Dr Kathomi Gatwiri

Since their advent until now, the international development agencies and their discourses have earned appreciation and scorn around their engagements in Nepali, Kenyan, and Ugandan development context. On the one hand, their centrality in mainstream development has received praise, while, on the other, their promotion of Western, hegemonic, and colonial development paradigms has been widely criticized within the contexts from which this chapter is written. Following the White savior mentality, the charity-narrative has masked the ongoing neocolonialism that communities continue to experience. Hence, drawing on a post-, alternative-decolonized development perspective, this chapter will explore how the idea of development led by the international development agencies itself is dead. The chapter will examine the persistence of West-to-the rest thinking that has perpetuated the continued imposition of Western models and agendas, ignoring indigenous models of responding and preventing social problems. While doing so, it will also suggest how the idea of development can be revived alternatively that withers away from the international development agencies.

There is no paucity of literature on academia as a site of resistance. Universities can also be sites of transformation/reclamation while raising questions of epistemic Coloniality, racism, racialization, and Whiteness in academia. In this chapter, we highlight and discuss aspects of the challenges of this erasure while sharing some thoughts on how the emerging theory of racial dignity offers the possibilities of addressing the visible and invisible impacts of Coloniality and seeing the beauty and joy of engaging in the resistance of decolonial antiracist scholarship. As articulated in this chapter, our resistance espouses our intentional collaboration, which cushions against negative outcomes associated with the solitude of solitary, neoliberal workplaces. In imagining an antiracist future in Australian higher education institutions, we call for greater equality and a more sustained effort to decolonize Australian higher education institutions of their colonial legacy. We recognize the need for Australian higher education institutions to turbocharge their obligation as transformatory institutions that prioritize humanity and the ontological legitimacy and epistemic contributions of racially and culturally marginalized (RACM) academics.

This chapter debates the centrality of migration to population and economic growth and nation-building in Australia and the tensions between continued migration and simultaneous tendencies toward insularity. It argues that insularity manifests through efforts to differentiate between “desirable” and “undesirable” migrants based on identity markers. The chapter uses historical and contemporary migration policies and laws in Australia to illustrate dominant attitudes, practices, and trends that inform the experience of migrants to Australia. In doing so, it focuses on research on African migration to Australia, unsettling the dominant perception that Africans are recent newcomers to Australia. The chapter concludes that immigrants’ experiences of migration and resettlement through successive phases of migration policies in Australia provide an illuminating lens on past, current, and future trends and challenges for migration to Australia. It urges the use of a decolonial and intersectional perspective to analyze these key issues.

Since their advent until now, the international development agencies and their discourses have earned appreciation and scorn around their engagements in Nepali, Kenyan, and Ugandan development context. On the one hand, their centrality in mainstream development has received praise, while, on the other, their promotion of Western, hegemonic, and colonial development paradigms has been widely criticized within the contexts from which this chapter is written. Following the White savior mentality, the charity-narrative has masked the ongoing neocolonialism that communities continue to experience. Hence, drawing on a post-, alternative-decolonized development perspective, this chapter will explore how the idea of development led by the international development agencies itself is dead. The chapter will examine the persistence of West-to-the rest thinking that has perpetuated the continued imposition of Western models and agendas, ignoring indigenous models of responding and preventing social problems. While doing so, it will also suggest how the idea of development can be revived alternatively that withers away from the international development agencies.

This chapter focusses on the Black Lives Matter movement, with a particular emphasis on its impact on the African diaspora in Australia. It outlines a novel and significant programme of research showing how young Black Africans and youth of African descent in Australia use #BlackLivesMatter in digital spaces. Via a series of studies, the numerous ways the youth used digital spaces to cultivate belonging, connection, and resistance are articulated. Concepts such as racial grief and racial dignity are outlined, and how these align with concepts of Blackness and Africanness within a white majority context like Australia is explored. Additionally, some of the challenges and successes experienced by researcher-activists in this space are summarized, as is the importance of allyship, partnership, and collaboration.

