THINK PIECE: Cognitive justice and integration without duress - The future of development education – perspectives from the South

Abstract

In a time of unacceptable global injustice, growing inequalities in the distribution of power, accelerating climate change, and unwavering racism and social exclusion, we are today facing the biggest challenges of human history' (European Conference on Intercultural Dialogue in Development Education, 2008: 1). A favourable wind is blowing slowly and steadfastly from the South. No longer is the South an 'object' of inquiry (Bhaba, 1995; De Silva et al., 1988; Prakash, 1995). The transition from bandit colonialism through the intricate systems of the modern triage society (Nandy, 1997; 2000) that is wired for Western cultural compliance is being challenged. We have to start 'rethinking thinking' itself from the constitutive rules: how paradigms are made; how rules are policed; how the architecture of modern institutions is fashioned to make them behave the way they do (Odora Hoppers, 2009b; Odora Hoppers and Richards, 2012). We have to raise the issue of the fate of the grass roots into the global arena, where ways of knowing and the issue of indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) can be given higher priority. By doing this, we join hands in articulating the defences of the mind and conceptual categories that the grass roots use to organize their thoughts and keep their actions alive, not just in the villages, but also in the public sphere. Turning the previously colonized into participants in a new moral and cognitive venture against oppression requires more than just periodic elections. The atrophy of human capabilities that has characterized human development in the context of both bandit colonialism and the modern triage society demands the development of a plurality of insights, of critical traditions, and a deepening of the tools for diagnosis, and hence the quality of prognosis.