The Power Shift: Decolonising Development

Addressing violence against women through community-grounded research. Dr Romina Istratii interviewed.

• Kate Bird • Season 1 • Episode 40

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In this week’s episode, we talk to Dr Romina Istratii, who tells us about the DLDL project, which takes an interdisciplinary approach to looking at domestic violence and religious communities.

We speak about co-created research which then feeds back into knowledge production and good practices in the West. This challenges Eurocentric norms around knowledge production by reversing the knowledge transfer as a way to shift power.

Romina centres the importance of identity and positionality in situating decolonisation efforts, and points at humility and reflexivity as key principles of co-created and community-grounded research.

Dr Romina Istratii is UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the School of History, Religions and Philosophies at SOAS University of London. She is an interdisciplinary researcher, scholar and practitioner working across international development, gender studies, religion and theology, psychology and anthropology to address societal challenges with gender dimensions. She currently leads and manage a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship of £1.2 million in Ethiopia and the UK that responds to domestic violence in religious communities working through an interdisciplinary, decolonial and innovative partnerships model with government, NGOs and grassroots groups. For the past 13 years, she has worked in development-oriented research to promote epistemological reflexivity, ethical research practices and healthy partnerships and collaboration models. She have led numerous initiatives within and beyond the university, having initialised the Decolonising Research Initiative under the aegis of the SOAS Research Directorate and in 2020, and co-founded Decolonial Subversions in 2020. She is the author of the monograph Adapting Gender and Development to Local Religious Contexts: A Decolonial Approach to Domestic Violence in Ethiopia (Routledge, 2020).

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

Recent work:

Istratii, R. and Laamann, L., eds (2024) Orthodox Churches and War Politics in Ethiopia and Ukraine: Historical, Ecclesial and Theological Reflections. Studies in World Christianity. Vol. 30, no.2.Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Relevant resources:

Kate:

Hello, I'm Professor Kate Bird and I'd like to introduce you to today's podcast episode. Today we're talking to Romina Istratii, who takes an interdisciplinary approach to looking at domestic violence in religious communities. The DLDL Project in Ethiopia takes an innovative approach to working with religious and community leaders, women and men, and learns lessons that can be applied to communities in the UK too. This fascinating research seeks to reject Eurocentric notions and applies a decolonial lens to its work. 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, Associate Economist and Director of the Development Hub. Today's co host is Dr. Nompilo Ndlovu. Over to you, Nompilo.

Nompilo:

Thank you, Kate. I'm Dr. Nompilo Ndlovu. I'm 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 study 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. Romina Istratii. Romina is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the School of History, Religions and Philosophies at SOAS, University of London. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to her work and currently leads a program looking at domestic violence in religious communities in Ethiopia and the UK, applying an interdisciplinary decolonial and innovative partnerships model with government, NGOs, and grassroots groups. She has a long track record working to promote epistemological reflexivity, ethical research practices, and healthy partnerships and collaboration models. She initiated the Decolonising Research Initiative at SOAS in 2020 and co founded Decolonial Subversions in 2020. For more on Romina and her work, click on the show notes below this episode. And I'm passing back to you now, Nompilo. Okay, Romina, I'll ask the first set of questions. Could you tell me about the DLDL- project in Ethiopia, its aims and background?

Romina:

Well, thank you so much, Nompilo. Thank you so much, Kate, for having me. It's a pleasure and a privilege. I'm sure you have hosted many others. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak and share. So Project DLDL, and thank you so much for the pronunciation and asking about it, means bridge in Tigrigna, one of our working languages. It is a research and innovation project funded by UK Research and Innovation under a scheme called Future Leaders Fellowship in the UK. And seeks to promote and develop community grounded, theologically informed, and culturally appropriate responses to domestic violence in East Africa and the UK. Our original working countries were Ethiopia and Eritrea, but due to the recent war, we only worked in Ethiopia and the UK. So, very briefly, the project seeks to apply robust, interdisciplinary, culturally informed evidence to the resolution of what is an urgent and global societal problem, domestic violence, but also in a manner that promotes equitable collaboration and two-way knowledge exchange between Europe and Africa. Now, I designed this project after completing my PhD at SOAS, University of London, which itself was a critical deconstruction of gender and development practices. And I was really informed and motivated by this decolonial understanding of historical inequalities in the system that has governed research and development, including some extractionist research practices and an inevitable collaboration practices that have been problematised by indigenous communities and many other activists. And the project also responds to several disciplinary biases that I engaged with early in my career, including the marginalisation of religious knowledge in what used to be a highly, and continues to be to a large extent, a highly secularised development paradigm and approach, but also many reductionist sociological frameworks and approaches to gender based violence in African contexts. They used to apply a very sort of reductionist theoretical understanding of the project without appropriate contextualisation and robust research on the ground. And so these were some of the disciplinary issues that I saw and I wanted to correct. But I also built on previous research, year long anthropological research in the countryside of Ethiopia that I conducted as part of my PhD to understand the role of religious and cultural factors in domestic violence experiences, and also to identify appropriate responses in the religious cultural worldview. So within people's own belief systems instead of imposing what used to be a very secular framework or reductionist framework that was not sufficiently contextualised. So in the project we co-create research. We develop culturally appropriate interventions and we also engage in knowledge exchange and public education, working with indigenous organisations and established institutions in the project countries. And these include also religious institutions. So in the first phase of the project, the past four years, we were guided by two specific aims that I wanted to bring up. One was to build evidence and develop research informed interventions to strengthen infrastructures and responses to domestic violence in Ethiopia, but also in the UK in collaboration with feminist women's organisations, religious institutions, businesses and charities. So all sorts of collaborators. And the second aim was to feed this evidence and practical knowledge into the UK's domestic violence sector, reversing the knowledge transfer, which historically used to be from the West to the rest, and actually have the UK domestic violence providers learn from good practices in East Africa and countries that cater to religious communities in order to respond better to ethnic minority faith communities in the UK migrant context. So these were the two aims of the project. I'll stop here, and I hope to be able to share more in the next questions.

