The Power Shift: Decolonising Development

Co-design, care and solidarity in social impact research projects. Jess Oddy interviewed.

• Kate Bird • Season 1 • Episode 35

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In this week’s episode, we talk to Jessica Oddy, founder and director of Design for Social Impact Lab (DFSI) about applying an equity-centred intersectional lens to social impact projects. We talk about the importance of co-design centred around care and solidarity throughout the entire project cycle.

Jess talks about having a systems thinking approach which engages with a community’s history and context in order to develop a project. A systems thinking approach facilitates mutual learning, where all actors stand to gain knowledge and insight from a project.

We talk about re-centering research around the people who have lived experience of structural inequity, and ensuring they are centred as experts.

Jess is the founder and director of Design for Social Impact Lab (DFSI), a social enterprise that supports organisations and practitioners design equity-centred programmes, policies, research and learning through training and coaching.  Jess started her career as a teacher, before spending 13 years as an education in emergencies practitioner. She recently completed her PhD, focusing on colonial legacies in youth education. She is a guest lecturer at the University of East London's MA Social Research for Social Action, where she teaches critical participatory research approaches and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bristol, focusing on anti-racism in education.

If you’re interested to find out more about Jess’ work, take a look here:

  • Linkedin
  • Website
  • Academic research
  • Research Design for Social Impact course launches 24th of May. Click here to sign up. We offer purchase parity payment/location based pricing, so please use the location-based code if needed.
  • Design for Social Impact mission and values 
  • Free Guide to embedding Anti-Oppressive principles in your research design for social impact

Relevant resources:

Jess:

Constructive complicity is about thinking how you can help shift the culture within the organisation because we know that we don't all have the luxury of leaving places and organisations and societies where we don't necessarily agree with the policies, but we may have power over is to connect with others and organise and advocate for changes that we want to see. And so for me that, I think that's something that I would always try and reflect on, is how can we be constructively complicit.

Kate:

I'm Professor Kate Bird and this is the Power Shift: Decolonising Development. Today we're talking to Dr. Jess Oddy, Director of Design for Social Impact Lab, about applying an equity centred, intersectional lens to social impact projects. We talk about care, solidarity, and taking a systems thinking approach where context matters and all actors gain knowledge from research projects that center people with lived experience of structural inequality. Listen on for more. Welcome to the Power Shift Decolonising Development, the podcast series seeking to bring together thinkers, practitioners, and activists to share ideas, inspire change, and identify tools for practical action. I'm Professor Kate Bird, a socio economist and director of the Development Hub. Today's co host is Nompilo Ndlovu. Over to you, Nompilo.

Nompilo:

Greetings. I'm Dr. Nompilo Ndlovu. I am a Zimbabwean living and working in South Africa. I'm an oral historian who applies gender frameworks to my work with communities in Africa. Recent work has included involvement in a mixed method studies on poverty dynamics in Zimbabwe, where I led the work on gender and marginalisation. My PhD focused on mass violence, memory, and local transitional justice in post colonial Zimbabwe. Back to you, Kate.

Kate:

Thanks, Nompilo. Today, we're very excited to be talking to Dr. Jessica Oddy. Jess is the founder and director of Design for Social Impact Lab, DFSI, a social enterprise that supports organisations and practitioners design equity centered programs, policies, research, and learning through training and coaching. Jess started her career as a teacher before spending 13 years as an education and emergencies practitioner. She recently completed her PhD focusing on colonial legacies in youth education. She's a guest lecturer at the University of East London's MA Social Research for Social Action, where she teaches critical participatory research approaches and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bristol focusing on anti racism in education. For more on Jess and the work she does, click on the show notes below this episode. Back to you, Nompilo.

Nompilo:

Awesome. Thank you for your time, Jess. Let's get right into it. Could you tell our audiences a bit about DFSI and the work that you do?