There is no paucity of literature on academia as a site of resistance. Universities can also be sites of transformation/reclamation while raising questions of epistemic Coloniality, racism, racialization, and Whiteness in academia. In this chapter, we highlight and discuss aspects of the challenges of this erasure while sharing some thoughts on how the emerging theory of racial dignity offers the possibilities of addressing the visible and invisible impacts of Coloniality and seeing the beauty and joy of engaging in the resistance of decolonial antiracist scholarship. As articulated in this chapter, our resistance espouses our intentional collaboration, which cushions against negative outcomes associated with the solitude of solitary, neoliberal workplaces. In imagining an antiracist future in Australian higher education institutions, we call for greater equality and a more sustained effort to decolonize Australian higher education institutions of their colonial legacy. We recognize the need for Australian higher education institutions to turbocharge their obligation as transformatory institutions that prioritize humanity and the ontological legitimacy and epistemic contributions of racially and culturally marginalized (RACM) academics.

This chapter weaves together, as nodes in a network of care, the experiences of activists collecting feminicide data in France, Germany, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Russia, the United States, and Venezuela. In our work, we draw from a long genealogy of feminist research and activism on femicide/feminicide and gender-related violence. To contextualise our practices, we draw on data activism and data feminism as theoretical lenses. Methodologically, we inhabited each other's experiences through an iterative conversation and co-writing session where we reflected on questions related to the context of our work, our data-making process, the mental and emotional toll, and the challenges and opportunities of generating feminicide data. The experiences of producing feminicide data we share here, together with others around the world, are valuable because they show how women organise to fight against the inequalities that affect us every day.

Obstetric fistulas remain a public health crisis in most of the developing word but particularly in sub-Saharan Africa where health infrastructure is inadequate. This chapter provides a critique of the narrative that obstetric fistulas are a “women’s issue”. Instead, obstetric fistulas are positioned as an outcome of complex structural failures that undermine the efforts of women seeking emergency obstetric care. In particular, Kenya remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a woman and pregnant, with an estimated 3000 women and girls developing fistula annually, and 300,000 cases of untreated fistulas in the ever-increasing backlog. To understand the full picture of the obstetric crisis in Kenya, one must consider the structural face of health care and the gendered way in which it stratifies and marginalises women seeking care. Through this theoretical lens, the chapter also critiques the popular and dominant discourses that attribute fistulas to just ethnicity and culture. It highlights how the obsession with putting African cultures under intense scrutiny while discussing fistulas, minimises the attention we pay to structural factors contributing to them and therefore does little to offer a nuanced analysis of the problem and the nature of its complexity.

The roles of both feminism and social work in Africa for Africans remain contested to date. Feminism is often positioned as a western ideology, while social work is criticised for the underlying whitewashed knowledge it inculcates in both students and practitioners. Without proper contextualisation and theorisation, both feminism and social work can function as colonising agents which do more harm than good in the African context. We theorise African feminism as an Afrocentric framework that centres African knowledge, theories, practices and ways of being, doing and knowing. We articulate the African feminist role in social work practice in Africa while also problematising the epistemological contradiction it presents. Afrocentric feminism is a collection of multiple knowledges that are focused on returning to our forgotten and often marginalised ways of being, doing and knowing and reclaiming a somehow lost or disfigured identity which was and is continually altered by colonialism and its ever-lingering presence in Africa.

Jarldorn and Gatwiri use auto-ethnographic and feminist theorisations to draw on their subjective experiences of gender, race, class, age and nationality to expose how the term ‘imposter syndrome’ attaches itself to bodies which transgress the ideals of traditional academia. Focussing on the experiences of transitioning from student to doctor, this chapter follows their entry into academia, exploring feeling ‘out of place’ through a structural lens in the context of the Australian neoliberal university. The authors conclude by offering the strategies they deploy to resist and challenge the narrative of the ‘ideal academic’, while shaking up academia through inclusive and critical approaches to teaching and student engagement, and through nurturing feminist friendships.