Epistemic Justice in International Social Work Research: Postcolonial Theory and Analytic Strategies

Abstract

Scholars have long grappled with the ways in which unequal power relations influence the creation and circulation of international social work knowledge. I outline a robust postcolonial theoretical framework to elucidate complexities of global knowledge and power and extend possibilities for considering such questions of epistemic justice. Drawing on my own research with service providers in Nepal, I suggest three analytic strategies to apply postcolonial insights in international social work research: reflexivity, critical discourse analysis, and postcolonial translation. Postcolonial theory and the strategies provided support social work researchers to comprehend, generate, and disseminate knowledge that can disrupt colonial assumptions.

“Pero es difícil differentiating between lo heredado, lo adquirido, lo impuesto. She puts history through a sieve, winnows out the lies, looks at the forces that we as a race, as women, have been part of.”

-Gloria Anzaldúa (1987/2012: 104) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Epistemic justice is concerned with how knowledge can be sought, generated, and circulated in ways that do not merely reinforce—and may, in fact, challenge—unwarranted claims to power based on the knowledge of already powerful groups and institutions. The pursuit of epistemic justice centers the questions of whose knowledge is afforded credibility as well as which knowledges are rendered intelligible in dominant social imaginaries, or collectively shared images and scripts (Koch, 2020; Medina, 2011). For at least four decades, conversations about epistemic justice have been evident in the international social work field. In light of colonization and other global inequities that have accorded undue epistemic influence to the West, social work scholars have grappled with naming the core knowledge and values that connect us as a profession and the processes through which social work knowledge should be generated (Askeland & Payne, 2006; Gray & Coates, 2008; Jones & Truell, 2012; Midgley, 1981; Ornellas, Spolander, & Engelbrecht, 2018; Sewpaul & Henrickson, 2019). The most recent Global Definition of Social Work (2014) explicitly named the impacts of colonization on the production of knowledge, stating:

Part of the legacy of colonialism is that Western theories and knowledges have been exclusively valorised, and indigenous knowledges have been devalued, discounted, and hegemonised by Western theories and knowledge. The proposed definition attempts to halt and reverse that process by acknowledging that Indigenous peoples in each region, country or area carry their own values, ways of knowing, ways of transmitting their knowledges, and have made invaluable contributions to science.

(IFSW & IASSW, 2014)

Indigenous was further defined according to the United Nations (UN) definition, which includes 1) maintaining attachments to “distinct ancestral territories,” 2) maintaining “distinct social, economic and political institutions within their territories,” 3) aspiring to “remain distinct culturally, geographically and institutionally,” and 4) self-identifying as “indigenous or tribal” (IFSW & IASSW, 2014).

Naming colonization and acknowledging the knowledge of Indigenous peoples are important steps for our profession. It is also important to recall that a hallmark of European colonization has been to undermine attachments to ancestral land, autonomy in governance, and the maintenance of distinct languages and cultures (De Sousa Santos, 2016). Therefore, it is not enough to recognize the different knowledges of Indigenous peoples as if such knowledge has always developed in separate spheres. To halt and reverse colonial knowledge in this context means to struggle with the ways colonization has impacted knowledge systems in much of the world, including the West (Dittfield, 2020; Ranta-Tyrkkö, 2011). Second, this definition recognizes only Western and Indigenous knowledge. If we accept the UN definition of Indigenous and use the term “West” to describe the socially constructed geographies, institutions, and knowledges emanating from Western Europe and the settler colonies established by Europeans (Hall, 2019), then the knowledge of many of the world’s peoples is not included here. These groups include those whose ancestors were enslaved and forcibly moved; migrants and refugees; non-Indigenous groups within non-Western nations; and groups whose claims to Indigeneity have not been recognized by authorizing countries or the UN. Third, knowledge not only arises out of being Western or Indigenous, but from intersecting experiences and social relations, such as relations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability (Alexander & Mohanty, 1997; Anzaldúa, 1987/2012; El-Lahib, 2017).

