 Welcome everyone to this first Development Studies seminar in our seminar series. My name is Basie, and I coordinate this seminar series together with a number of brilliant colleagues who you will see milling around, helping and also a number of volunteers who dedicate a great deal of time that they put into the series for everything from tweeting to organising the reception afterwards to publicising the series. So thank you all for coming. So we have a brilliant panel today with Andrea Cornwall, Tanya Keiser and Mira Sabaratnam on deconstructing development discourse buzzwords and fuzzwords revisited. And this is based on Andrea's book of 2010, which she's updating and she'll tell us all about it. So I will just introduce each of our speakers and they'll have about 15 to 20 minutes and then we'll open it out to the floor. And in particular we really do want to get your thoughts and your ideas on the topic, on buzzwords and fuzzwords. So Andrea is a political anthropologist who specialises in the anthropology of democracy, citizen participation, participatory research, gender and sexuality. She's worked on topics ranging from understanding women's perspectives on family planning, fertility and sexually transmitted infection in Nigerians in Barbway, public engagement in UK regeneration programs, the quality of democratic deliberation in new democratic spaces in Brazil, the use and abuse of participatory appraisal in Kenya, domestic workers' rights activism in Brazil and sex workers' rights activism in India. Wow, a range of things. Tanya Keiser is senior lecturer in forced migration studies here in the department. She has degrees in literature and anthropology from the universities of Bristol and Oxford and her research focuses on forced migration in Africa, East and West Africa in particular, culture and society and internal conflict in Uganda and conflict in South Sudan. And she's also been the programme convener for the BA in development studies so she has a lot to say on this subject. Mira Samaratnam is senior lecturer in international relations in politics here at SOAS. Her research interests are in the colonial and post-colonial dimensions of international relations in both theory and practice and she's worked on questions of decolonisation, Eurocentrism, race and methodology in IR and she's applied these concepts to the analysis of international development aid, peace building and state building most recently in her book Decolonising Intervention and that book can also be downloaded for free which I think we'll tweet at some point and her regional interests are in Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean region and she's currently working on questions of race and IR theory and a post-colonial historiography of the First World War. So if you are tweeting the hashtags of SOAS DEV studies all one word and ESRC and I think that's all. So Andrea. Thank you. So to start with a quote from one of the most amazing wordsmiths Goethe when ideas fail words come in very handy. So my interest in language, in development language as it came to be but also in the politics of language, the anthropology of language was piqued when I was a student here at SOAS and I studied with Mark Hobart in my third year of my anthropology degree so how many of you are studying anthropology and how many of you are in your third year? Okay so a couple of you might be doing a version of that very course that introduced me to some really really interesting linguistic anthropology that got me thinking about how words have their own lives and they travel through different times and spaces and people use them and mean them in different kinds of ways and use them for different political purposes and political nature of speech but also the bureaucratic and ordinary nature of speech and the ways in which we can hear a word but actually have such different meanings that we associate with it that we're having parallel conversations that don't really understand each other but actually we are meaning very different things and something that intrigued me about the use of certain kinds of language was that certain words can mask intentions and can mask projects, political projects and possibilities so they can be used as code words to be able to do things with so I found myself working many years after leaving SOAS in development in a place called the Institute of Development Studies with gender, participation, accountability and human rights and empowerment so these are all nice words, feel good words words that I had very fond notions about but I'd go out into the world and work with people who'd got either different projects that they were harboring these words under these words or we were negotiating words that were very different different understanding, political understandings of what development was and of what these words could mean and what they would translate into in terms of projects in the world so I became very interested in how people were using those words and I was invited when UNRIST had their anniversary conference to write a piece about those words which took that kind of analysis of what had happened to those words so the histories and movements and trajectories of those words and then at that conference bumped into Deborah Eid who is the editor of Development in Practice and we spent quite a bit of time laughing and joking about buzzword bingo and how some of these words were used as meaningless empty vehicles and were just traded in different places so we put together a list of people who we thought would be really interesting to ask from very different locations to write a piece on a word so we come across something for example I was just saying the example earlier I came across somebody who had written something about country ownership who was in charge of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development so the European World Bank who talks about country ownership which is a very fond buzzword in the 90s about ownership of that country by the people who were determining its economic policies so we thought this is great, let's ask this guy to write something they were activists who we thought would be really interesting to write something about advocacy what does that mean? Has it been used? Has it been abused? Sustainability I'll go to some of the examples, gender gender is a very classic one peace building, best practice which was a big one in that time harmonisation which was the donors co-ordinating with each other civil society NGOs sustainability corruption, good governance fragile states looking through this list of words and thinking it conjures up a particular moment as well in development the popularity of those words ten years ago defined a development agenda which is profoundly different to the agenda that we now see in development in fact that we see in many of the nation states with the rise of populism and really big political transformations some of these words could no longer be mobilised in quite the same way they have had to be sheltered in other places they've lost their meaning an empowerment for ten years an empowerment became something over that period that was completely swept up with corporations and their own uses being made of girls and women's empowerment it came to mean something totally different to the term as it meant to the people who claimed it for feminist activism so it's interesting to look back and so something that I thought would be interesting to bring today so this idea of people in different locations using these words in different ways and how from ten years ago to now what's changed so put out a call on Twitter for what today's development buzzwords are and started thinking with a request to update this book what would be the buzzwords of now and what are the buzzwords that have gone out so I'm just going to go through this list and just share with you some of the buzzwords of today that came out from that quite wide to Twitter conversation so first of all the extent to which the language of business has come in so a lot of corporate language has crept into development language in a very very marked way so if you go to a random buzzword generator from business you'll hear many of those words being traded in development spaces we thought we'd keep social protection and poverty reduction in but they've both changed in the way in