Jess:

Yeah, sure. Thank you. And thank you both for having me on the show. So I set up Design for Social Impact Lab in its current formation about six months ago. We were around a little bit longer before that as a consultancy, but I grew increasingly frustrated with that way of working. And I wanted to set up a social enterprise that would really be part of the change that I felt the social impact sector needed to make. And so, as a social enterprise, we're committed to supporting organisations, practitioners, individuals who are designing social impact projects, policies, research and action, and we support them to do this work through an equity centered intersectional lens and to do this in a way that really identifies and addresses inequities, root causes and creates meaningful and sustainable change. And so I co founded the organisation, but I am by no means on my own in this endeavor. We have a wide number of people who are involved, whether that's as facilitators helping to deliver our online courses and workshops. We also partner with other organisations who share their own equity challenges with us, which we use to inform and shape our learning experiences that we offer to learners. And we have a social commitment in the sense that a minimum of 10 percent of our revenue goes back into social impact projects each year. As well as the commitment that people who have been underserved, people who have been most affected by structural injustices and we know are least likely to be seen in non profits, in decision making roles, we offer paid facilitation work to people from those backgrounds because I strongly believe that the people with the greatest proximity to an issue should be the ones designing what an intervention or research on their community should look like.

Nompilo:

Awesome. I'm really struck if I must say, by your statement when you say as an act of social responsibility that DFSI makes sure that a part of their percentage goes towards funding this course and other smaller organisations that are growing in this field. So that's really awesome to hear because it's putting in practice exactly who you say you are. Can we move on to the next question? You also work on research informed by decolonial theory. Could you tell our audience about the tool you use to do this research?

Jess:

Yeah, so I would say I use personally many, many tools. I'm influenced by many different decolonial thinkers and social movements, but also more broadly. When I talk about the framework that we use in Design for Social Impact when we're looking at programs and research and policies. We have eight core principles, one of which is anti colonial and decolonial informed theory. So this very much influences the ways that we work with others to really think about the questions that they're seeking to answer, the framing of these questions, the ways that they are thinking or identifying things as problems, the ways that they are going about developing or creating the kind of data around this and then how they're doing the analysis. So for me, that's one way that I think decolonial theory influences my work, but I don't tend to use the term decolonial research because I think there are many different interpretations about what we mean when we talk about decolonial theory. When we look at a lot of scholarship and a lot of social movements, it's very much attached to redistribution of resources and wealth. And that's something that I think we have to be really mindful of. And I think what we've seen in academia, at least, and the nonprofit sector, particularly international development over the past couple of years is the co option of this term. And so when people are talking instead of saying, you know, they're doing participatory research, they will say we're doing decolonial informed research because maybe they're using methods or they've cited a scholar from an indigenous background. And for me, I think we can do a real disservice to that term when we use it in such a way that's not to say that it doesn't have a place and I think it's very, very important conversation and it's actually provoked, I think, the sector to have some very critical conversations and critical reflections, but it's a term that I think shouldn't be used lightly. And so, for me, I'm definitely influenced by this thinking, but I'm very much informed by I would say kind of anti oppressive scholarship and concepts and so to do this work for me means, yes, having a deep commitment to social justice and an understanding of how systemic inequalities operate in our society, and how that plays out in our research and for that to happen, I think we have to be mindful of many different things. One, I think, is, as I mentioned, being informed by scholarship, and the type of scholarship that if you grew up in, for example, in the UK, you probably would not have had access to in school. The other principle, I think, is co design. So for me, this is really, really important. If we're talking about anti oppressive research, is to be really mindful of how these projects and how this research is designed with, as opposed to designed for. And when we come to research, thinking through, is this research with, or is this research on? And again, co design is something that I think can and has been co opted a lot by the non profit sector. We often see co design at the point of, I don't know, consultations. We don't see co design at the point of budgetary decisions or at the point of data analysis. And so, part of the work that I do and try to replicate in my own scholarship is to be really mindful of that and to try as much as possible to have co design throughout a project or research cycle. Another element that I think again contributes to a kind of anti oppressive research or programmatic culture is being really mindful of power deferentials and an intersectional approach. And so for me intersectionality is not just about noticing difference, it's about noticing resistance to structural oppression by groups that have been historically underserved and structurally disadvantaged. It's about noticing commonalities and synergies across contexts as well. And it's around if we're doing intersectional research, it's also about challenging those, using the findings that come out of this to challenge oppressive structures and to highlight and advocate for the changes that we want to see, because again, many of these theories, they come, they're very much informed by and come from social movements. And I think there's a real danger when it becomes separated from that. And we see these terms being used and applied in academia and the nonprofit sector in a way that's very different from the kind of original historical lineages. Another element that I think again, makes up anti oppressive research principles or styles is we have to be really mindful that we center pedagogies of care and solidarity throughout the work that we do. And I was talking to somebody about this the other day, you know, I'd spent so many years working in the non profit sector within international non governmental organisations, and this idea, the terms care and solidarity were rarely used, or it was rarely a consideration, or there was an assumption that what we were doing was for good, but there was never this kind of critical reflection on the process to get there. It was always about, okay, what's the outcome? What is the output? But actually we have to be really mindful the way that we go about developing projects or the way we go about research, if pedagogies of care are not sensitive to that, we can end up reproducing and doing a lot of harm. And so that's something I think it's really, really important to be mindful of and to really center in the work that we do. Because when we don't, we end up reproducing the systems or systems processes that actually do a lot of harm. And when we have these kind of things and these frameworks and these concepts as central to our work, we can get to a place where I think we are radically inclusive. And there's a reason why so many communities are resistant to research particularly historically underserved communities, and it's because often care and solidarity has been so far from the experiences that they've had with outsiders coming and researching on them. The same when we come to think about international development and humanitarian interventions, there's in so many places a real pessimism, resentment, disengagement with nonprofit organisations. And again, I think that's because care and solidarity is often very far from the ways of working and other points that I think are really crucial if we're talking about anti oppressive research is how we open up to the possibility of iterative and mutual learning within that process. I think often organisations will go in and do research and they will have already a set determined log frame, indicators of success that they want to see happen. These indicators of success or evaluation, whether it's a monitoring evaluation project or a kind of more rigorous research study, these indicators of success are either predetermined by the funder or they've been designed by people who sit in head offices, very far from the context and the communities that have been receiving the services. And, for me, it's extremely problematic for many reasons. But I think one of the key things it misses out on is this opportunity of mutual learning, or this idea that people's ideas and opinions can't change, you know, you design a project, you maybe get funded six months later, and then there's this idea that, 12 months later, you're expecting to see some linear progression as a result of your intervention. And for me, I've seen this, my background's in education and most of the projects that I've worked on in the international development context have been around education. And for me, one of the things that I have to say really annoys me about the education sector in particular is this obsession with social and emotional learning and documenting how education interventions can, as a result of an organisation going in and offering X number of service, they alone are the ones that are responsible for whatever change in the wellbeing of the children or teachers who have been recipients of this intervention. And when we see these programs, what's often missing, and in fact, most of the programs I've seen, is any recognition of influences outside of that organisation. There's no engagement with histories, legacies, the strength that many communities get from their spiritual practices, recognising the power of their ancestral lineages. None of that is included in these predetermined social emotional learning research studies where the assumption is that for people to grow or feel a sense of resilience in a poverty or crisis context that it has to come from outside. So I think, yeah, we miss a lot with these approaches, especially when we don't give space for mutual learning. And I think maybe just a final couple of points, for me, it's really important when we do research, and I talk about research in the academic sense, but again, I consider myself a practitioner and I work on a lot of different social impact projects. And I think what's really important that, when we go in or we create with other people, and we're trying to understand an issue in a community. It's so important on one, the lens in which we do this work. So always from an asset based lens going in and trying to see the strengths within a place, as opposed to just going in and seeing deficit and need. And the other thing is around recognising that often where the problem is, isn't where it started. And that's why it's so important to have a systems thinking approach so that you're not just studying down, you're studying up. And so if we're seeing huge inequities in a certain context or impact in a certain community, it's important just to look at the kind of ecosystem that those people are living in and that often, which doesn't happen enough, should also trigger a need for research on the institutions including the non profits that are in those communities and often have been for decades and their systems and their ways of working to really understand why inequities persisted it in a certain way. And for me, I think, you know, that's one of the reasons why we have to really have this approach, which is systemic thinking. And then I guess my final point would be around economic justice. And again, when we think about research, it's applicable if you do programmatic design. The ways that these projects are funded, and maybe it links back to my point earlier about co design. So rarely do we see co design at the point of budgetary decisions, at the point of resourcing, how much will go towards a particular study, or how much will go towards this particular program. We definitely do not see budget transparency when it comes to how people should be remunerated for their time. And we see time and time again, the people who are designated the data collectors or the people with the greatest proximity to the communities, they're often, more often than not, the people who are who are paid the least. They're the people whose work and contributions are not seen in academic journals or the reports or whatever kind of publication that is going to come out of this study. Their names are often absent and as I said, they're often the people who are paid the least. And so I think if we really want to do anti oppressive research and we actually want to call it decolonial, we need to be getting the economic justice part, and we need to be doing some radical redistribution in the ways that these projects are put together, because to not do that and still want to label something decolonial to me is a farce. So, yeah, that's my two cents on your first question.