This paper provides a robust postcolonial epistemological framework and analytic strategies to support researchers to make sense of the complex relations of knowledge and power that international social work researchers engage. In the section that follows, I provide a brief overview of postcolonial conceptions of knowledge and power and discuss major critiques of colonial discursive formations. I then draw on the work of postcolonial scholars, Gloria Anzaldúa (1987/2012) and Homi Bhabha (1994), to discuss the kinds of knowledge that arise in the meeting places between worlds and worldviews. Finally, I discuss three analytic strategies for researchers that are suggested by a postcolonial lens: reflexivity, critical discourse analysis, and postcolonial translation.

The research experience that I draw on for this paper is a qualitative study that I conducted with service providers in Pokhara, Nepal about their constructions of domestic violence and strategies to address it. Although Nepal was never officially colonized by a European power, long-standing and far-reaching investments of international development organizations to address social welfare issues within the country have made it an important site to examine how development knowledge has been produced and circulated (Leve, 2007; Pigg, 1993; Shrestha, 1995; Tamang, 2000, 2009; Yadav, 2019).

I am a white scholar located in a United States (U.S.)-based academic institution. I lived in Nepal and worked for three and a half years with non-governmental organizations (NGO) whose work related to women and children’s human rights and psychosocial well-being. Through marriage, I am a Nepal buhārī, a daughter-in-law of Nepal. Despite the focus of this paper on research from my own positioning, the strategies proposed here do not require academic credentials or a gaze from universities in the West. The goal of this paper is to provide tools for those engaging in research to open the space for the recognition, production, and communication of knowledge that challenges colonial assumptions.

Theorizing Colonial Knowledge and Power: Caught in the Net

Developed and named as an interdisciplinary body of theory amid anticolonial, anti-imperial, and Civil Rights movements of the mid-20^th century, postcolonial scholarship has highlighted the ways that relations of power are legitimized by dominant understandings of the world that rose through European colonization (Frankenberg & Mani, 1992; Hall, 1996; Stam & Shohat, 2012). Postcolonial theory offers a perspective for examining the impacts of colonization on knowledge and power, and has been applied both in places and times characterized by European or settler colonial rule, and in places and times that are not, or are no longer, characterized by direct colonial rule (Smith, 1999/2012; Stam & Shohat, 2012).¹ Here I provide an overview of a postcolonial conceptualization of knowledge and power and discuss two colonial discursive formations that postcolonial scholars have highlighted and critiqued: hegemonic universalism and cultural essentialism.

Postcolonial scholars have largely drawn on poststructuralist conceptions of power, in turn influenced by Algerian anti-colonial struggles (Stam & Shohat, 2012). Poststructuralists view modern power as operating through the circulation of discourse, or systems of representation, in society (Hall, 2001). The circulation of discourses is conceived of as operating through a net-like structure in which actors have differential power to shape discourse, but are always involved in either its reproduction or contestation (Foucault, 1980; Hall, 2001). Discourses influence knowledge by providing the categories and frameworks that influence what we observe and how we make sense of these observations, and knowledge is seen as value-laden, as discourses construct what is considered to be normative (e.g. normal, healthy, modern) (Chambon, 1999; Fairclough, 2015; Gee, 2014; Hall, 2001). By rendering oppressive systems invisible and blaming marginalized individuals and groups for the problems they face, dominant discourses operate as foundational assumptions and tend to support the power of already powerful groups and institutions. Postcolonial critiques of hegemonic universalism and cultural essentialism offer two important perspectives on the ways in which powerful institutions and actors assert the superiority of their own knowledges.

Hegemonic Universalism

Hegemonic universalism, also called pseudouniversalism or simply universalism, is the assumption that knowledge is neutral and universally applicable, when in fact it is built on dominant assumptions about whose knowledge and what kinds of knowledge are viewed as legitimate and accorded value (Narayan, 1998; Ranta-Tyrkkö, 2011). For example, within international development, postcolonial scholars have argued that, despite the diverse and ever changing priorities promoted by international development institutions, a persistent theme has been the measurement of development using idealized Western approaches as the “yardstick” (Escobar, 1995/2012).