which they're being framed globalisation would go out and global would come in citizenship would go out and inclusion would come in social capital would go out and resilience would come in human rights we thought was almost on its way out in terms of the ways in which it was used in development and words like intersectionality were on their way in in terms of being used in a really quite a vacuous way advocacy out, innovation in NGOs out impact in harmonisation out alignment in and then words like voice open government securitisation and so on co-create cross cutting so it's quite an interesting exercise and I'm looking forward to hearing what the other panellists are going to say just being aware of and noticing the words that are appearing both in the practitioner spaces and also in the policy spaces and the extent to which these ripple out then into academic spaces and the extent to which critical academic interrogation the deconstruction of these words and their meanings and uses can be used as a way of shining a light back into those spaces and getting people to think and to interrupt the kind of habits of mind and habits of thinking that you pick up when you're constantly saturated and surrounded by these words this has been surprisingly popular and certainly any of us imagined other of us who did it, imagined it would still be ten years later would be asked to do a second edition and it's still being read and used I think it hit a chord then and I think in some ways that chord is still there for people who are sick of seeing words just being bandied around without any substance to them but also would rather see still believe that those words are things that could have meaning I want to see them infused with beliefs about making a better society and making a better world that perhaps they are associated with in their own minds so this tension between the voiding of meaning and the uses of these words and just of ordinary bullshit bingo type of parlance and then the actual real projects that underlie words like human rights empowerment, voice, justice gender and so on so with that I'll hand over to my rest of the panel, thank you Thank you very much, it's a pleasure to be here and to participate in this panel and the discussion which I'm sure is going to be very interesting I am coming at this from a fairly particular angle I guess which is to say that when revisiting the book and thinking about what I wanted to talk about today I was very much thinking about the boundaries between development and humanitarian contexts and specifically because of what you already know about the kind of thing that I'm interested in working on and very kind of bound up in in thinking about the kind of language which is used in discussing the situation and responses to people who are forced to migrate for whatever reason in many of the cases in which I've carried out research I've been working with people who've been forced to move by conflict of one kind or another in sub-Saharan Africa or elsewhere and there are of course numerous reasons why people move and although there's nothing new about that whether you know, however, whatever way you look at it it is nevertheless something that over the last three or four years in the context of the EU in particular there has been significantly more discussion about in a whole range of different kinds of contexts than arguably there was for a really really long time before that and so I started with the kind of a fairly basic idea of thinking about some of the different ways some of the different descriptive words which are used to refer to the people who've arrived in the EU over the last three or four years since 19... since 2015 and I'm tripping over my tongue because I'm trying to avoid using the words refugee and migrant which are the two most common words which have been used in various combinations sometimes with qualifiers, sometimes not and I don't know whether they would... they don't really count as buzz words in the sense of the buzz words which are represented and discussed in this book but I think that some of the ways... thinking about some of the ways in which those terms have been used and the uses to which they've been put is perhaps the kind of the point of overlap and there are a number of different things which I think we can immediately see emerging if we reflect about the kind of language which has been used to describe people arriving mainly by sea but also across land into the EU since 2015 predominantly from conflict affected countries one is that there is an absolute proliferation of perspectives in the sense that kinds of actors who are discussing these individuals and groups may be development practitioners they may be politicians, they may be journalists or other members of the media more broadly they may be ordinary, regular people who don't have any particular professional interests but nevertheless have an interest in this subject in this kind of topic and in this set of movements they may of course also be the people who are moving themselves who might indeed have very different sense of what kind of language ought to be being used about the journeys that they're making and the choices that they're making and the opportunities that are open to them within which they can choose from those sets of choices. So there's all of those kinds of things so first of all we've got a lot of different actors who might be talking about discussing and having various different reasons to do those things the people who arrived over a period of time in significantly greater numbers than we had recently seen. So the first kind of entry point is to think about what kind of language is most immediately familiar to us when we think about the way in which those movements of people were represented and I think that the biggest kind of arguments which took place in real time if you like about the kind of language which should be used was about whether one should refer to the movement of people as a refugee crisis or as a migrant crisis and it sounds superficially like a very kind of trivial distinction but actually it's massively consequential and I think when we're already thinking about the ways in which different categories of actor in development and contextual contexts might use words quite deliberately and strategically to produce specific sets of outcomes and effect then it doesn't take us very long to really get to the crux of what's going on when different terms are selected. We don't have much time so even to stick to fairly mainstream sources the BBC, quite a lot of research has been carried out since 2015 on what kind of language and terminology was used in BBC reporting of the arrivals of asylum seekers into the EU over the period 2015-2016 and even onwards and what's come out of a number of different studies produced or commissioned in one case by UNHCR and carried out by Cardiff Journalism School also in the BBC's own kind of accounting of its own kind of practice is that the BBC which as we know is a public service broadcaster is supposed to be balanced kind of objective and all the rest of it right from the beginning made the decision to use the word migrant crisis to refer to the arrival of people in very large numbers in conditions of extreme danger and in many cases trauma and it justified its use of the word migrant in terms of the fact that while it stated and it had a kind of paragraph that it cut and pasted onto basically every report it published over months and months and months and it stated its position in terms of an acknowledgement that there were different categories of people represented within these large numbers of people who were arriving and that it was very likely if not probable that many of the people who were arriving would make claims for asylum once they reached the EU and indeed they didn't want to rule out the possibility that many or even most of them would receive refugee status eventually but at the moment of their arrival they set out their position that there was no other accurate way of representing these people collectively without resorting in a sense to this very broad very kind of difficult to kind of pin down term in the introduction to her book Andrea pointed out very clearly in 2010 that constellations of words together have kind of multiplier effects in terms of the impact that they can have