Nompilo:

A lot of two cents, I love it. There's some nuggets and quite a few things that you said. Thank you for expressing why you prefer the use of terminology such as anti oppressive research as opposed to decolonial research or theory as we know it because of the various connotations that it has. But I also really like that you showed that whilst we have eight different frameworks or principles that at different levels of them, for example, co design, there are different areas in which you see that there's been progress, and yet there's other areas, say, in the economic side where co design doesn't quite come into it. So it just gives a more rounded idea of what actually happens despite what an anti oppressive lens can look like, the inner workings and how several aspects of it can continue to grow and where others are a little bit further along. That was most interesting. I'll move to the next question. Although I do suspect that you've started to answer it quite a bit in your previous answer, so you can determine what you add over and above that. You also train others towards an anti oppressive lens. Who do you teach? And I think you've answered the, what do you teach them? So perhaps you could speak more about who do you teach and perhaps how do you teach them? I know you highlighted earlier that you do mostly online sharing, so it will be interesting to hear more about that.

Jess:

Yeah, sure. So, when we started Design for Social Impact, I wanted it to be a space where people in the sector or people who are interested in doing social impact work could get access to the types of conversations and resources that have been so absent from my formal education and my training really as a practitioner in the humanitarian aid sector, from the sort of resources that were absent from my training as a teacher in the UK. And so we have several offerings that we say are open to anyone who's interested in doing social impact work and wants to engage in some critical conversations. And we have a number of different programs that are available. And the one that we're currently called Research Design for Social Impact. And that's for people who find themselves in roles where they do research and they want to learn more about anti oppressive ways of working. And so we look at the eight core principles that I mentioned. And we look at ways that these are applicable to our work. And we do this in, I think, quite an interesting way in that each week we're very much about, we're trying to connect theory to practice. So organisations submit equity challenges to us. And we have a wide range of organisations who are working on so many different social justice issues, and some of the organisations are quite big, some are quite small, and they will submit a small equity challenge that they're having within their organisation. And maybe it's a programmatic issue, or maybe it's, you know, more conceptual. And each week, these practitioners who join our program will have a look at these challenges and discuss how they can apply these different components to really rethink and reframe the issue. It's not just myself, as I mentioned that is doing this training. I very much believe, you know, obviously, that's again, when we're thinking about decolonial theory and decolonial approaches. Yeah, I think that what is so important is that we recognise that we're all shaped by our own worldviews and we will have limitations because of that and it's so important to have a pluriverse of voices when we're doing this kind of reimagining of ways of working and so each week we have different guest speakers who are working on social justice issues come in and talk to our learners and say how they're doing this in a practical way, how they're using anti oppressive methods to inform their research or how research and evidence is being used to inform programmatic design. And, as I mentioned before, one of the really important things that I think has to shift in the social impact sector is how we center people who have lived experience of structural inequities as experts. And one of the ways that we do that is we engage with people who have many different experiences of being or have come from historically underserved communities and are now working in the social impact space and have that lived experience that they can really bring to the conversation and show the value of that, but also, I think really emphasises this idea that if we want to have radically inclusive, socially just interventions, it has to start with giving people with the greatest proximity to the issues a space to share their rich knowledge and also remunerating them for that as well. So often I think when people are invited along to do these talks for organisations and when they do have lived experience, they're often not renumerated for this. And for me, I'd love to see us get to a point where we can offer paid consultancy opportunities for our guest speakers. And I'd like to see that go beyond the guest speaking to work on more collaborative pieces, or more extensive pieces, and also to direct people to them because I think that's really, really important. And again, as part of this idea that if we're doing anti oppressive work, you can't separate theory from practice. It shouldn't be that you can write an academic piece and say, this is anti oppressive research, but then your ways of working and what you do with that is so detached from day to day operations. So, that's, in a nutshell, how we're going about teaching. The other thing as well is that we spoke to so many practitioners before designing these courses, and one of the things that really came through was this desire, I think, for a place, like a sense of community, where you can meet with people from different places, different organisations. I think sometimes when we work within institutions and organisations we can get real tunnel vision or organisations really have, particularly non profits, I think this, like, they really want to drive this kind of branded culture and it can prevent you from seeing all the wonderful alternatives that are out there. And so what we're really trying to create space for through our courses is a place for people to come together, to have a community of practice, and also to kind of build their own organic networks where they can connect with other people who may find themselves quite isolated within their organisations or within their institutions in terms of their way of thinking. It's also this idea that we can't do change alone, and I think bringing people together is another way that we can help people strategise around what needs to change and to build alliances that way.