Nompilo:

Great. Thank you for that detail. Can you please share more about the practical steps that you have taken to challenge the norms surrounding international development research? I know you've already started to pick on some ideas like co creation, cultural appropriateness, but can you share more?

Romina:

Yes, and I really appreciate this question because I don't think we really reflect on the practical operationalisation of what a decolonial approach looks like, if that makes sense. So in developing this project, again, I was at the time an early PhD graduate, had worked in decolonising my own institution, so I was very much informed by these debates and felt them to my skin and my bones. And so I really wanted to create a project that was different. And my primary concern, again, in conversation with collaborators and long-term friends in Ethiopia was to create something that would address structurally, in a structural, clear manner, the epistemological issues that I mentioned, the inequalities that I mentioned, while still responding effectively to domestic violence and still meeting that need. So we do a couple of things at the epistemological, methodological, and practical level. And I want to mention them briefly. Epistemically speaking, we try to depart from the historical approaches that we've engaged with in much gender sensitive and domestic violence research that have tended to define gender relations or gender conditions in low- and middle- income countries, non European countries through a reductionist or ethnocentric lens. So we really depart from these frameworks. We question these frameworks and we depart from any concepts or assumptions that these concepts carry or theories in order to really learn from the ground up, including the concept of religion itself, we do avoid it in the project. We may talk about religious beliefs or religious worldviews, but generally the concept of religion is generally avoided because it is very much embedded in modernity. Although again, it's hard to avoid it altogether. Methodologically speaking, we employ multilingual, community grounded, and participatory approaches that can allow us to engage with communities and build trust and build understanding over time. So these are not one-off projects, but we live in these communities and we work with researchers who live in these communities. We try to employ more interactive, visual, research methods. So methods that, again, are more interactive and allow the communities that we engage to share and to respond and to overcome this bias to written evidence, but really look at embodied experience overall and lived experience. And then we tend to work with indigenous researchers, again, whom we support with training, where gaps exist, but really the aim is to see them lead research activities so that we contribute to local research leadership over time and really build, really strengthen infrastructures, so that when the project ends, the legacy of it continues. Structurally speaking, and here I'll speak as I, because when I was building this application in the early stages, of course I was in conversation with collaborators, but it was still very much a creative project in my mind. I tried to structure the project so that the work packages would proceed from Ethiopia to the UK. Again, we speak about reversing the knowledge transfer, but if we started with the UK, then that's not really reversing knowledge transfer. So I really wanted to start working in Ethiopia and Eritrea, with our collaborators and indigenous communities. And then transfer that knowledge and good practices and lessons and maybe failures as well in our project approaches, for us in the UK to be learning from others. We also try to look at this at the nitty gritty level. So I spent a lot of time in developing this project in the early stages to decolonise some of our contracts and ensure that all the partners, collaborators would have joint intellectual property and would be able to use data collected together collaboratively, as they saw fit, because again, we know that data regulations oftentimes limit our partners, and then of course thinking everything in the project was informed by this need to reverse the knowledge transfer and to give more opportunities to our partners in Ethiopia, in East Africa, to have more exposure, to be more in the spotlight and share their own knowledge and evidence. So we included two international conferences. Again, the first one taking place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the second one in London, UK. And of course we are very adamant that everyone should be identified in co authored papers or outputs including staff, organisational staff, who may contribute minimally and maybe low ranking staff are oftentimes omitted. But for us, it's really important that everyone is acknowledged in some way, if not as co authors, in a fair manner, within each publication. It was important to structure the project so that we kept trying to reverse and overcome some of the structural issues that we've seen with previous projects and I've seen in previous projects and also personally speaking as the PI, I am committed, and I've always said that to working with the communities and in the same context because I feel that, and I know that, if we lose communication with the communities, then we really lose sight of the lived experience and the truth, whatever truth we're looking at, at the time. So for me, it was very important that I live in Ethiopia for the first two years, and I also speak Amharic and Tigrigna, the two working languages. I'm the only foreigner in fact in this project in the sense that every time our teams in these different projects are nationals in the societies where we work in. So in Ethiopia we work with an all- Ethiopian team, in Eritrea with an all-Eritrean team, and then in the UK with community researchers from the communities we work with in the UK. And I'll stop here. Again, there's more nuances and more things we try to do, but I think this gives you a sense of what we're trying to do and how we have tried structurally and I have tried structurally right as the P. I. because I understand that I have that responsibility of making certain decisions to give more opportunity to collaborators and to make sure that this project is beneficial to all and not just myself or the aims of the project, but it really sees the team and the collaborators as one and as a family and it is beneficial to everyone in some way.