and it seems to me that the BBC's choice of word in selecting migrant over refugee and I'll talk about that in a second was very very meaningful in that for lots of reasons but also in the fact that the word migrant in the popular discourse in the UK and in the political discourse perhaps more importantly and to some extent the development discourse surrounding responses the humanitarian discourse surrounding responses to arrivals is very much about linking the word migrant with a whole load of words and qualifiers which are broadly projected as negative so it's economic migrant which even that perhaps once as a neutral term no longer feels and looks like a neutral term in terms of the kinds of responses that provokes or precipitates the almost ridiculously unmeaningful illegal migrant which in many ways means absolutely nothing at all but and this is the scary part can be used to mobilise political position and action even though it's somewhat acknowledged at least some of the time by some of the people who are hearing it and that brings me to another important point and this may have wider resonance for some of the other terms as well which is that there is this extraordinary capacity there is a substantial and interesting literature on the way in which language encodes meaning one can pursue a whole range of different lines of inquiry about the way in which language and power are associated which symbolic dimensions of power and authority are encoded in language in which language can be used in a way that's quite coercive and a whole number of other quite actually interesting and consequential areas or domains of inquiry but when it comes down to it all of those things being true what is in a sense more pressing is the fact that there is at some level an acknowledgement or an acceptance that a term is being used erroneously it is deliberately being projected to imply or suggest a linkage between a category which is relatively neutral or technical and a whole range of other negatively inspired meanings and associations that doesn't stop that term being used in that way so there is this what my supervisor 20 years ago used to call functional ignorance going on where you know that it's not true and yet you nevertheless have this term circulating and in a sense it may not matter in a sense that it's not true that it is not really possible to be an illegal migrant because in practice everyone should know that it is not illegal to enter a country illegally if your intention is to claim asylum when you arrive in it so that means that nobody is an illegal migrant they might be a migrant who then claims asylum which arguably means that they should have been referred to as an asylum seeker all along i somebody who was going to claim asylum and then did that thing there is no kind of pretence really from the perspective of the person making the journey and making the claim about what it is there in the process of trying to do but in the way that it's represented you see quite a different set of issues I suspect I'm probably running out of time slightly am I I've got five minutes ok good so let me then on the flip side of the idea of the migrant crisis talk about what we might mean by a refugee crisis and here there are a number of different sets of issues which we perhaps should be thinking about one is that according to research carried out by a whole raft of different perfectly kind of substantial and reliable academics journalists and others it is now demonstrably the case that we know that the large majority of people who arrived in the EU from 2015 let's say to date but I mean certainly 2015 2016 2017 the years in which the numbers of arrivals were highest the majority of those people eventually received either refugee status or some other form of humanitarian protection in an EU state so in practice if what we're talking about is oh well broad strokes let's call it how it is those people were in fact refugees which may have been predictable given that over 50% of the people who arrived during those years in the UK certainly and yeah I think it's also the case in the EU more broadly where obviously the numbers are massively bigger were from Syria and Afghanistan i.e. to obviously conflict affected countries with other large numbers of people coming from other places which also produce large numbers of refugees in the regions where those places are so it was always likely frankly that the people who were coming were going to be recognised as refugees and if they weren't going to be recognised as refugees that was almost more an indication that some kind of political sleight of hand in place vis-à-vis the way that the migration management kind of bureaucracy was being deployed in response to them and we of course know that there were a number of different locations geographical locations but also kinds of spaces within which despite their legitimate asylum seeking status despite the likelihood that they were eventually going to receive refugee status people were treated in ways which totally totally contravened international norms and expectations and the legal refugee protection framework so again you've got this kind of functional ignorance coming in whereby the fact that there was a very compelling truth demonstrably present didn't have a positive consequence in terms of the way that people were swindled to and the way that they were treated in line with the very well known and very well understood refugee protection framework so I suppose there's a sense in which to kind of shorthand my kind of conclusion to all of this is to say that if language can be so consequential when it's misused in terms of the kinds of responses which are made to people in this case in asylum seeking refugee status seeking contexts then there must be some mileage for us in responding as activists as academics as researchers and as writers in reclaiming, reappropriating and repopulating with kind of truth honesty and empathy the terms which are being bandied about in ways which kind of reactivate them and make them reaccessible in a sense to us because I think that to some extent people have felt rather kind of beaten down by the onslaught of kind of negative press the onslaught of kind of negative representations and left feeling uncertain about their own responses in terms of the kind of the kinds of representations which have been made which haven't been exclusively but have to some extent been characterised by these kind of tragic, poignant, painful human interest stories which have been mobilised and again as a way of encouraging a kind of warmer, softer, better political response but which actually don't speak to the hard realities of the need and of the rights of the people in them I mean I'm a bit nervous about human rights going out to be honest so I mean I think it kind of sounds negative but in the end maybe there is at least a glimmer of positive hope in that there is a kind of call for a kind of a re-engagement with that language and a kind of a reclaiming of it I think I'll leave it there Do you have some small adjustments? Elu? Okay good. Hi everybody thanks for all coming I don't work in development studies I sort of work slightly laterally to it and I really love the opportunity to discuss these issues with all of you I was rereading the book Andrea's book, Andrea and Deborah's book last night and it struck me there was an interesting tension between the first two chapters and it actually kind of follows on from what Tanya was saying and that tension is very much about whether language can be re-purposed or re-signified or whether it should be abandoned and in Andrea's opening chapter towards the end she makes the case for re-signifying language but in Gilbert Rhys' chapter after that he's making quite a strong case for why the terminology of development should be abandoned altogether and I suppose I'm leaning at least in this talk, who knows in another talk I'm leaning very much towards the latter not because I think we should abandon the motivations behind a lot of this stuff but because there's a character of development as a concept and as an idea which is so driven with structural problems that it might be better to abandon it but that's actually what I'm going to focus on in the first part of the talk what I'm interested in is not so much the meanings or non-meanings of particular words