Development studies as boundary crossing: challenges and possibilities

Abstract

The idea of boundary crossing is explored in this lecture as referring to traversing those contentious barriers that demarcate disciplines and geopolitical spaces. Such boundaries are posited as ultimately transformable in a context that demands complex solutions to complex problems. Boundary crossing then becomes the stretching and refiguring of these demarcations and spaces. This can happen by re-imagining teaching and scholarly engagement within a framework that problematizes the power effects of knowledge-creating and -seeking practices. Using four vignettes to illustrate boundary crossing as lived experience, the lecture interrogates its progressive potential to advance ideas and actions in many domains of social and intellectual life. It envisions transformed knowledge production that moves across boundaries (be they those that separate academe and activism, theory and practice, researcher and researched) most deliberately. Notions such as reciprocity, positionality, self-reflexivity, emancipatory epistemologies and transformative methodologies are reviewed as keys to boundary crossing. Inter-and transdisciplinarity are presented as projects that can offer enriched thinking, teaching and knowing about development as social change.