Critiques of hegemonic universality center both the methods of dominant knowledge production as well as the norms, values, or ideologies that underlie the types of knowledge sought. Early international development research has been critiqued for the use of ahistorical lenses that failed to recognize the impacts of colonization and slavery on the development profiles of previously colonized countries (McMichael, 2012). Moreover, the privileging of quantitative methods and claims to scientific objectivity have enabled outsiders, disproportionately white outsiders from the West, to gain credibility as technical experts in developing countries even as they lacked context-specific knowledge (Koch, 2020; Mosse, 2014).

An impact of hegemonic universalism is that subjugated lenses and values through which knowledge could be constructed are, at best, considered only relevant at the local level (Pigg, 1997). The postcolonial critique of hegemonic universality suggests that researchers, especially those coming from positions of relative privilege, should embrace an understanding of knowledge as partial, become attuned to the culturally and historically specific processes through which supposedly universal knowledge is produced, and make visible the norms and values that underlie it.

Cultural Essentialism

In Western colonial discourse, cultural essentialism is a discourse of absolute cultural difference between the West and those groups considered to be cultural outsiders to the West (i.e. cultural Others), as well as a presumption of homogeneity within groups constructed as Other (Narayan, 1998). Edward Said (1978/1994) famously examined how discourses of cultural difference, established through colonization, structured knowledge in the field of Oriental Studies. He demonstrated that European writings about “the Orient,” which included the Middle-East and extended across Asia, consistently constructed knowledge around a discursive binary between “the Orient” and the West. This binary, Said argued, began and ended with the conception of difference, where non-Western cultures were depicted as completely different from, and inferior to, the West. Similarly, critical development scholars have described how the field of development was founded on a dichotomy between tradition and modernity, where societies were depicted as historically separate from one another, and to become modern was to become more like an idealized version of the West (Bernstein, 1971; Crewe and Harrison, 2002).

I use the term idealized above to point out that the West is co-constructed alongside those places and peoples constructed as outside the West, and to advocate skepticism of claims that ideas such as science or human rights are the sole purview of the West (Narayan, 1998; Sewpaul, 2016). For example, in Western Europe and the United States (U.S.) the concept of rights has co-existed with justifications of slavery, colonization, and denial of women’s equal rights with men. Today, the U.S. still has not ratified international rights conventions such as the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) (Sewpaul, 2016). The current conceptualization of human rights as, in its ideal form, applying to everyone, is the result of long struggles by oppressed groups against racism, patriarchy, and colonization (Narayan, 1998).

Although at first glance discursive formations of hegemonic universality and cultural essentialism may seem to be opposed to one another, Narayan (1998) argued that these discursive formations are, so to speak, two sides of the same colonial coin. She observed that some feminists have responded to critiques of ethnocentrism in their solidarity efforts with a pendulum swing towards culturally essentialist relativism. Because this brand of cultural essentialism does not recognize the heterogeneity within non-Western societies, it undermines the efforts of those working for gender justice within these contexts and provides ideological cover for conservative movements that seek to maintain or deepen gender inequality (Narayan, 1998).

Postcolonial scholars have further pointed out that both hegemonic universalism and cultural essentialism have been replicated within regions, countries, and other localities. In fact, an early strategy among international development experts was to support a class of with-in country elites, who would lead the way toward modernization (Bernstein, 1971). As such, the discursive divisions produced through development discourses which construct those considered developed and those considered to be in need of development have been replicated within Nepal (Pigg, 1993; Shrestha, 1995) For example, Tamang (2000) argued that early development efforts constructed Nepali women through the priorities of the dominant group, bringing Indigenous peoples—some of whose cultures had more flexible gender norms and practices—under increased control of the former single-party state.

Held together, critiques of hegemonic universality and cultural essentialism, and an understanding of the replication of colonial dynamics of knowledge and power at regional, national, and local levels, demonstrate that postcolonial scholarship cannot be a matter of uncritically replacing “Western” knowledge with “non-Western” or “local” knowledge. Such a substitution can result in the privileging of the knowledge and priorities of more powerful actors in a country or locality at the expense of people with less social power.