Nompilo:

Awesome. I will hand over to Kate. But just to say I really love this approach to teaching. To say that the theory so that perhaps the academics or the top down mother organisation isn't necessarily the experts, but that the teacher is the person with the lived experience. So thank you for reiterating that. Kate, hand over to you.

Kate:

Thanks Nompilo. Yes, this is fascinating, Jess, and I'm looking forward to the rest of our conversation, but also carrying on the conversation after this podcast, because I'd like to learn more about the way that you're working and bring it more into the practice that we are developing in The Development Hub. So, I'd like to loop back to something that you said earlier and kind of comment on that before I go on with the question that I was going to ask. So you were talking earlier about how when there's an intervention or a project, it's that the outcomes of that project are often claimed to be solely to do with the intervention itself. And the social changes or the changes in I think it was the student's and the teacher's attitudes or mindset, the contextual factors were ignored and history was ignored and culture was ignored and so on. And that really struck me because I've seen that lots of times in the research projects and the interventions that I've observed around the world, and that kind of ignoring of the multiplicities of external context and other influences. I have often put it down to the fact that people designing funded projects, are required in their log frame to do some quite sophisticated acrobatics around causality and to show that their intervention is going to drive particular outcomes. And that's to do with proving value for money. And the donor requires them to prove value for money. And that's partly so that the donor is accountable either to their parliament or to Congress or to whatever kind of system and structure they have upward accountability to. So it's a kind of rigid accountability mechanism that is requiring proof of value for money. And for me, that is linked to new public management and the kind of linear thinking around causality. And also a very short term understanding of social change and how social change happens. And if you look in the UK, how we moved from social protection being provided by the parish, and then through the poor laws to go from that to tax credits and so on that we have today has taken hundreds of years. But if you look at projects in low income developing countries or the majority world, what's often expected is that you'll get an outcome within three years, which change doesn't happen in three years. So I just, I suppose I'm making a commentary, but also asking you if what I'm saying resonates with you in terms of the comment that you were making, or if I'm completely off field here.

Jess:

No, it definitely resonates with me and it leads me back I think to my point around who are the people who get to decide how things are framed and you know I've worked in organisations and I'm not naive and I fully understand how these things work. For me, it's all by design though. Often there's resistance. People say, well, we have to do it this way. It's what the donor wants. Well, the donor is made up of people and the people who are within these organisations, they are the frameworks, the accountability mechanisms, whatever we want to call it, it is coming, it's being designed by some kind of abstract non human thing. It's very much being set about by groups of people and designed by groups of people. And for me, when we think about what we know if we're looking at the UK context and the way that the charity sector or the third sector nonprofit sector is set up, we know there are huge inequities in terms of who gets to be represented within these organisations at senior levels. We have huge issues when it comes across the intersections of class, gender, people living with disabilities, et cetera. And we know that when it comes to the top, the people who have the most power in these organisations, they're not the people who more often than not who are coming from communities or backgrounds where they've experienced structural inequities and have been historically underserved. That's not to say that they have perfect lives but it's to say that when you have a system where the people who are basically the ones holding all the power and designing things, and they're doing it in a way that sets the stage, it's not surprising that we have these quite frankly ridiculous parameters being set like as you said, it's just you can't change things. Deep systemic issues within a time frame of three years if there's absolutely no acknowledgement there that there are historical social and cultural context coming into play as to the reason why these issues exist. So, for me, just to say I agree with what you say, the parameters that are set for change, in most cases, it would be impossible for any social intervention to reach, but there is this expectation that it will be reached. And what we see is that the result of this is that we have quite frankly, very, not all, but a lot, kind of deeply ineffective programs being built on deeply flawed evidence that has been set and designed by people who've had very little experience of structural inequities.