Nompilo:

Thank you Romina. There are actually quite a few practical steps that you shared there and I like your use of the word trying to reverse. I think it's like doing things in a different order altogether. I think it's wonderful how you were able to elaborate on that. The next question, your work includes working with both men and women to shift behavior around domestic violence. Can you tell us about how your thinking about Western feminism and the application to international development has influenced your work?

Romina:

Thank you so much. It's an excellent question again because it's at the heart of my work. So my work is precisely a response to my engagement with Western feminisms over the past 13 years. So my primary focus has been on deconstructing and rendering more visible the ethnocentric assumptions that I have seen in gender and development and gender based violence theoretical paradigms and the way they're applied in international development practice specifically, because again, oftentimes the theory is more nuanced than what is applied and practiced on the ground, right, by international organisations and practitioners. So, my first aim has been to address the disconnect that I've seen between on the one hand a historically broadly Western secular feminist theoretical framework of different ideological branches, so it's not a single feminism, it's multiple feminist expressions, but they have tended to the secularity and certain positions on religion. And again, this has not eschewed the coloniality of modernity, because these disciplines are embedded in the same epistemological framework that dominates, a Western epistemological framework informed by modernity. So on the one hand, I had that, and on the other hand, the gender normative systems of non Western religious and cultural communities that I engage with in the African continent. And I actually started from West Africa when I was much younger and now I'm working in East Africa, so I've seen quite a few communities that are very diverse. So I saw very early the practical and the ethical tensions that oftentimes exist when secular gender standards or paradigms were applied to non secular religious societies or diverse cultural societies in the context I worked in, and that oftentimes would cause backlash or tensions that I thought were unnecessary. But some of them also pointed to what seemed to be some incommensurability in values. So difference of values, difference of beliefs. And so I wanted to create something that would actually take that seriously, take that difference seriously, and promote an approach that would be more culturally appropriate, more community led, and would start from the community's own understanding of domestic violence and abuse, their own lived experiences, their own linguistic repertoires, how they define things and the concepts they use as opposed to introducing foreign concepts. So I arrived at this work just to say, passing through many disciplines. I started as a political theorist and economist, then was exposed to the gender and development paradigm in agricultural development and development economics. But then I went on and did year-long ethnographic research in four African countries, did a master's in gender and development, and then completed my PhD at SOAS, which has incorporated methods from all these disciplines in addition to anthropology, sociology, and psychology. And again, the reason was because domestic violence is such a complex problem that requires that ecological framework, right, to pay kudos to this feminist theoretical framework, it requires a comprehensive framework, an interdisciplinary framework. And in going through all these experiences, I really came across biases and reductionisms in the gender and development literature and in the practice. And one of those biases was also a theoretical tendency to essentialise all men as perpetrators or to systematically exclude men from research on domestic violence. And in fact, one of my earlier questions, as someone who has been affected by domestic violence myself, was why certain men became abusive and others did not, even when they shared the same cultural or family context because I had seen that in my life. So it was curious to me that feminists generally concerned with ending domestic violence in the Western world actually tended to ignore half of the world's population, right? They didn't seem open enough to differentiate between, or comfortable enough to differentiate between men who were abusive and men who were not, and really to explore what made some men embody positive masculinities as opposed to other men, right? So to reverse the submission, we consciously tried to include males in all our research and interventions as Project DLDL. In fact, one of the films we created on domestic violence and faith, which I wrote on the basis of over 200 interviews, on domestic violence in Ethiopia, and this was then co produced with two companies in Ethiopia and the UK, actually speaks to perpetrators more than survivors. It's really interesting because survivors know what they go through, but perpetrators oftentimes need to be made aware of the pain they cause. So interestingly, even the film that I wrote speaks a lot to perpetrators, perhaps informed by my own personal experiences. During my anthropological research in Ethiopia, I actually found that a lot of men who, when I asked them whether they were abusive or not, we started becoming very comfortable and building these relationships of trust with male participants, and oftentimes, they started sharing with me personal experiences of when they were becoming abusive or not, and abuse, again, could be defined in multiple ways, right? They could be adulterous, they could be disrespectful, they could abandon their wives. It's not necessarily physical abuse. And a lot of them would tell me that they did not become abusive because they wanted to be righteous, you know, and they didn't want to sin. So that finding was very curious to me, and it suggested, well, actually, there might be something in religious language that could serve as a resource to deter abusiveness in that specific segment of abusive males. And then we did that project, one of our first projects, apologies, as Project DLDL, was co created and conducted with EMIRTA Research Training and Development in Ethiopia, which is an indigenous organisation that promotes robust research practices in Ethiopia, in order to look into this more in depth. But it wasn't just to co-create a piece of research and intervention with men. It was also to equip male research teams, because I worked with an all male team for this particular project, to conduct sensitive research on domestic violence, right? Men themselves have to be trained to lead these sorts of research projects to achieve maximum disclosure, sometimes they have the benefit of their gender identity with this particular group. And so I really wanted to invest in that and make sure that, again, once the project ends, there is a male team in the country that can continue promoting this kind of research and is equipped to understand the sensitivity and the safety concerns in domestic violence research.