Knowledge in the Borderlands

Thus far, I have discussed broad postcolonial understandings of knowledge and power and two major colonial discursive formations that have been critiqued in postcolonial scholarship. Yet, once these critiques are understood, the question remains about how knowledge can be produced that does not merely reify colonial legacies. In what follows, I draw on classic postcolonial works of Gloria Anzaldúa (1987/2012) and Homi Bhabha (1994) who, each in their own way, sought to understand and describe the production of knowledge in the spaces between worlds and worldviews, arguing that knowledge arising in these in-between spaces had the capacity to challenge colonial worldviews.

These postcolonial works should be understood within the contexts from which both Anzaldúa and Bhabha wrote. Anzaldúa (1987/2012) drew on her experiences growing up near the U.S.-Mexican border to communicate a theory of the borderlands, conceived both as a state enforced border terrain and as a metaphor for intersecting structures of privilege and oppression. Bhabha (1994), an English studies scholar who was born in Mumbai and lived in the United Kingdom and the U.S., employed a similar concept of hybrid spaces. Hybrid spaces that he described included metropolitan cities, colonized, and previously colonized spaces, in which he explored the borders between multiple subject positions created by race, class, gender, migration, geopolitical location, and sexual orientation. For both Anzaldúa and Bhabha, the borderlands between groups (also interstices/intersticios) were not only sites of struggle, but also of creativity, specifically the construction of new worldviews, identities, and knowledge.

Both Anzaldúa (1987/2012) and Bhabha (1994) conceived of the interstices as not only playing out between people but also within them. Embodied in mestizaje (Anzaldúa, 1987/2012) and hybridity (Bhabha, 1994), those persons who hold borderlands within themselves, whether by virtue of ancestry, migration, or education, call into question both cultural essentialist and universalist claims. According to Anzaldúa, mestiza consciousness is, at least in part, knowledge generated through inner struggles to keep “intact one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity” (Anzaldúa, 1987/2012, p. 19). Such consciousness comes about when those with claims in two or more cultures refuse to stand either on one riverbank or the other, instead seeking to negotiate elements among different worldviews. Similarly, Bhabha (1994) argued that those living in hybrid places negotiated worldviews as a strategy for cultural survival, and that these negotiations result in the emergence of new knowledges, identities, and politics as individuals and groups creatively assert themselves as “neither one nor the other” (p. 27).

Such negotiations, which Bhabha (1994) calls postcolonial translation, are struggles not only because of the violence of colonization, but because they involve the negotiation of incommensurabilities, or “incompatible frames of reference,” that exist between worldviews (Anzaldúa, 1987/2012, p. 100; Bhabha, 1994). Postcolonial translation is powerful because knowledges arising in this process can neither be subsumed under colonial hegemonic rubrics, nor totalized as absolute difference. Instead, they “enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 162). Anzaldúa (1987/2012) cautions, however, that merely countering colonial domination is not the end goal. It is one step towards mestiza consciousness, and the new knowledge that emerges from the struggle to hold and evaluate conflicting worldviews and ways of knowing.

Cultural studies scholar Ien Ang (1997) emphasized that both common ground (commensurable elements, shared language) and those ideas or affective experiences that cannot be reconciled, exist simultaneously. Rather than seeing incommensurabilities as blocks to communication, Ang writes, “Ironically, such moments of incommensurability, while generally not acknowledged as such, are precisely what propel us to go on communicating” (p. 59). Arising largely out of my own experiences navigating the borderlands as an American daughter and a Nepal buhārī, I believe that holding onto an “ethic of incommensurability” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 28)²—or the deliberate search for and grappling with elements that do not sit easily together—is the crucial element of what it means to be in the borderlands.

