Siri Seminar IKMAS 1/2024

Development Knowledge from the Global South? A Bangladesh Case Study

  • Speaker: Professor Dr Palash Kamruzzaman
    University of South Wales, United Kingdom
  • Date: 2 May 2024 (Thursday)
  • Time: 12.00 noon – 12.00 pm
  • Venue: IKMAS Meeting Room & Online via Zoom Application
  • Zoom link: https://ukm-edu-my.zoom.us/j/94308154424

Abstract:

This talks takes Bangladesh as a case study and explores the motivations (or lack of), challenges, and politics of knowledge production with a particular focus on the country’s aid and development sector. This talk is based on qualitative research methods and draws from 25 semi-structured interviews with highly experienced and senior Bangladeshi development practitioners and academics. Empirical evidence and consequent analysis contribute to the debates around the schism in access to resources, politics of aid, and power over knowledge production. The research reveals local cultural contexts as consultancy works are perceived to be more financially rewarding. This is manifested through current practices that have created a condition where local researchers and practitioners feel they have no time (or incentive and motivation) to engage in knowledge production. Moreover, this research explores whether one’s race and/or nationality play any role in knowledge production, and how the respondents reflect about these issues based on their lived experience. In doing so, findings of this research further the arguments of structural inequality and colour-blind approach within aid and global development landscape.

This talk offers a rich account of how existing practices favour staff members from the donor countries and exclude Bangladeshi researchers and practitioners from knowledge production processes. It also brings forward an important issue which highlights that, as perceived by the respondents of this study, one’s institutional affiliation with prestigious Western institutions might matter more in knowledge production (as we know it) than the content, ideas and credibility of knowledge that are generated in the global South. It contends that by excluding, rejecting, side-lining, and subjugating knowledges produced in the global South development policies and practices will continue to manufacture a particular type of knowledge that will circumvent equity in knowledge production and perpetuate Western hegemony.

Short Biography

Palash Kamruzzaman is Professor of social policy at the University of South Wales, UK. Palash has degrees in sociology and social policy (PhD), and anthropology (MSS and BSS (Hon.)). Before joining the University of South Wales, Palash taught international development, politics, sociology and anthropology at the University of Bath, University of Leicester, University of Nottingham, University of Liverpool, and Independent University (Bangladesh). Palash has convened research in Bangladesh, Ghana, Nigeria and Afghanistan and published in the areas of aid ethnographies, expertise in international development, politics of development, participation in policymaking, displacement, global development goals (eg SDGs, MDGs), civil society and extreme poverty. Palash is the author of Poverty Reduction Strategy in Bangladesh – Rethinking Participation in Policy Making (2014) and Dollarisation of Poverty – Rethinking Poverty beyond 2015 (2015), and the editor of Civil Society in the Global South (2019).

While my research interests can be found here, but in terms of networking and research collaboration my other roles might be useful (such as Director, Centre for Social Policy (USW); RIG Lead, Social Policy (USW); Member of the Management Board, Wales Graduate School of Social Sciences; Elected Board Member, International Humanitarian Studies Association).