Nompilo:

Thank you, Romina. You're so passionate about your work. The next question, kind of already dovetails of what you'd already started speaking about. You'd already started speaking more just about gender, but also about your work with men. So I'll just repeat to say, can you speak about your specific work with men? Just as an add on to what you'd already started addressing.

Romina:

Yeah, yeah, happy to. I can say a little bit about this research a little more. So this was primarily again, informed by my previous research findings in Tigray region, Ethiopia. So this is a region that was affected by the recent war and the research was done before the war. This is ethnographic interviews. It's all in my book and open access PhD. So people can read some of these stories and conversations I had with men, which I tell very explicitly and openly, of course, anonymised. And so a lot of them would tell me that they were not hurtful or abusive with their wives, or they did not behave in certain ways that other men behave, certain harmful ways, because of their faith based conscience. And they kept emphasising being moral and upholding righteousness, being a righteous man and not sinning. And so what I wanted to do is I wanted to explore how a different male sample in a different region rationalised and understood domestic violence and what attitudes they had about domestic violence and abuse. I really wanted to do a piece of research that would work only with males. I also wanted to explore how religious language and beliefs in particular were invoked or would be invoked by men to either justify or condemn domestic violence, and then identify if the clergy and the religious institutions could be play a role in changing abusive behavior or tolerant behavior, because again, we were already working with the church and training clergy, and so we have those established connections and relationships, and we wanted to understand if the church institution and the clergy on the ground could become part of the solution, essentially, part of a deterrence, a mechanism of building deterrence amongst the abusive segment of the population, which is a minority. Again, I want to emphasise that. So the other aspect of this is that I wanted to build this as an intervention, not just as a research, a piece of research. And I wanted while doing the research to raise awareness about domestic violence amongst the male participants and to help them envision and deterrence mechanisms. So, what we did, again, we worked collaboratively with EMIRTA, we, the team comprised myself and four male researchers, led by Dr. Zinawork Assefa, and then I supported the team with guidance, but especially, support with data coding analysis and then obviously training in domestic violence ethics and safety, prior to undertaking the research. The team went into the field and completed interactive visual surveys with 72 male participants, in Amhara region, so this is a different region of Ethiopia, and so they used essentially something quite different. It wasn't a questionnaire. I call it an interactive visual survey because it combines some questions about the background of the participants, sort of like a survey, but then it also combined a visual exercise where the researchers would show the participants six different drawings and scenes of domestic violence drawn by a local artist, Yared Tadesse. And those were scenes that were described to me in the research by other members of the Ethiopian community. And then we would invite them through a series of questions to give their reactions and to also put themselves in the situation of the protagonist and imagine what they would do differently if they were in the same situation. So it was a research piece, but it also actively engaged the participants to envision themselves in the situation and how they would deter themselves. Because again, the point was for them to understand that these situations are abusive. This is what the community calls domestic abuse. Some of whom did not realise, right? I wanted to just give a bit of an overview of key findings. This is not the full research, which hasn't been published yet. So it was interesting, one of the first comments that I received from the team and Dr. Zinawork was that men appreciated being invited to be part of the research because, as they said, they had been excluded in the past. So this was a reaffirmation of what I said before. They also found it useful to place themselves in the position of the perpetrator and to associate the situation that they were shown to their own lives. And it's interesting that in the process of describing the situations of domestic violence, so we ask them to interpret those situation, right, a lot of them actually started to realise abusive actions that they had engaged in in the past and actually express regret, which is truly an amazing outcome for just a research piece, right? It just goes to show that it was at the same time also an intervention in these men's lives. Interestingly enough, many men were concerned about their daughter's safety and future romantic relationships with men, because in the digital era, in the social media era, the parents could not monitor what was happening and they didn't have as much influence in their children's lives, right? And this suggested to us that the father daughter relationship, which other research has pointed to, probably merits more research attention because it might actually be a conducive tool to reforming abusive or abuse tolerant behavior among the abusive segment of the male population. They do care about daughters, they do care about females, but especially daughters, and they wouldn't want to see their daughters in that situation, and that can help them reform some of their views about women in general and domestic violence. Interestingly, the faith parameter did not emerge as strongly. Again, we're still kind of analyzing the results, but the role of the clergy as influential figures once again was emphasised in this research too by the participants.

Nompilo:

Okay. All righty. I think I'm going to hand over to Kate because it's quite a lot of questions, but just in just my own observations, I just thought it was so clever to, as a research method, get a local artist to draw different versions of violence and try to get the society to envision or to imagine themselves in that situation. So it was just a learning curve for me to think of just such textured ways of doing such a complicated conversation with men. So yeah, very well done on that and just being intuitive about it. Kate, I do want to hand it over to you. I've heard a lot of my own voice.

Kate:

Thank you so much Nompilo and I'm finding hearing about your research absolutely fascinating, Romina. Could you tell us a little bit more just as a follow on question about the ways in which your research has led to South South and circular learning because you were talking about bringing advice from Ethiopia into migrant communities in the UK. And I'd really be interested to hear a little bit about how this innovatory research has led to informing practice in perhaps other countries, but also in the UK, because I think that's a very interesting bridge that your bridge project has made.