Although my positioning as a Nepali buhārī affords me some of the opportunities of a borderland resident, it is important to recognize the ways my positioning is different from Anzaldúa’s and Bhabha’s, who experienced colonial worldviews and ways of life as largely thrust upon those occupying borderland places. Thus, the negotiations they perceived and engaged in were a matter of survival. As a middle-class white person from the U.S., the cultural understandings in which I was raised have not been impinged upon by another colonizing cultural group. Because of my positioning, entering the borderlands—that is, grappling with worldviews different from the one I was raised, and allowing my own cultivated sense of self to be challenged when examined from a different cultural rubric—has always been and continues to be a choice. Thus, instead of ever seeing myself as an expert in my research area, I see my role is as translator—seeking to use my privileges to highlight perspectives that have the capacity to challenge dominant frameworks. I now outline three postcolonial analytic strategies that support the recognition, production, and amplification of subjugated knowledges and demonstrate how they could be used using examples from my own research.

Postcolonial Analytic Strategies

A postcolonial epistemology presumes that knowledge is not merely a description of the world as it is but is shaped through processes of giving meaning to our observations. It is further concerned with the negotiation of knowledge recognizing uneven terrains of power. Since no knowledge is considered neutral, analytics that extend from a postcolonial epistemological framework seek to intervene on dominant worldviews to create space for the surfacing of knowledges and values that could support a more just world. In this section, I discuss three analytic strategies that extend from a postcolonial epistemological framework: reflexivity, critical discourse analysis, and postcolonial translation. As postcolonial theory sits at crosscurrents between many different bodies of scholarship, I borrow examples that draw on, and are consistent with, postcolonial theory.

Reflexivity

Reflexivity refers to the practice of continuously considering how the researcher and participants influence the research process, the interpretations made, and the impacts of the research on those who have a stake in it (Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2009). Reflexivity is an essential component of any postcolonial research endeavor because it enables the researcher to “break away from a frame of reference and look at what it is not capable of saying” (Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2009, p. 270). According to Anzaldúa (1987/2012), the practice of reflexivity between worldviews involves not only intellectual, but also emotional and spiritual resources, as knowledge producers are stretched, not only to see the world, but also ourselves, from another vantage point.

If knowledge is circulated via individuals and institutions holding unequal power to shape it, reflexivity must entail reflections on researchers’ entanglements within this knowledge-power matrix (Carranza, 2018). Such reflection examines the intersecting positionalities of the researcher, while recognizing the contingent nature of our identities, as having been carved out through social processes such as racism, colonization, and nation building (Bhabha, 1994; Hall, 1996). For example, Carranza (2018) reflected upon the many ways her identity was constructed by potential collaborators in Central America and the Caribbean. Contingent on the specific histories of these places, she was alternatively constructed as white, Spanish, North American, mestiza, and oppressor. Understanding the contexts for these constructions and listening to the stories of those with whom she met enabled her and her research team to consider how these relationships impacted the research process.

Given the prominent role that institutions play in the circulation of discourse, postcolonial reflexivity should also entail reflections upon institutional, geopolitical, and material relationships of those engaged in research (Nagar & Geiger, 2014). For example, the academic and development organizations that employ researchers, have often accorded higher value to quantitative research methods or expectations of scholarly productivity that can inhibit critical reflection or ensuring that research directly benefits those who have a stake in it (Nagar & Geiger, 2014). These institutions have also afforded disproportionate credibility to international actors, and a credibility deficit to more locally situated researchers, thereby constraining local researchers’ ability to shape theories of social life (Koch, 2020).

Since the production of knowledge is never politically neutral, postcolonial reflexivity must include reflection on our commitments as researchers, and the struggles we hope to enable. These can service as guiding lights for the research and also help us to seek collaborators who have shared commitments (Nagar & Geiger, 2014). Such shared commitments in turn allow for the cultivation of relationships characterized by the “proper relations of trust” that are necessary for openness to having our worldviews challenged (Medina, 2011, p. 31). Such trust includes trust that collaborators know things that the researcher does not and, ideally, that can enable reflexive exploration of issues of power and the limitations of our collective knowledge (Sangtin Writers & Nagar, 2006).