Kate:

Yeah, thank you. It's a kind of case of the emperor's clothes, isn't it? Everyone knows that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes, but no one will actually say it out loud because you don't want to embarrass the emperor. Anyway, I'll move on to my next question before we go too deeply down that imagery. I would love to hear how policy oriented mixed methods research can be decolonised. So, for example, how would you approach decolonising a project where qualitative researchers use a mix of in depth qualitative tools, including participative methods, and work within the same project as quantitative researchers who are analyzing large datasets of household survey data?

Jess:

So I think I would start by trying to get a common understanding about what we mean by decolonising in that context, and what we mean by that, and I think if we want to start thinking about how we're defining decolonising, what is the intended output? What would be the deciding factor that means that this is a decolonised project or has been a successful decolonising intervention? And I think one of the ways to look at that would be to think through, before we get into the methods, kind of the intention behind collecting the data, the ways that the data is being collected, the ways that the questions are being framed. I'd want to know again, some of the things I mentioned earlier around the kind of economic side of things, like where is this funding coming from? I think the source of funding is also really important if we want to term things decolonial, because if the funding is coming from a country that formerly colonised and continues to colonise parts of the world, is it really ever going to be a decolonial project when the source of income has come from that place and there is no kind of intention that this is kind of a reparative act. So I think that would be the first kind of angle I take. And then I would say when it comes to the mixed method side of things, I think there's really interesting work being done by people in the field who are looking at quantitative methods. I know there's always this tension for me, I think there's some really interesting work around quantitative methods coming from particularly the U. S. around Quantcrit, which looks at kind of critical ways of using typical quantitative data to really analyze and highlight systemic inequities across contexts and across different issues. So, yeah, I think that's kind of where I'd begin. In terms of have I seen this done? I'm not sure I have. But I have read some really, really interesting articles recently. There's one article that I think is fantastic, which is called The Data is Gold and We Are The Gold Diggers, whiteness, race and contemporary academic research in eastern DRC. This is written by Gauthier Marchaise, Paulin Bazuzi, Aimable Amani Lameke. And it's an article actually, where they talk about the whole academic research development industry that has emerged in conflict affected areas of Eastern DRC, and how this kind of demand for huge mixed methods type surveys and research has led to a whole industry around collecting this data, but it's also ended up highlighting how racial and geographical inequities come up when we do this type of work. And for me I found it very interesting because I think it was one of the first articles that I'd read where they openly talk about race and how race constitutes a resource that can be tapped into, particularly in a context where empirical data, competition for funding and value for money are increasingly becoming the norm. And so they really unpack this around how this demand for huge amounts of data really relies on systems of inequity. And as I talked about earlier on, like this idea that the people who are going out collecting the data often are the least paid, work in very precarious conditions with little concern for their own well being. Whereas for the people who are out there mining the data or the big organisations who are collecting this data for them, this represents an opportunity of career advancement, of publications, of more funding for their organisation and the opportunity to maybe do this in other contexts as well. So, for me, when I think, just going back to your original question, when we talk about research and methodologies. Yes, it's very important, but I think if we want to be talking about decolonial research, it's so important to really unpick the intentions behind it and really think about what we're trying to do and why we're trying to do it and what are we trying to show and what is the proposed outcome and who benefits from that. I think that's really important.

Kate:

Thank you, Jess. That was a very comprehensive answer and very thought provoking. I think you've already answered my next question was, do you think that donor funded research can be decolonised if the donor hasn't decolonised? I mean, I think from what you've said, it's a comprehensive no. But do you have any other comments that you would like to expand on in terms of that area of thinking?

