behaviors of black and
brown men. And so for me working on implementing gender-based violence
programs and now research, I think there are very implied very
western ideas that shape the field. So for example this idea that you
should always report gender-based violence, that women who don’t take action and
not exercising agency and that we should help them so they can
report. And this can really make like context and the barriers that people
face in accessing response services. So I’ve worked for example in settings where
reporting is not safe and has resulted in worse outcomes and even harm to
survivors. And so I think western ideas about what you should do in
situations of gender-based violence are not always possible. And that’s sometimes
rooted in in these ideas of you know this is what independence looks like. This is
what agency looks like. And again using the western kind of worldview as the
standard or the norm. During conflict I think these narratives can take a very
specific direction. And Simon Turner actually talks about this, about how during
conflict and displacement there’s a very specific narrative, that displacement,
that war, that conflict disrupts communities, disrupts family structures,
social structures and that men somehow become unable to manage changes in their
roles. So they’re emasculated due to being unable to work and they
react using violence. And that is not to deny that this happens but the
positioning of conflict and displacement as a cause for gender-based
violence can often over simplify complex power dynamics and give lesser
emphasis to experiences of gender-based violence that happen outside of conflict.
And so I’ve been troubled by these narratives about people affected by conflict
and also uncomfortable with how as a practitioner I would be involved in talking
about change and so reflecting on my own practices and the kinds of changes in
culture and tradition that we as outsiders demand and suggest is needed;
we often label culture and tradition as not progressive as not modern
and as spaces where we will come and we will transform attitudes, behaviors,
norms through our activities. And I think in reality changes really tricky to pin
down and to measure and wanting or being expected to produce results after six
months, after one year, after short term emergency funding can real
challenge but the language and the narratives that I use to talk about the
this kind of change can be really quite problematic. So we talk about what works
and that seems to suggest that we know what works, that this and this and this will
lead to a certain kind of change that is desirable and that we say is needed.
And when actually there’s a lot more complexity and
context is really critical to the question of effectiveness.
I think also embedded within this idea of if you do A and B and C then this will
happen it also sounds like, like social engineering that people can be
shaped to believe and act in particular ways and this kind of idea of
manufacturing people’s behavior and it has this kind of colonial
underpinnings to them and this can slip into work on gender-based violence and
especially on social norms.

Michelle’s words touch it me profoundly
as a person who manages teams I admit that in the past eight years
protection against sexual abuse, exploitation and harassment, PSHEA
has become one of the untouchable cornerstones of my practice.
With my team and with project participants I’ve always tried to contextualize our
protocols but what they hear makes me think that perhaps there are some extra steps
we should take. For example, acknowledging complexity and that
reality is not something that we can easily fix with a protocol.
But while I kept this as something I need to reflect on I didn’t want to stop
Michelle’s flow and I asked her to reply to my last question on decolonial
practices and tools.

So my practice and really in the last 10 years or so has
been around using feminist ways of thinking about power to unravel my own assumptions
and beliefs about the populations being helped
and also to rethink and reflect a bit on the kinds of interventions I’ve been
involved in promoting and implementing. I’ve been asking myself the question youknow how do I know what I know and what assumptions am I actually relying on?
Where do these assumptions come from? Certainly many of the interventions I’ve beeninvolved in have helped improve people’s lives but I’d say that many of them
were also not asked for. They imposed an agenda where they positioned
culture and tradition as problems to be solved by outsiders and they weren’t
developed these interventions they weren’t developed in
collaboration with the program participants themselves. And I think maybe even
more so than other sectors the space of gender equality, gender-based
violence work is one where there’s moral outrage you know how can this happen?
How can this rights violation happen? This violence happen, this scale of violence
happen, we need to act and that kind of language and that kind of narrative has
value judgments built within it. And so a feminist approach to decolonising is one
that I found helpful in thinking about different kinds of power and how they
intersect and how they operate within the specific space of aid and development.