but what is the political effect of the churn the churn is the replacing of one term with another, the in and out, the faddishness and the continuous renewal the restless, impatient renewal all the time at all places of the development structure of the development industry of what it is that is happening and I'm interested in the churn as a political phenomenon in its own right what functions does it serve and I also won't reflect on it now but maybe we can talk afterwards about the relationship between the churn in a field like development and in fields such as our own higher education, health and so on so much of that restless initiativeisation and a kind of cycling of ideas is starting to just characterise what it means to do the work Okay, so materially what's involved if you like in the life cycle of a buzzword so often you might have something emerge as part of a crisis and then a reaction to that crisis so we were not prepared for this earthquake or we were not prepared for HIVAs or we were not prepared, you know, so on so there's a crisis, there's a reaction then a concept starts to engage and to proliferate now with the proliferation of a concept you get a proliferation of experts people who know about the concept who need to be consulted these people write reports they engage in advocacy they form networks they develop policies those policies attract funding that funding goes out into programmes and into projects at the national and local and international level there are evaluations of those programmes and projects there are reviews of the wider programmes of the wider ideas and repeat, okay so there's another crisis another concept another set of experts another bunch of consultancies and so on and so we see this pattern materially constitute the life cycle of buzzwords as they exist in the development industry now okay, you can see this as it's just inefficiencies it's just cost of doing business if you like in a development field which is informed by research and is responding to new situations I'm going to argue that you can also see it slightly differently and I want to now think about what that experience is like if you are an aid receiving country or an aid receiving subject and this is what I tried to do in my book as well to think about the effects of that churn on being an aid receiving country my story is pretty negative I suppose in my view large development infrastructures over time in my case was Mozambique that I looked at over the last kind of 20 years is that you get a progressive hollowing out of the state infrastructure as attention and resources and people are sucked up into servicing the churn so the churn itself becomes the object of political practice of policy making of all of the intellectual activity that goes on in universities and outside it and what happens is that not only of course is there sort of embedded dependency and this is a word used by people within Mozambique but a certain embedded cynicism I don't mean by this like a bad attitude I mean that rationally speaking it makes no sense to invest time and attention into something that is going to disappear in two or three years so there's a lot of satisfying reports and reporting but in terms of concretely working on things in an institution or in a department or in a sector it's difficult to invest real time and money into that because of the effect and the weight of that churn cycle that means that you can't consolidate or grow or invest in a particular idea if you're working in health you can't be guaranteed that money for family planning is going to be there in the next cycle and you might be working on HIV AIDS instead actually it's happened the other way around all of the money for unsexy things that are not part of the buzzword framework or not in fashion gets kind of by the wayside or reappropriated through those other big vertical pots that are coming down I could go on about this but the generalized effect I would say and this is not a comment on the will and the good faith of the people involved on either side the generalized effect is a hollowing out of political activity why does this happen I asked a few people in Mozambique that I was talking to as part of this project why they thought that there were always new programs and new initiatives and new ideas to do when the other ones either hadn't quite finished or been realised to fruition one of the answers that I talk about in the book is this idea of gizmo the idea that donors in particular want to be at the centre of a story they need ways to reinsert themselves into policy making on health or agriculture or good governance or whatever it is and one of the ways in which this happens is the invention of a new concept or a new subfield in which they need to present expertise, generate an action plan do something else and this is really significant for how it relocates agency control and power within the development nexus so buzzwords function politically to empower the outsider they empower the zeitgeist they empower the new they are current and therefore they are currency and this fits into a wider problem with development as essentially a concept about time development is about going forward it's about being advanced to work with the times and therefore to develop is to adopt all of these new ideas new phrases and to keep up in significant ways now we might see this then there's been a lot of writing about whether this is to do with the development industry itself or whether we can see this as a feature of modernity in general I think that's a useful question to ask I think we can overstate the difference between let's say the coloniality I'm a big fan of the works and analyses that bring those two concepts together but more than that I think there's something interesting going on which is about the re-centering of the donor within development activity that leads to the continuous churn of buzzwords it's about the realisation of one's self as a progressive agent as a saviour, as a helper or an assistor or as a technical expert and this is not going on at any kind of deliberate or conspiratorial level but it is just how subjectivities are constituted in this field and by our discourses now alongside these experiences or what I would say experiences of being the sort of person on the receiving end of this constant innovation we also need to remember the historical origins of development as a discourse and this is also actually pulled out of Gilbert's chapter in the book which I'm encouraging you to read and that is a reminder that the concept of development as taken up and practiced by the west over the last six or seven decades itself was a form of geopolitical counterinsurgency that is to say that particularly after the end of the Second World War and at the time when a number of countries were demanding independence, demanding reparations demanding all kinds of justice the promise of development assistance was to essentially reassure them that they would be looked after that they would be encouraged and taught how to come up to the standards of the civilising powers and it would also form a bullwalk against communism as we know right Walt Rostow's work an anti-communist or non-communist manifesto so in this context the ideas of development were conceived and practiced as a way of essentially giving the Third World enough or thinking about giving the Third World enough such that it wouldn't take another path and other experiments either failed or were actively undermined by that process so development itself I'm not saying that origins always constitute the future of a concept by the way I think that's a mistake that a lot of colonial or post-colonial analysis can make quite clearly just because something had colonial origins doesn't mean it does in the present however I do think that the production of a development industry has created a number of vested interests in the continuation of that industry both in a material sense in which we might think of kind of corporate interests but also in a political sense of how we arrange our political consciousness and subjectivities and what we can see through the churn of buzzwords is a constant reharnishing and reconstitution of the development project as it incorporates resistance and critique right it is not a coincidence that the things that it has incorporated as buzzwords have