Romina:

Yeah, and that's the one million dollar question, right, Kate? Has it contributed to furthering the aims, because I would never claim meeting the aims is a possibility, but at least to further those aims. So I would start by saying that, in general, throughout the four years we've had as a team, we've tried to be very active in knowledge sharing. So we've done several dozens of webinars, spoken at UN webinars, spoken on all sorts of international platforms as a team to share what we're doing and also regional webinars, engaging men in gender based violence response tests and prevention, various other webinars. And in those webinars and in those events, oftentimes we would have these conversations with other participants from representing other African countries. And the feedback we received was that this resonated with them too. This approach resonates with us. This is something that needs to be done here too and so on. So throughout the years we have, especially we've had a lot of conversations with other countries we could expand this work in or again, working collaboratively and exploring synergies, including Kenya and various other countries is that, so far we haven't really delved into the synergies because we still have to meet the original deliverables of this project. So hopefully this will evolve in the future. And the other thing when it comes to the UK, again, throughout the four years, although we were focusing the first two years in East Africa and the final two years in the UK to make it a bit more practical and manageable, and but also again to structurally reverse the knowledge transfer direction, we always had communication between all contexts throughout the lifetime of the project. So from day one, we brought together, we created a community of practice, essentially, of practitioners who work with faith and domestic violence in the UK, in Ethiopia, in Eritrea and internationally, and started creating that community, which has grown considerably in the past four years. One of the main platforms we work with in the UK is the Faith and VAWG Coalition. So, Faith and Violence Against Women and Girls Coalition, which brings together already organisations, charities, initiatives, by and for, so community led initiatives that work in the UK with ethnic minority faith communities of all religious backgrounds. And we have been sort of co-creating webinars, creating conversations and opening and starting these conversations. Some of us in Ethiopia, some of us being in the UK and starting that exchange of knowledge and experience since day one of the project. So this has been ongoing but it really culminated at the recent conference. So we had two international conferences. The one in Ethiopia, and from that conference we actually published a conference proceedings. I think we had papers published representing at least 13 countries, the majority of them, many of them being in Africa, also having Australia, I believe there, Canada, maybe, and I can't remember now, I don't want to lie, but it was very international. Also the UK, also Ethiopia, but many other countries as well in Africa and internationally, and that was the first indicator again that what we're doing resonates with other people. It has relevance and it brings a lot of interest. And again, that conference provided us with an opportunity to start creating those synergies and partnerships and more partnerships between our collaborators, the organisations we worked with and partners we work with in the UK, but also organisations that we don't work with in the UK, but know us, who wanted to speak to our partners in Ethiopia. So actually we have been what we call ourselves to be a bridge. People come to me from the UK asking to talk to our collaborators in Ethiopia who support us, kind of work with us on different projects, so depending on their interest area. And then we are a bridge bringing these people together to create new synergies, some of which we are part of, some of which evolve in their own direction, and become independent of us. And then the recent conference in the UK was really interesting. We brought about a hundred people, maybe, well, less than a hundred. I think it was about 80 people in the room representing 15 domestic violence service providers in the UK. But also about eight or nine representatives of the organisations we work with in Ethiopia. So we actually funded the travel for our partners to be, obviously, in the UK. We always fund travel for everyone to come together and have that sharing. But we also had, for the first time, it was really interesting, and again, we have these highlights, we have the conference recorded in full, this is all on Vimeo. And I can share that with our audiences if they're interested, and we had the Domestic Abuse Commissioner of the UK in the room, and we had Archbishop Angaelos of the Coptic Orthodox Church in London, and then we had representatives from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the room from Ethiopia, and from all other collaborating organisations we work with. We had Imams from Muslim organisations working on domestic violence, and then we had these conversations that were very exciting, everyone was deeply grateful for the fact that they could meet people from a very different context and hear their experience and learn genuinely from what they had to share. It was very collegiate, very open to learning, and a safe environment that I think the domestic violence sector really brought into the room because creating safety and creating a safe environment is a priority for the sector. So I think it's really hard to tell you to what extent this has been achieved and how effectively, but I can definitely confirm that, well, I know that we have created the maximum opportunities we could have created with the funds we have for that knowledge exchange to happen and everything we publish is open access. All the webinars we do are published online. All the publications we develop are published online. We just published a piece of research on domestic violence attitudes and responses in the UK, working with Ethiopian, Eritrean and Bangladeshi ethnic minority communities, Christian and Muslim. And this was conducted with the help of community based researchers. We just published it as a preprint again to make it available as soon as possible so that it can be used by practitioners, it can be shared with participants, it can be used in the community in real time to the extent possible, of course. And of course, we are also undergoing the proper peer review process to publish it as an article, which we always have. So really it's been for us, we've done what we could have done to everything we create to make available, not just for use, but also for critique and feedback. And to leave the option to people to take it or leave it, you know, it's a resource that we have created for others because we have the funding and that was the aim. That's why I created the project. I realised that those working on domestic violence on the ground don't have the luxury to do research, to build the evidence base, to translate research into language that can inform policy. This is something that we are trying to do. And a gap that we want to fill is where we want to add value. And so I'll stop here. I don't have a conclusive response. I think this would engage asking also our collaborators. So we hope to do a survey or some sort of an assessment at the end of this project as we come to the end of the four year phase to understand better how partners have benefited or not, the gaps, the limitations and resources. I had partners who were not able to attend the conference because we only had limited funds. So a limited number of people could be supported with travel. So, there's always limitations and there's always things that don't go exactly as they should go. But I think given the war that we went through and the COVID 19, again, we started in 2020 when both these crises emerged. I think we've managed to create those opportunities that we hoped for, yes.