Three ways in which reflexivity showed up in my research were reflecting on my own positioning, how research participants constructed my outsider and insider identities in in the research process, and the positioning of research participants themselves. As a white researcher from a U.S. academic institution, I have experienced a great deal of privilege in Nepal. According to philosopher José Medina, the credibility excesses afforded to those in dominant groups can limit individuals’ ability to understand the world from non-dominant perspectives. This inability, in turn, can lead to what he called a ‘hermeneutical gap’ (p. 27) which, in the case of research might lead researchers to listen to participants’ views but only incorporated them insofar as they fit with the researchers’ already existing views.

At the same time, service providers evoked diverse aspects of my identities in the course of the research, which likely influenced research interactions in my fieldwork in Pokhara. I expected that my proximity to outsider (and relatively powerful) identities would be salient. Indeed, in several interviews I was addressed as an accomplished researcher or a potential future donor. Others evoked less powerful outsider identities, including as a budding researcher or study abroad student. I was surprised to find, however, that participants additionally evoked insider identities, including my experiences as a woman, as a wife, and as a buhārī. For example, prior to one interview, an interviewee called my husband on the phone to say hello and to share that he was doing an interview with me. In one focus group discussion, service providers asked me about my experiences as a buhārī in a Newar³ family, and some of the gendered practices in Newar families. Other identities evoked in research interactions included my identity as a practitioner and colleague in Pokhara, expressed through phrases which suggested that some of the topics discussed were things I already understood.

One understanding of postcolonial and other critical theory is that it is often those who are closest to the issues, and that are experiencing the greatest levels of oppression, who are positioned to have the most insightful (and potentially disruptive) perspectives (Alexander & Mohanty, 1997). Despite this, I chose to speak with service providers rather than survivors because I felt that, as a relative outsider embarking on my first research project, the real risks of harm to survivors, such as risks of retaliation by powerful actors (Nagar, 2014), or that I would not respond appropriately to survivors’ utterances and silences, was too great. I instead sought the knowledge of service providers with diverse experiences of gender, caste, ethnicity, and class. Having already built relationships with service providers in Pokhara, I trusted that they possessed knowledge from their work which has not been sufficiently acknowledged at the international level.

Being transparent about my own positionings, and those of service providers, in relation to the research is a first step toward, to use Bhabha’s phrase, estranging the basis of our authority, by giving audiences more information through which to evaluate the knowledge produced. As I moved toward interpretation, I still needed strategies to account for my own privileges, and the resulting hermeneutical gap in the research process. Critical discourse analysis allowed for this.

Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical discourse analysis elucidates and interrupts unjust relations of knowledge and power through the examination of discourses (Fairclough, 2015; Gee, 2014; Willey-Sthapit et al., 2020). Because these relations are of primary concern to postcolonial theorists, the analysis of discourses has been used extensively by scholarship incorporating postcolonial perspectives. As described above, there are dominant discourses circulating in the field of international development, which are often replicated within regions, countries, and local places.

Despite the power they wield, dominant discourses are not the only game in town. In the field of development, knowledge has been found to be a matter of constant negotiation. For example, local activists have grafted international discourses of human rights onto their on-going movements to forge new relationships with powerful actors (Mosse, 2014). Development discourses have led to unintended effects, such as when a discourse of women’s empowerment was used by women to support their own enrollment in Nepal’s Maoist insurgency (Leve, 2007). Development discourses have also been openly contested or, conversely, adopted but subverted in practice, as when women involved microfinance programs used loans in ways that were not intended (Shakya & Rankin, 2008). Thus, comparing discourses that are used by different development actors across different sites allows for reflection on the ways knowledge is taken up, challenged, and changed as it circulates.

When undertaking the analysis of discourse, it was also important for me to consider the role of language in its more conventional sense. I conducted interviews in Nepali with the support of a research assistant to helped to smooth gaps in understanding. I do not claim fluency in Nepali, and to some extent, service providers certainly adjusted their speech to help me understand. Yet, my skill was sufficient to transcribe research interactions in Nepali language (using Latin script), thus enabling analysis of discourse in the language used by service providers themselves. When I began to transcribe this data, I quickly found that it was important to transcribe it in Nepali, so that the worldviews opened up through our shared used of Nepali language was not lost by forcing service providers’ utterances into an English mold.