And now I think sitting in a university and seeing how this works in academia and
research and also in my engagement with NGOs and research projects and
consulting work thinking about you know how do we
meaningfully understand the coloniality in our practice first and then take action
and really seeing that as a two-step process. I think people often want to
run immediately to action. I often get requested you know can you just develop a
one-page on how we decolonise and actually it’s
it’s a long journey it requires ongoing reflection and action
and reflection again and action again and it’s um it’s not an outcome that can be
achieved. And I think that within the aid and development space there’s been a
lot of narratives you know well how do we actually bring about change? Do we need to
dismantle the system itself or are there incremental things we can do as
individuals? I think most of us aren’t in positions of power to make
sweeping changes nor should we have to wait till our entire
organizations have caught up and are ready to be completely transformed
but most of us can influence within our sphere. I do think more work needs to be
done on how to operationalise decolonising. We did a scoping review recently that
looked at the concepts of colonialism and decolonising and how they’re being
understood in research and violence against women and girls and
and we found decolonising as a concept has become quite a buzzword
and now in our interviews and focus groups we’re really trying to explore you know
does language matter is using an equity lens the same as a decolonial one
isn’t enough to say you know I’m using the storytelling approach does that make
my work my research decolonial or am I just kind of
appropriating adapting an indigenous method to suit me
and is writing a positionality statement enough does that mean like I can tick
this box to say I’ve now reflected on power and so I think for me it’s been
about really critically reflecting on my own practice
and thinking about within monitoring and evaluation and research
specifically which tends to be the bulk of what I work on where are they scope
where is that where are they entry points for me to use a decolonial feminist
approach to help bring some change I think within the design phase how we decide
that something is a problem how we measure change and who we involve when we
design tools all of this benefits from a feminist approach
to decolonising do we invite the people who are actually affected by the issue
into the design process or are we sitting with our handbooks our lists of
indicators deciding what to change should happen
I think when it comes to methods and really reflecting you know is that value
we’re assigning to particular ways of knowing over others if we only think
effectiveness and impact can be defined by randomized control trials this is
what will give us the evidence we need then we might miss other ways of knowing
and lose out on on community-based ways to tackling an issue just because it’s
not in the format we’re used to if we tend to not engage the actual
ordinary community members because we only value the views of key
informants who are really often an elite a male elite then what knowledge are
we missing out on so I think the design stages critical but also data
collection at that point when we collecting data really being critical about
the methods we’re using and their limitations and their strengths
not just assuming certain methods are automatically decolonial or
participatory by default and here really taking time to think about you know
what is it about this method that makes it unique or different is it shifting
power is it actually allowing participants more voice and space
and I think avoiding that binary where we think that you know qualitative
research is always good and always participatory and quantitative is bad
but taking steps no matter what the method to reduce the extractiveness of
every engagement we have with communities I remember we had one project in
in Papua New Guinea and the NGO wanted a survey to be administered
but as the team went out going house to house administering the survey they found
that actually in between each of the survey questions participants were
making side comments that were actually quite interesting they were expanding
on their answers they were reflecting on the questions that we were asking
and so we shifted to actually making these in-between comments part of our
data as well and then lastly analysis and data sharing phase I think how we
analyze data and the types of narratives we fixate or ignore I think
can have colonial threads in them you know we curate what data is highlighted
which quote is included or excluded and play a really powerful role in
in choosing what data eventually is published and if we’re not careful we can
end up choosing accounts that suit our agenda
so for me reflecting on positionality while we analyze and write and not just
at the beginning is so crucial but I think it’s not always straightforward and
just reflecting on power might not be enough because we might not ever be able
to completely unravel those power dynamics and we had a project in Lebanon
where we used a collaborative coding approach and it didn’t completely
address power hierarchies but it meant that we as a team were constantly
aware of power because we reflected on it on power at every stage and as we
wrote together we talked and we discussed the power dynamics that were involved
in the analysis and writing process and in this project we had the local
the national teams whose whose role was normally to just collect the data
and send it to someone else who would then write it up they were actually part
of analysis and writing but I think then reflection on positionality shouldn’t
just end up being an exercise in trying to prove expertise
I think there are real tensions now in how positionality statements are
presented Jasmine Gani and Rabeah Khan actually they have a really
interesting paper where they talk about how positionality statements might
inadvertently center whiteness and center expertise
so I think the question is are we just finding more subtle ways of proving that
we have a right to be in spaces through positionality statements
I think I’ve seen in my own experience positionality statements can be
sometimes used to play up people’s expertise even to play up that someone’s from
a racialized minority as a way of showing
they are authentic they have a right to participate
in this study and to lead it despite the fact that they were entirely
Western educated and haven’t lived in that setting that is part of their ethnic
identity so I think really asking ourselves and reflecting on power more
critically is important and approaches the stating positionality need to be
done really carefully and so for me I think thinking about the different
stages of monitoring and evaluation and research and looking for entry points
in a really active way asking uncomfortable questions and reflecting on my
own practice my own assumptions that I still bring and that still shape the
decisions I make has been really helpful and also seeing decolonising as an
incremental pathway to unsettling and de-centering Western ways of knowing.
No tool is good for all solutions and we should make sure
to use the right one when we are starting to work in a new concept.
I like the idea of not giving anything for granted which is also a beautiful way
to admit that we can always be surprised by the word around us if we listen.
You listened to living decoloniality, practical examples of decolonial
re-exsistance through the aid sector. I am Carla Vitantonio and you can reach me
through my Spotify and speaker channels or through my Instagram Carla Vitantonio.
This podcast was deliberately recorded with minimum technical equipment trying
to preserve as much as possible the feelings and intentions of those who
participated. If you liked it please subscribe and share it through your
network. Living decoloniality was produced in partnership with the Centre for
Humanitarian Leadership. The logo is a present from Eugenio Nittolo