come from activists and so on trying to engage critically with that project and I think particularly when we look at things like gender or empowerment or participation these began life as quite stinging critiques of development practice and have since been kind of reabsorbed the last thing I'd like us to think about really is the relationship between the idea of development as a sort of practice of giving economic assistance or political assistance to countries in the global south and the category of development as a social scientific term of art right so we have this problem that the idea of development is very deeply embedded into political science, economics anthropology to a certain extent various forms of history marxism, barbarianism if we think about social science as a set of knowledge practices it's very difficult to think about what it would mean without the concept of development without some idea of some people being in the future and some people being behind them historically speaking even if you have quite a critical perspective I've tried to play around a little bit with concepts that I think are more useful I think terms such as accumulation, concentration transformation help us to capture change without tying us into the kinds of teleology of development and therefore facilitating the slippage between say scholarly usages of the term development and their political usages so a challenge for all of us for scholarship is alternative ontologies and alternative categories of thought for talking about things like the accumulation of wealth the development of industrialisation the emergence of industrialisation and so on so just to conclude buzzwords are amusing they have this kind of bullshit dimension and that's worth engaging with and worth being self-reflexive about however we shouldn't forget about the political functions that buzzwords serve and the kinds of practices that they enable and that the churn itself enables rather than the words themselves it is emblematic I would say of a kind of structural dynamic within development as a concept and a practice and enables very much what we might think of as what we call choiceless democracies in the global south constant reinvention from the outside and an attempt to hold something together in the middle without any real kind of popular republic engagement okay so questions contributions thoughts all of that was lots of food for thoughts very interesting insights yes person on the floor just behind you yet thank you very much for that discussion I was particularly moved to start thinking about Anna Arendt's discussion about human rights and the necessity for states to create that and also a gamben and this issue of the state of exception and it seems quite a deliberate choice the politicisation of migration because what it actually does is to isolate the context that produces the refugees and the asylum seekers so I just wondered could relate back to sort of a gamben Anna Arendt and make some connections there thank you thank you so we'll take a few and feel free to come in in the discussion yes at the back thank you so in the context of the refugee versus migrant use so there's a sort of pressure group called stop funding hate and they sort of pressure different or like corporations basically to not fund like the Daily Mail and those kind of like horrible papers but I was wondering so that's kind of like a like non-legal way to do it but is there any legal way to hold something like the Daily Mail or even for example the BBC to account for the misuse of words if can you make a yeah have you ever heard of using like legal instruments to hold limit to account for yeah misuse of language thank you so yes and then and then you yeah thank you for that just two part question wondering if you think land reform is considered a buzzword at all and also land reform okay land reform is on like donors list of priorities within development so it seems like if that was God and Right then it would be a good way to break away from dependency and then over here if you could just make a bit of room so the volunteers could come up and get the mic, thanks I've got one, thanks so I'm currently doing some research doing discourse analysis of intersectionality in GBV discourse in humanitarian spaces so thank you for making this event for me basically that's what it's for very helpful, thank you so I was particularly struck by the fact that intersectionality came up in the new list of buzzwords and that Professor Cornwall, you characterise it in particular as wonder is used in a particularly vacuous way so I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about that and also about the risks of you know the very concrete risks of taking these terms that come from a political you know from political projects and movements and their co-option in development discourse thank you, thanks and over there over there to your right hand I was wondering if you could just elaborate on the connection between funding and buzzwords and how we as practitioners could kind of subvert this top down approach to ensure that we're doing the work that is needed rather than kind of following the current modes of thinking from the top thanks my question is for Mira specifically and thinking about the reclaiming or the task that you throw at re-signifying those words, thinking about social movements in the political context and how sometimes through the buying so these concepts are defined outside by social movements in their contested re-nature is the real room for social movements to reinvent to reclaim these words thinking as well that some of the words that come from within the contested re-nature am talking about particularly leftist movements are not necessarily defined in the periphery if you talk about it so what kind of periphery are you talking about is it just a mainstream periphery or is it also within social movements also some marginalisation in terms of who defines what great thanks excellent questions hi I'm a development practitioner so I don't feel very good about my job right now and the words that I use every day but I guess the question is this is incredibly interesting and it's something that should be thought about in the way in which we work but what are the ways in which we can make sure that we are not appropriating language but questioning it and giving agency to the people who are affected by that language so it's to what extent what are some practical things that we could do to sort of change the rhythm of the turn in a way thanks okay let's hold that thought let's get our panellists to just come in for a few minutes there's quite a lot of questions and then we'll resume again do you want to stop or do you want to go okay thank you I'm just I think going to respond to the questions about the migration refugee thing just for obvious reasons I think it's very useful to think in terms of a gambon state of exception and you know kind of similar literature I think one can push it almost immediately further than thinking about the difference between refugees or migrants or different categories of forced migrants to the legal political classifications which are being used albeit that there are resonances there as well but I think if you think further to work for example by Bauman on you know surplus populations and the detritus of kind of globalisation you really start seeing a world which is being divided into categories of people who are regarded as useful to you know what we understand to be the kind of capitalist globalised system whatever or are not useful and to what purpose can populations be put and I think you know again if you think about the way that Bourdieu writes about the way that language can be symbolic, can also be violent, can be connected in a sense to structural violence you see exactly the ways in which how you talk about these kinds of people and the situations that they find themselves in you know precisely kind of contributes to the construction and reconstruction of precisely those kind of oppositional relationships so I think it's a really valuable kind of you know way of thinking about it as far as the thinking about a legal recourse for you know disgusting right wing kind of publications and other sorts of mouthpiece I mean I'm not aware of any kind of legal response which is possible in the context of you know a kind