To analyze the data generated through our research interactions, I used discursive comparison to examine similarities and differences in constructions of domestic violence forwarded by service providers Nepal, and major international women’s human rights documents that service providers cited to support their work. I found that both groups saw domestic violence as largely occurring within, and reinforcing, patriarchy. Both emphasized acts (such as acts of physical, sexual, and psychological violence, threats, and preventing mobility) which caused harm and were used to control. However, in contrast to the human rights documents I examined, I found that service providers additionally emphasized denial of the rights and entitlements normally achieved through the family, such as withholding economic support and denial of belonging in the family, in their conceptualizations of violence (Willey, 2021).

Comparing international and service providers’ constructions of domestic violence enabled me to detect both similarities and differences without presuming such differences beforehand. Whereas dominant knowledges have often explained such differences in terms of the specificities of local settings and traditional culture (Pigg, 1997), I considered whether such differences pointed to incommensurabilities that could elucidate the limitations of dominant development frameworks to understand social issues such as domestic violence. These incommensurabilities, I argue, are at the heart of the third strategy I will describe: postcolonial translation.

Postcolonial Translation

According to Anzaldúa (1987/2012) and Bhabha (1994), new knowledge arises out of the processes of negotiation, or postcolonial translation, that occur at the borderlands between worlds and worldviews. Philosopher José Medina (2011) similarly asserted that “Alternative social imaginaries can serve as correctives of each other, epistemic counterpoints that enable people to see the limitations of each viewpoint, creating beneficial epistemic friction” (p. 29). I propose that in the context of research, postcolonial translation refers to a process of considering social phenomena through multiple lenses and communicating resulting knowledge in ways that may include shared understandings, but that also disrupt the authority of dominant frameworks by, for example, highlighting contradictions and limitations of such frameworks. I see postcolonial translation to be operating at three levels within my own research with domestic violence service providers: 1) the processes through which participants translated between diverse constituencies in the course of their work, including donors, other organizations, and community members; 2) the ways service providers translated their knowledge for me, the researcher, and 3) the ways I, the researcher, translate the research and findings for audiences of my research.

In the development field, Mosse and Lewis (2006) emphasized that negotiations between discursive frameworks produced shared understandings, conceptualizing translation as involving the “creation of coherent representations” that “permits the negotiation of common meanings and definitions and the mutual enrollment and cooptation into individual and collective objectives and activities” (p. 14). The flip side of this, described by Anzaldúa and Bhabha, is giving attention to the incommensurabilities found between different frames of reference. Seeking shared understandings offers a way to enable the surfacing of knowledge, values, or priorities that are not shared, without resorting to a priori assumptions of cultural difference. Pointing to, and trying to make sense of, incommensurabilities can in turn challenge the authority of dominant frameworks and highlight systemic oppression that such frameworks so often obfuscate (Ang, 1997).

This conceptualization of postcolonial translation offers a lens that can support the design and interpretation of research. For example, in my research, I theorized that because of service providers’ longstanding work with international policy and donors, and because I am a white American, service providers might tend toward drawing on international discourses in our research interactions, both because they already employ these ideas in their work and to aid my understanding and enrollment in their projects. Thus, to draw out perspectives that might lie outside of dominant international discourses, I asked service providers to reflect on differences. For example, I asked about the ways service providers negotiated between the knowledge and priorities of the communities in which they practiced, their own organizations, and donors in their work. During interviews and while analyzing transcripts, I found that service providers also initiated efforts to help me understand the differences they perceived. For example, one service provider described differences she perceived between American and Nepali values related to the pooling of economic resources in families. By asking about and analyzing service providers’ own analyses of similarities and differences, I could begin to consider what these meant about the limitations of dominant international perspectives.

