Decolonizing Development: Kichwa and Tsachila women's engagement with postcolonial development

Sarah Radcliffe (Cambridge) - Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Ecuador, the seminar examines how Kichwa and Tsachila women have come to understand, critique and offer alternatives to the successive policy models in postcolonial development. Understanding indigenous women as critical theorists of development offers the change to examine how development, in its more global as well as more local formulations, has failed to engage with postcolonial intersectional hierarchies, such as those which consistenly marginalize and disempower Kichwa and Tsachila women. The paper also addresses their perspectives on sumak kawsay/Buen Vivir as it has been formulated under the 2008 Constitution.

Sarah Radcliffe is Professor of Latin American Geography and Fellow of Christ’s College as well as a member of the Management Committee, Centre of Latin American Studies. Her research interests fall broadly within these areas: development, social heterogeneity and postcolonial governance; geographies of contested postcolonial national identities; postcolonialism, culture and social development and political transnationalism and development networks. Her most recent publications include: ‘The ethno-environmental fix and its limits: Indigenous land titling and the production of not-quite-neoliberal natures in Bolivia’ Geoforum, with P. Anthias; Dilemmas of Difference Indigenous Women and the Limits of Postcolonial Development Policy and ‘Development Alternatives’. Development and Change. More on Prof Radcliffe here: http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/people/radcliffe/