Kate:

Thank you so much. It sounds to me as though you've really woven attempts to disseminate and engage with different audiences right into your policy and into your research design. And I like the kind of reflective, reflexive approach that you've taken your work. In previous conversations that we've had, you've expressed doubts about whether a decolonisation of research can actually be achieved. And I know in the way that you've designed this research, you've tried to be very mindful of partnership. You've attempted to be truly respectful of your research partners. You've tried to be aware of Eurocentrism. You've tried to apply a critique of the idea of modernity and the link between a kind of modernity and Eurocentric approach to many forms of feminism. But you still are doubtful about whether decolonisation can be achieved in research. Could you tell us why?

Romina:

Oh, well, this is a complex, complex conversation. And it does require a nuanced answer because I don't want this to be misunderstood. And I don't think I can provide this answer in a few minutes, but I will try to share some thoughts. I mean, I think the obvious answer is that decolonisation is never something that one can say has been achieved. It's an ongoing process. And we can only contribute to that process. I think we have to start from that humble point of reference. From a practical point of view, even though we as researchers and collaborators may become more reflexive, may become more humble in our approaches and may become more critical of what we do and our own actions and are more open to learning and adapting and learning from our collaborators, and so the behavioral, the subjective element may be there, but the structures remain the same. Most of the funding is based on the Global North and Western industrialised societies. Budgets are usually controlled by the principal investigator based in Western institutions. That means that Western institutions are embedded in their own regulatory frameworks that speak to Northern, Western industrialised societies more than our collaborating societies in Africa or Asia where we work in. So the structure doesn't change, but regardless of all the efforts we make, and I think we can start to subvert some of these structural inequalities when we are a bit more equitable with our budgetary arrangements. So in my project, again, the partners had a budget to manage that was agreed based on a contract and the contract listed our mutual expectations, mine and theirs, and our mutual responsibilities and so on. But they had financial independence. And that for me was a step in the right direction. You know, people should feel that they have ownership over their budget. Still, the overall budget and the one who monitored the overall budget and made the overall decisions was myself. And again, it starts, I think, from that structural difference or asymmetry. But I think my doubt lies somewhere else beyond the structural concern that I have. And my doubt lies in actually who is best positioned to contribute to decolonisation efforts in different regions of the world. So it has become very clear to me leading this project in the past four years, during a war, during a pandemic with a lot of uncertainty with everything going wrong, to a large extent, thankfully I had collaborators and partners who were very supportive and we had effective partnerships and an institution that supported me, but I also had a lot of challenges. And I saw that it really dawned on me that our positionalities, our identities inform and define and really limit what we might do, where we might do such work, so decolonisation related work, and where we can have good and positive impact. And I want to illustrate this through an example. This is a very sensitive example. I thought about hard and long whether I should share it, but it is part of my lived experience and my narrative, and I think I have the right to share it. So, having been based in Ethiopia during the two years of the Tigray conflict, I realised how easily white identity, because I was perceived as white, can become politicised in the war, which can create limitations, both for the work we seek to do, which seeks to be decolonial at least, it's informed by that reflexivity, but also can raise safety concerns for international project teams. So as the politics of the war intensified, my position in Ethiopia, but also the fact that I spoke against sexual violence in Tigray, perpetrated by both what we know now to have been Ethiopian and Eritrean militants in the region, gradually made me a persona non grata, let's say, for certain groups in Eritrea, where we also had built our collaborations and projects. And as a result, because of all sorts of issues that emerged, we had to cease all collaboration and withdraw from the country, which meant losing the opportunity to work with the Eritrean communities we wanted to work with. I had the privilege to travel in Eritrea during the war and I was really grateful to receive a community of exceptionally hospitable people, whom I also felt I let down. At the time, we had taken about a year to build the necessary partnerships to develop trust. But when the situation changed radically, my positionality as PI became a liability. Right? So this is what I meant earlier when I said that positionality can define what impact we may or may not be able to create in certain regions of the world at certain political times. And identity will always be instrumentalised in times of crisis, whether white, black, or any other identity. So as researchers, sitting in Western institutions, I think we really need to be thinking, unfortunately, about all the unintended consequences that our positionality could have if everything were to go wrong, because that has been my experience. And if that were the case, then perhaps we need to be able to courageously opt out of working in certain regions because of the likelihood of unintended harm. Essentially, what I'm saying is that perhaps certain Western Europeans may not be most well placed to lead projects, let's say, I mean on decolonisation right, in some African context at some particular time, but they may be more well placed to do such work in a Western European context with diverse non Western or African communities because they share that cultural context by geography, right? Now, I'm not saying that, again, researchers sitting in Western institutions should not be involved in decolonisation efforts in Africa. And I speak of Africa because this is the region I work in primarily. But I'm not saying that. I'm saying that they should be part of these projects, but they should proceed with humility, reflexivity, and really a realistic understanding of the risks of politicisation, because we exist in very sensitive times where conflict is almost ubiquitous of some sort. And be willing to be guided by their partners of what their partners think is safe and appropriate, and even be willing to disengage and choose not to be somewhere, not to do research if they think that their positionality could become a liability. That's really what I'm talking about. These are, of course, tentative thoughts based on my lived experience. I don't have a conclusive answer. But I do have to stress that I think we do need to realise that decolonisation efforts are defined inherently and primarily by our identities. Who we are defines how we understand decolonisation, how we contribute to decolonisation, why that is important to us, and so on. So while we can all contribute to decolonisation efforts from any position in the world, and I stand by that, we have different comparative advantages and limitations that come with our identities in different regions of the world and in different political times. So we need to really understand that fluidity of identity and the consequences and the limitations and the strengths that comes with that fluidity. And I think I'll stop here.