of a legal discussion or discourse I mean none of the things that I've described albeit that many of them you know point towards actions which are highly questionable and possibly eventually themselves illegal under at least international refugee and humanitarian law if not more locally and not you know the language which is used is not in itself insightful or is that even a word but you know what I mean it doesn't kind of do the kinds of things which for which a legal recourse could be made so obviously there is freedom of speech there you know people are free to express views however horrible they are I mean I think that it nevertheless there is some kind of even if more limited response to be made in terms of calling that kind of language and you know spelling out articulating making explicit what it is actually saying and then inviting people you know to participate in a discussion about whether that's actually what they think and whether it's actually what they mean I mean there is a very very important part of the public discourse which is organised around wrong information as I've already tried to say I was talking earlier in the day with some of our students about some of the public information surveys about asylum and immigration which carried out by Europol it's very very shocking to what extent there are misunderstandings on the basis of which people make decisions about what they think about asylum and immigration for example and then if you look at specific studies that are being carried out the one that I mentioned that UNHCR commissioned at Cardiff for example looks at media discourse and coverage relating to refugees and asylum issues in five European countries including the UK and it specifies the UK as having the most vitriolic right wing kind of coverage in terms of the kind of language which is used in sorts of political positions which are espoused you know more than countries which we might find ourselves surprised to be worse than in these stakes and the Italian media which is well known for being really kind of brutal in its coverage of asylum and immigration comes out in this study as less kind of violently opposed and less problematically representing so thank you I'll maybe pick up the questions about the risks of taking terms that come from sort of more radical political projects and being co-opted into development discourse how to subvert top down approach and re-signifying the words from social movements, how social movements can, is there room for them to reinvent these words and I think something that's really was a really interesting insight for me when I started looking into this was the value of these words as fuzz words so I saw fuzz words as words that had very very vague and expansive meanings that would shelter a multiplicity of possible agendas and therefore would be Trojan horses that could be used to be able to enter into certain kinds of political spaces or steal into conversations or into opportunities to be the recipient of funding for by donors wanting one thing and then actually getting something very different because you're using the same language so I was interested in the subversive uses of fuzz words and then the strategic deployment of fuzz words in order to be able to seek that kind of funding support I have a colleague who would routinely put funding calls and things through something called wordle and find out what the main words what wordle does if you know it you put a tranche of text into it and the words that are repeated most often come out to be larger so this person would then put them in their funding bid and then run the wordle on the funding bid and see if there was a match and then submit the funding bid and get the money so as a tactical manoeuvre the strategic use then of these or tactical use of these fuzz words can be a way of reclaiming them I had a moment with Difford Difford gave myself and a motley collection of feminist activists spread around the world a rather large amount of money to work on women's empowerment which we highly disapproved of as a concept because it had become it started to become so avoided of meaning we included in our project people who had advanced it as a feminist feminist word and we wanted to reclaim some of those meanings but some people were quite skeptical at that point and halfway through the project they turned round to me and said but this stuff that you're doing here on sexuality and pleasure it's not really empowerment is it? I was like yes it is all about empowerment so you can use it to harbour many things I think also let's remind ourselves also of the ways in which discourse can be used in various ways by those who have less power so Foucault writes about the strategic reversibility of discourse about the fact that it's never set it's always an act of manoeuvre to find ways of placing yourself within discourse and putting yourselves in a position where you can turn it to your advantage for resistance so I like the idea of that as well and sometimes putting a bit of bullshit in can also make you feel empowered even in a very small way in terms of strategies I thought about this quite a lot and talked about it quite a lot as we were doing this because rather than a sort of bleak deconstruction of everything we wanted to come up with something to say well actually this is not about saying we're never going to use this word again the word is being used it's being used out there, it's access to certain kinds of space certain kinds of resources and we want to actively even if we're not actively re-signifying it through our practices and through our uses of it we can begin to steal in and reclaim and re-mold the ways in which this word is being used so some of the things that occurred to us were to use the philosophy of Wittgenstein of family resemblances which you probably are familiar with so things that are common and similar so how do you build in a sentence or a paragraph or a document enough family resemblances that signify those words with the meanings that you want to fill them with so Anestha La Clau's got this idea of chains of equivalence so what is it about putting words together with other words that slough away certain meanings so if you put the word rights along with customer market and so on chain of equivalence and if you put rights together with human citizenship and so on the other thing is using adjectives so or mimicking some of the phrases so I became fond at certain points and I should probably take this up again of arguing for a pleasure based approach to development because there was a rights based approach there was a results based approach there was a community based approach and it was why not have a pleasure based approach and then start a conversation about how it would look different so some of the hyphenation practices that are used to give a different meaning so anyway that's playing with words but as somebody who's interested in the political uses of words I think we can play with words that's why I started with Goethe who was a great made up and used words in very creative ways because it is also a way about not only reclaiming the use of those words we're reclaiming some of those acts and some of those spaces that otherwise would just be empty so if we refuse to participate because we're not interested in a debate about that particular word or that particular concept we take ourselves out of that space we lose a voice in that space and I think so my final point really is about social movements carrying on going into and contesting within those spaces even if the means of invitation into those spaces are highly restrained and restricted to words that they might otherwise not feel any sense of kindred with once they enter into those spaces and begin to debate and bring other ideas and repopulate those spaces with different kinds of ways of framing those words they can gain a sort of political mobility that they didn't have before or regain them having said that I wrote that as a conclusion to a paper for New Left Review they liked the paper they hated the conclusion and they rejected the paper so yeah maybe it's no good Thanks Just on the land reform question I don't any word could be a buzzword I think given the sort of analysis we're engaged in I don't know where it is on Dona's list of priorities and that's because I haven't checked for like 10 