Gone native?: Reflections of a feminist tightrope walker’s research on ‘land grabbing’ and the dilemmas of ‘fieldworking’ while parenting

Abstract

This chapter is a retrospective account of the great adventure of PhDoing while Parenting which started after the researcher’s Masters to Ph.D. upgrade for doctoral research on the Contemporary Land Rush and Contradictions of Agrarian Change in Senegal. My research project belongs to the much fluid, borderless and cross-disciplinary discipline of International Development. Despite being affiliated to both the departments of Development Studies and Economics, I was mostly associated with the first, a discipline that emerged in the post-war era of decolonisation. Though influenced by a myriad of other social sciences, Development Studies, originally a discourse from the West, is interested in studying how to bring about social change through combining long-term strategies with short-term interventions. And Development, engendered as a colonial enterprise from the West to the Rest, has inherited a colonial legacy based on aspirations to modernity and progress, even though much is being done to ‘decolonise’ Development Studies through transforming ‘how we know’ about ‘others,’ how we disseminate what we know and how we also teach and train students in International Development (Mohanty 1991; Aidoo 1992; Tuhiwai- Smith 1999; Kothari 2005; Rutazibwa 2017; Cornwall 2017; Ndlovu- Gatsheni 2014, 2017; Sarr 2016; Mbembe 2015).