Kate:

Thank you very much. It's a very thoughtful and comprehensive answer. And I like the emphasis that you give to humility and talking with and listening to your country partners about the roles and responsibilities that somebody with a Eurocentric white identity might have in this kind of work. So given the challenges that you've had in this project, but also given the really remarkable work that you've done, now that you're coming towards the end of this four year phase of your project in Ethiopia, what do you think are the next steps for you and your work?

Romina:

Yeah, so we're just completing the first phase this month and we have been awarded renewal funding, not as large, but a substantive amount by UK Research and Innovation for three more years. So we will certainly continue. We have new work packages and new programs coming out for the next three years. And in terms of the impact and the direction we want to take. And again, a complex question because I'm constantly reflecting on what has been achieved, what was done well, what was not done well, and how we should proceed next. And of course in having that monologue with myself and having conversation with collaborators, people I work with, new partners who are coming to me with opportunities and potential synergies. So again, it is very dynamic. I want to say that the original FLF project, so the original four-year project, was designed, again, to develop new evidence around domestic violence and religio-cultural diversity and how that could inform domestic violence services, again, reinforce a more community grounded research approach and really promote a transboundary understanding of domestic violence that looks both at what happens in country of origin and in host countries to understand better attitudes about domestic violence and help seeking responses in ethnic minority migrant contexts. So again, it's such a complex problem that it has to be looked at through a multi-site transboundary approach, because we have become more international and more mobile, so people move from one place to the other. They're not really bounded geographically. And that is something that we have really tried to bring into research on domestic violence. And I think this is something that's quite different, I haven't seen many advocating for that. They probably are. But, you know, when it comes to the mainstream, it's not yet mainstream. So we completed multiple activities about four research projects, two interventions, with clergy and men, three research films, two of which have not been published yet, two, three dozen publications, I honestly, I haven't kept count, and we have also seen substantive results. We've trained clergy, 155 clergy in Ethiopia, on domestic violence and how to respond in a theologically accurate manner, but also in a way that considers safeguarding and safety concerns and legal frameworks in Ethiopia. Again, this was done with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church Development Wing, EOTC, DICAC, our collaborator. We've created a new field really at the intersection of religious domestic violence, psychology and international development, those were disconnected disciplines entirely. And to connect disciplines, it's not easy work. I think when we think about impact, this is important to close these boundaries, and I don't think researchers get enough acknowledgement for doing that, because it takes so much effort to try and speak different languages to different disciplines and bring them together and create a common language of understanding. And then of course, we also promoted a lot, as I said, knowledge exchange between Africa and Europe. And I can already see the different conversations that are happening around me between collaborators in Ethiopia, domestic violence providers in the UK, and everyone being curious about each other. So to me, that is an indication that something good has happened in this project. The renewal project will expand in new directions organically, so we want to work more with survivors of conflict related violence and domestic violence in Ethiopia, but also in Poland. So that's a new country that we are expanding, we want to work in bringing in a new co-investigator, Dr. Sandra Pertek, who is also doing extremely important work on faith and gender based violence internationally. We want to do more interfaith work with Christian and Muslim clerics in the UK because we've started training clergy, but we are working to create together with Dr Mahmoud Ali Goma Fifi, one of my collaborators, to create interfaith trainings on domestic violence for Christian and Muslim clerics in multi religious societies, including UK, Ethiopia, and Egypt. And then we really want to start new initiatives to improve religious literacy in domestic violence services in the UK. So very ambitious, but again, building on what we have done so far. And as I said before, thinking about the overall impact and where I could contribute the most and the value that I'm adding. And again, I have come to believe that I have a comparative advantage to work more also in Europe because my first 13 years of work experience were mostly focused on the African region. But as a result of the limitations I mentioned, I think I have been more motivated to look towards Eastern Europe as well, my own region. But not in a way that isolates the regions, but actually brings them together and integrates my experience working with African religious communities in cross cultural contexts into Eastern Europe and vice versa and into Western Europe. So really expanding regionally, but again, not to work in silos, but to bring everyone together which in itself is a very ambitious task. So, I think we're quite ambitious. And then, you know, we really want to look at violence across migration pathways because we've had a lot of conflicts. We've had a lot of displaced populations, but we also have economic migration and educational migration. And we really want to understand, to use a feminist concept, which I'm very grateful to, the continuum of violence, and really look at different forms of violence and how the one exacerbates the likelihood of the other and exacerbates vulnerabilities, and then build responses that consider these multiple forms of violence simultaneously. And then finally, we are involving, actually, I think I can share this, an independent research institute. It is very much inspired by the decolonial reflexivity or aims or ambitions or aspirations, of Project DLDL and then the co-creation model and principles that have guided the previous project. And really what we want to do through this institute, not only expand geographically and internationally and influence more good practice in the fields and the sectors that we work in, but also to inform policy and to promote even stronger bridges between disciplines on the one hand, religious and secular stakeholders on the other continents and geographies at a third level, and really be a bridge. So continuing to be a bridge, hopefully with more impact. And again, we do this because as a project, we do need to achieve financial independence in the long run, and funding does not come easily, as we know, even though we're based in Western institutions. So we're looking for a different model, operational model that allows us to become sustainable, and continue to maximise this impact for the long term. So I really don't believe in short term projects. Although we did have to have a lot of mini projects in the larger project. I do believe that the community that has been created has to continue and it's my responsibility as the PI, but also the responsibility of our team to continue providing a space for that community.