minutes so it might have changed but at one point actually no I mean there's a more serious story here which is that in Mozambique land reform there's been a big battle a political battle for a long time because Mozambique's independence was founded on the basis that land should be publicly owned and so the World Bank and so on have been pushing the Mozambican government to privatise it for a long time they've always resisted and they found workarounds and things to do and there's also been a long struggle by community organisations to get land titles registered which has been achieved with assistance and cooperation from a number of other donors as well that's only partial in as the battle over agribusiness changes at some but all of that is just to say that there is political potentiality and there is important political work being done under all of these umbrellas for buzzwords and I even though I'm making a kind of structuralist critique about what these things entail I don't begrudge anybody an opportunist moment to get something done in a particular way through funding streams that's important like people's lives depend on that and that's not something I've complained about with regard to how to avoid or how social movements can engage productively in what is going on I think one of the key things is actually for social movements not just to articulate principles such as justice or equality but to articulate demands and I think when you have got a demand that says something very specific it becomes much more difficult to co-opt or to push away or to kind of dissolve in some kind of strategy paper right so saying that you want equality and justice is good right but saying we want a universal basic income of 10,000 pounds for every person in the country like that's something which is very concrete which actually might be more productive than campaigning for some kinds of benefit reform on this and this and the other thing right it's a clear thing, it's a positive thing you can create real weight behind a particular demand so the job of the movement will be to philosophise and deliberate and to think about what the priority should be but I think when movements publicly campaign and they do need publicly campaign it needs to be about concrete things like three acres of land for everybody universal basic income or government support for price for X right and I think those kinds of organised concrete winds can really help and avoid the discussion about how deep to go into the weeds with various partners because then you can choose your partners also depending on who is actually going to help you realise this demand rather than are we going to have a long time partnership of this and that character because you can't make those strategic decisions I think of a level of movement um for the practitioners how can you change the rhythm of the churn it's a really interesting question I actually think there are both simple things that would make a big difference and bigger things so this whole thing about like protagonism and so on having simple things like agricultural projects which last for 10 years rather than 3 years don't require consistent reporting but have a clear level of like funded support that is not being developed by reports and consultants and so on like just making more space even within whatever the size of the thing that you hold just making more space for people to define their own terms and what they want to do I just think is crucial and I think it's that holding of the ring or holding back the other kinds of forces that people can do in a way which might help development practice realise things getting interesting we had a question over there yes I have the feeling that we have to explain and justify every single word that we use in our research and in my case I'm looking at the role of English in processes of modernisation and development a bit closer to your mouth here okay so in my case I'm looking at the role of English in the processes of modernisation and development so of course I need to explain what development is modernisation but I'm in a point in which I'm reading about that thing called English you know so I have the feeling that it's endless when to stop okay thanks and over here I think one of the biggest for me buzzwords and buzzwords to be revisited, challenged and even maybe abandoned is development itself because when we talk about development what those decision makers or those people in power mean they mean capitalist development that maintains the neocolonial and imperial structures of powers and in that respect I want to engage with you Mira in what you said like you are inclined to be on the opinion of rest and others like Arturo Escobar in his book encountering development that we need to discard that whole discourse because it is based on a dominant imaginary that wants tends to say it is universal and imposes itself on others and that discourse is the modernity thing and modernity and coloniality I would like you to elaborate more on that thanks and over there really enjoyed the panel I thought it was fantastic and I just had one comment and a question the comment comes back to the functions of the buzzwords again and to me it seems as if there's a tension between what what Andrea sketched out as being what would be the classic Marxist analysis or implication of it being that the buzzword is used as a kind of cloaking device to hide and conceal to distort different material and political interests so we have that tradition but also speaking to what Mira was saying is again that there are all very kind of non-cynical functions of the language in terms of status, recognition just basic communication so to me part of the tension is that you as an academic come along and say it's concealing it's all terrible you don't know your real interests etc but you may not say that in those terms but the fact is that some other defender of the vocabulary you can say we're just together it's just a part of a communication process so to me that's a tension between the different effects and functions of it is more of a kind of is one about whether you can map out a kind of hierarchy of buzzwords I mean clearly we're talking about development as a kind of linchpin but is it possible to think about other master buzzwords and maybe secondary buzzwords which are swirling around, spinning off it and maybe there's another tier which are the real empty ones that just come and go may not last very long and so forth is it possible to do a kind of categorisation of the buzzwords Thanks Anything bouncing off what this gentleman has just said I'm interested if you could speak to how buzzwords can create barriers of entry not only for people affected by the development process but also for practitioners and how they might promote specialist and siloed approaches to development limiting multi-sectoral and multi-disciplinary approaches to complex problems Thanks Over here I had wondered about some of your views on the links between buzzwords used in development and broader buzzwords used in society and how much this field is a reflection of broader trends that are out there and then I had also a specific question about views on the role of global frameworks and global goals in terms of consolidating understanding and focus on certain areas so things like the MDGs and SDGs and views across the panel from those great thanks I have also two things just as more common you mentioned earlier that innovation is coming in is one of the new buzzwords I was a bit surprised because it seems to have been around at least since farmer first so maybe it's having a second, third or for every many a spring but yeah I guess they come and go and then my question we got to some things that you already somehow touched on that I have the feeling that in the way that development functions even if you question the term itself the short live nature of projects seem to not make it possible to get around the use of buzzwords because if you don't use what is sexy enough to date you might not get the funding to do what you want and I quite like the idea I think that Andrea brought up about kind of subversively getting in there I am wondering how well that works in practice in terms of accountability towards the donors will you be able to do this more than once and how much influence really does development