The concept of postcolonial translation also applies to the negotiations of knowledge undertaken by researchers in the dissemination of research. In contexts in which dominant groups and institutions wittingly or unwittingly distort or erase subjugated knowledges, an important task of postcolonial translation is to hold up a mirror to dominant perspectives that exposes their limitations. This can be done when sharing research in diverse settings including within centers of power such as donors or academic audiences in the West, or with service providers in Nepal. For example, in my examination of how service providers constructed domestic violence, I found that there were many alignments between their own understandings and those found in prominent women’s human rights documents yet gave attention in my analysis to the forms of violence described by service providers which were not illuminated at the international level. The conceptualization of violence as withholding the rights and entitlements of family members made sense as violence in a context in which the family was central to individuals’ economic, social, and political well-being. I further found that this construction of violence was not merely a local cultural issue, or, as some scholarship suggests, an erroneous perception, but was shaped by structural forces, including those at the international level (Willey, 2021). This finding disrupts a dominant individualist framing of domestic violence. Moreover, a framework that recognizes structural and social relationships is not merely important for domestic violence practice in Nepal, or even only within low-income countries, but is also consistent with intersectional critiques of structures that limit domestic violence practice in the U.S. and other wealthy countries (see for example, Crenshaw, 1991; Richie, 2012).

In addition to sharing disruptions of dominant frameworks when speaking to audiences in the West, such disruptions can be communicated when presenting the research to service providers in Nepal. In sharing my research in Nepal, rather than positioning myself as an expert bringing knowledge back to Nepal, I can reflect on what the research has illuminated for me, both including shared commitments and the limitations of our approaches to domestic violence in the West, and specifically, in the U.S. For example, this research has led me and to wonder at the fact that the U.S. has not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) given the importance of this platform for domestic violence work in Nepal. It has prompted me to imagine what struggles could be enabled were mainstream domestic violence work to treat domestic violence in the U.S. as a human rights issue or employ strategies to address it like those found in Nepal. Pointing to my own learning from service providers further estranges the basis of my authority and opens opportunities for deeper dialogue on the strengths and limitations of our approaches to addressing domestic violence.

Discussion

In this paper I have argued that international social workers pursuing epistemic justice need a theoretical framework that is responsive to the complexities inherent in relationships of knowledge and power. Postcolonial theory is up to this task. Yet, without an encompassing understanding of postcolonial theory, scholarship can too easily swing from an indictment of professional imperialism to cultural essentialism. The concept of postcolonial translation allows for recognition of the ways in which actors whose knowledges have been subjugated are involved in knowledge production through negotiation between worldviews. The strategies described here have the capacity to, as the Global Definition wrote, “halt and reverse” top-down knowledge transmission processes, not by seeking to re-establish absolute dichotomies between Western and non-Western or Indigenous knowledges, but through processes that Anzaldúa described as sieving and winnowing, seeking to make underlying knowledge structures visible, and challenging entanglements of knowledge with colonial power.

While I believe postcolonial theory has applications in most settings, it cannot do all things in all settings. Analysis that centers epistemic injustice is not sufficient to address overt abuses of power such as coercion and violence, the appropriation of Indigenous lands, or environmental exploitation (Tuck & Yang, 2012). The anti-essentialist thrust of postcolonial theory can also run counter to movements that seek to claim or reclaim territories against encroachment as well as origin stories, language, and culture (Stam & Shohat, 2012). At the same time, there are many examples of scholarship that leverage the insights of postcolonial theory as part of broader strategies to contest overt abuses of power including settler colonialism (Smith, 1999/2012), the legitimation of war (Abu-Lughod, 2011), and the reconsolidation of heteropatriarchy through domestic violence legislation in a neocolonial state (Alexander, 1997). Those of us seeking to understand social issues, rather than claiming a stance outside the webs of knowledge and power, must continuously acknowledge the limitations of our perspectives, and seek to highlight structural inequalities, as well as the agency of those who have been marginalized by colonial discourses (Deepak, 2011). While attending to such issues of epistemic justice may appear self-evident to social workers, given our expressed commitments to social justice, solidarity, and self-determination (IFSW & IASSW, 2018), this paper has surfaced analytic strategies that can buoy this work.