Kate:

Thank you so much Romina. So bringing our conversation to a close, and reflecting on what you've just said about working in an interfaith way and working in an interdisciplinary way and providing a bridge between communities in Africa, in Eastern Europe, and in Western Europe. I'd like you to think about the practical first steps that you could recommend to our listeners and viewers so that they can work differently in their international collaborations and work in a decolonised way.

Romina:

Yeah, again, I think everyone really has to reflect on who they are and their point of reference, their positionality, how they're coming into that community, their relationship to the community. And I think starting from that reflection, they can be led to find answers. I don't think anyone can tell anyone what might work for them. But I do see the benefit of this question in the sense that there are certain priority areas, perhaps, and certain considerations that we may want to keep in mind as we do this. And for me, essentially, what I'm trying to say, Kate, is that there is no checklist approach to this. I really think it's about reflexivity first and foremost, it sounds trite and cliche, but it really is about understanding the strengths and limitations of your positionality and who you are in relation to the community. Secondly, it's humility and understanding that you have power based on where you are. If you are based in Western institution, if you have some funding available, that already gives you some advantage that may result in some structural asymmetry vis a vis your collaborators, or the communities you want to work with. Understanding that power asymmetry is important. It will never disappear, but it's important that we understand the limitations and we can subvert it and navigate it appropriately. And then I would say understanding that decolonisation essentially means giving up power. And I don't think anyone feels comfortable with giving up power. This is a psychological reality, I think. For all sorts of reasons, I'm not going to go there. But I think being able to take the back seat, and to me, saying that is very hard, because I am the PI, and I've always been on the front seat, and I'm a perfectionist and I need to know that things will happen and I make them happen. But sometimes you just have to take the backseat. Yeah. Sometimes you have to take the backseat and let others learn through the process. You've learned enough, you know enough. You've done it enough. Let others try to do it too in that sense. It's not like you know everything. I'm not saying that, but you've done it. You've had a chance to learn. Let others learn too through the process of trying. And then I would say really thinking about practicalities. Partners need funds. Our African collaborators need funds to do what they need to do. So I think we as prospective collaborators or friends or trusted colleagues who can navigate the funding culture on our side of the world a bit better because it comes more easily to us. I think we need to support them in developing competitive funding applications so that they can take ownership of projects that they envision building and doing and leading. Not that they cannot necessarily again, it's different. I'm not talking about capacity building, which has all sorts of complexities and intricacies and limitations and colonial nuances as well. But I'm really talking about genuine support where it's needed. Our partners tell us constantly that the funding culture is very complex, understanding eligibility criteria is complex, and oftentimes they need support with writing the applications. I mean, English is not their first language necessarily. So it's practical support as friends, as colleagues, that we can give. But again, we need to understand that most of the funding is available in the Global North. Most of the donors, most of the funding available is based in a regulatory framework and a language and a terminology that is a bit more accessible to us. So we need to start from that. And in fact, in our renewal project, we have included funds that we want to award to collaborators so that they develop their own projects that they envision leading so that they can apply to competitive bids and secure those funds to be able to lead them. And this is a way again, we would not have any gain, but we would be happy to see our collaborators able to lead projects that perhaps we would never be competitive enough to apply for these projects on their behalf, because I had situations where collaborators said, well, you apply for us and we'll be collaborators. And I would say, well, I don't have your knowledge to apply, you know, you have to apply. And so we really need to understand, again, where we have a comparative advantage to act and where we have a comparative advantage not to act and let others act. And I think I'm going to, I'm going to stop with that comment.

Kate:

Thank you very much. So we've had a great conversation. And I'd like to say goodbye for now. And thank you on behalf of myself and Dr. Nompilo Ndlovu for joining us on today's podcast episode. Thank you so much.

Romina:

Thank you so much, Kate and Nompilo. Thank you for having me once again.