I am currently writing my RRR, and discovering the difficulty of not trying to explore every single change that I went through during and after my project (as a development practitioner-learner of course).
I have decided on my RRR topic of ‘the othering’, which is something that I have always found extremely interesting in development. The othering is basically the idea that in development, practitioners or organizations view people as the ‘others’, and this means that certain people, states, cultures etc. are not properly understood, it devalues them as equal human beings, and skews the frameworks of development and human rights.
I am looking at this from a colonial/post-colonial framework, which is where a lot of the current literature draws their explanations from. It reminds me that the problematic consequences colonialism/post-colonialism have literally been something that have come up at least once in every single subject I have studied during my Masters.
Honestly, one of the key changes I am experiencing now is trying to determine whether Australia is a post-colonial, or a colonial country. I know this is a little detour from the RRR topic, but when looking at othering and post-colonialism (especially in cases of Indigenous communities), there is confliction about whether Australia has indeed moved into a ‘post-colonial state’, or whether it is still defined as colonial. A lot of the recent work by Indigenous activists argue that Australia is absolutely still in a colonial state- and this has opened my eyes to this argument, and is making me re-think what we were always taught that Australia is post-colonial.
Another big thing I am noticing is that writing reflectively is hard! Having been taught to write our essays in a certain manner throughout our school career, it feels odd (but good) to be using the term ‘I’, and being able to write out a thought process on paper.
I’ll post again when I hand in the RRR!