Jess:

So yeah, I would say no, I don't think it can. And that's again comes back to this misuse of the term decolonised and we have to really think about why we're calling something a decolonised project. That's not to say that project does not cannot serve a purpose. You may be trying to do participatory research. You may be trying to do some type of co design. You may be, again, instilling pedagogies of care and solidarity in your research product. But ultimately, for me, if your source of funding is coming from a source which is actively involved in supporting conflict or genocide, then it can't be a decolonial project. So I think for those of us who find ourselves working within these industries or working within all sectors, I think are complicit, what I think is really important to think about how do you redistribute the resources that you have access to given your position. And again, we are all positioned very differently within our places of work or within society. There is a really good book that I found, really inspiring and helpful when I was doing my PhD, and it's called the Anti Racist Scholar Activist, by Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Laura Connelly, and it's a book where they build on the ideas of many, many other people. So they quote many people within it. And they're not the first people to talk about this, but they say, if you're doing this type of work and you're working within institutions that are complicit in different forms of othering and exclusion, then you need to find out how you can be constructively complicit. And that might mean making sure that if you are designing the project, making sure that you are getting this point around economic justice in every point you can making sure you're maximising the amount you can pay people, making sure if you're producing anything that it's co authored or putting money aside so that it's actually going to be shared in a format that's accessible to the people who've co created the research. Constructive complicity is about thinking how you can help shift the culture within the organisation because we know that we don't all have the luxury of leaving places and organisations and societies where we don't necessarily agree with the policies, but we may have power over is to connect with others and organise and advocate for changes that we want to see. And so for me that, I think that's something that I would always try and reflect on, is how can we be constructively complicit.

Kate:

I really love that phrase. I'm going to be poaching that. It's great, I really like it. So, that's very useful, actually, because sometimes it's impossible to avoid working on or in a piece of work that you feel is somewhat compromising. But this idea of constructive complicity gives you the opportunity of having agency within a project or an organisation where you feel somewhat trapped and you're not. You actually have power and agency to make change and to push at the boundaries and within the scope of the limits of power that you have, you have agency as an individual to push for progressive change and I think that's quite useful because very few of us are completely outside the machine. We're within the machine and the machine is within us. So it's how you can create space for progressive change within that. That's really useful. Thank you. So Jess, we've covered a lot of ground in today's conversation and I've found it very rich and enjoyable, actually. I find your ideas refreshing and kind of intricate, that you've really looked at this from all different angles. And the language that you use is very precise. You've got a lexicon that you're using here that is obviously grounded in theory, but it's also very useful. It's very, I don't know tactile is the word I'm wanting to say because you've got a really comprehensive agenda here. So, to finish up what I'd like to do is to identify some practical first steps that our listeners and viewers can take to support decolonisation and shifting power, whether they're members of the engaged general public or work in the development sector. Do you have a first step that people can take?

Jess:

I think the first step would be to start with self and that involves critical self reflection. And I think that for me is a commitment to ongoing reflection and critique of one's own positionality, biases and assumptions that you hold and how they come out within whatever design process you're involved in and so I think the start of any journey of unlearning has to start with self and it has to start with an understanding of who you are and what has informed your world views, what has informed the way that you see yourself and the way that society sees you? And so I think when you start to have that kind of self reflection, knowledge, critique, you can then start to think about, okay, well, what are my implicit biases and explicit biases? And what does that enable me to see or not see? I think it then asks you to be attentive to the way that power operates within your community, within your team, and how that can maybe impact or how it does impact the work that you do in the processes and the outcome. And I think when you get to a point when you are critically self reflective and you are aware of these different biases, and you are aware of power differentials, that then calls for an opportunity to think, okay, well, where can I cede power? Where do I need to cede power? Where do I have power over where I should instead have power with or give power to? And so for me, I just would say to anyone who's starting on this journey or worked in the sector and has seen and started to feel quite uncomfortable with the stark inequities that you can see, I would say start with critical self reflection and take it from there.

Kate:

Thanks, Jess. That's very much in alignment with our philosophy in the Development Hub too. So thank you for finishing on that note. And it's been a complete pleasure to talk to you today. So it's goodbye from me and over to Nompilo.

Nompilo:

Also goodbye from me. Thank you so much for today's learnings.

Jess:

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on here.

Kate:

Thanks and goodbye.