practice have on the length of project cycles because to me that seems so inherently problematic if you always have three-year projects you can't really get around that so how you said maybe 10-year projects would make more sense but how feasible is that really all great questions it seems that the umbrella of buzzwords is expanding and expanding and I presume this question has been asked in different forms here but I am just trying to highlight it again that the development buzzwords have gained such a traction I would say that they have almost subsumed more culturally relevant ideas of say social service and you know would you think there is still a distinction between them as how social service can be seen or how or are they completely repackaged now and if that is the case then what does it essentially mean for societies where these ideas are fundamentally very relevant still today I think maybe this it's a bit related to the question of land reform I think in a sense but good governance and I think a relative lack of inequality in some of these discourses and thank you from an IT background one of the things that changed information technology completely was the integration of different chips into one code and that did not only reduce the size of the computing gadget but changed a lot of things and I'm looking at a time when there are efforts being put into bringing different disciplines and departments and so on into what is ideally to form one thing interdisciplinarity and so on and then a word that in the 1970s didn't mean much like resilience is now appearing in the buzz of first word and it comes with a lot of advantage as well and in the field at the end of last year I came across an approach that was taking a human rights based approach and on one side and one that was taking a more capitalist approach on one side and they both connect in one word which was resilience approach and which is a new word but is buzz word a problem can we see it as an advantage because it's being driven by not just the fanciness of the word but also by other things happening especially within the academic as well thank you. Resilience that's got to be a new one for sure. I was just thinking that's just an incredible idea because it goes back to what you were saying about the teleological approach like always looking for the next best thing and behind that the history of development is about the economic liberalisation of market forces and just one idea after the other which is just a mask for a great range of activities with absolutely no end at all so it's a production that keeps on producing its own meaning in that process but it just also reminds me of a very practical example doing technical assistance programmes and you're in a situation where as the expert you're in a workshop trying to pass on knowledge it always bothers me this idea of agency because it's never ever localised it's never clear what the local input is which will help the beneficiaries resolve their own problems so it's almost like a black box even when we talk about agency and what we're trying to do with technical assistance programmes we don't have a clear idea of how whether we give them information whether we give them what it is that will help the beneficiaries resolve their own issues and it just seems really just a very strange process that we don't there's a black box at the heart of what we're trying to do there This one's back to the proliferation of expertise that you mentioned earlier and I feel like one of the things we've come up with to sort of avoid that development churn were country ownership and development effectiveness which are now just buzzwords and sometimes empty so is there a way to are there any solutions to that or is there anything development practitioners who don't want to contribute to the churn but this is also where they make their money and their funding is it sort of a circular problem or is there a way to break that cycle We've got time for two, three questions So far a lot of people have talked about agency and I was wondering if you could think of agency itself as a buzzword I mean I know Andrea talks about your work you look at appraisals of PRA so I'm wondering if that could be considered a buzzword of itself and giving agency is that is that poemmatic or giving agency is that problematic So the guy before me was talking about kind of I mean I think it kind of links to the different empowerment maybe empowering communities but in that sense you're kind of kind of putting the responsibility in communities to create the change themselves and that kind of dissuades material aid so I guess that other questions don't be shy I was listening to a podcast a couple weeks ago that I discussed I don't want to call it a phenomenon because that's a buzzword but something called dog whistling which is I guess using terms that have a loaded meaning so it kind of allows the person using that term to apply a meaning but innocuously kind of like hide behind the vagueness of the term so the person gave the example like using urban youth as opposed to speaking about specific racial minorities in cities and I was just wondering because I've seen this so much in media in even just discussions I have with friends and family so I was wondering if you can maybe give some suggestions on how to call out these buzzwords when they don't have such innocuous meanings maybe in a way that doesn't put the user off but kind of facilitates a discussion Thanks again for a great discussion it reminded me of this discussion I have with this researcher in the institute in the Netherlands I'm researching Dutch aid in the context of Mozambique as well and I was talking with him on Dutch aid he did this major project he's a historicist he did a major project on Dutch aid since the history of development proper started in 1949 I guess so he went into our guys and all the rest of it and we talked about buzzwords which are actually popping up through how this history of Dutch aid not really new like he talked about participation which was a major buzzwords in the 1970s he wrote this paper about it but the conclusion was we are not really moving forward, we are moving in cycles which and I thought about it what does participation mean in the 1970s as opposed to participation in current times in the start of neoliberal times as opposed to advanced neoliberalism now just a thought and it also reminded me of this paper that I think David Moss of souls as well wrote about the addition of buzzwords so the one buzzwords not really traded for another as it is sort of added up since the 1980s, structural adjustment plus participation plus good governance plus you know and that's been if you read about development and the development NGOs they're talking about multiple of these buzzwords in addition not really putting the one out as well, yeah okay, alright okay so we'll hear from Mira and then Tanya and then we'll give Andrew the last word just three or four minutes each okay thank you I'm almost done, I'm going to be able to do justice to all of these great questions maybe to say a general comment which might cover a few of the things so the question about whether we have the term development the question about local ownership the question about like how to bring knowledges together question about buzzwords so what I would, I've tried to push back and think at a very basic level what is the thing that development practice is trying to do and I suppose it is trying to get to a world in which people have enough to eat can do work are not horribly oppressed in some way or the other I mean these are like these are fundamental things that humans have tried to do through time these are things that humans I would suggest without becoming a biological essentialist humans do right, if you put a bunch of humans in a space give them a problem to solve they will find a way to solve it they will find ways to be social and be political and so on what development discourse and practice has done is to try to scientise that process and put it into a language and a framework in which the capacities to do those things is delivered externally by people who know better and who look different from you right and so this is why the local ownership problem is actually it's the heart of the very conundrum real local ownership means buggering off I mean no, I'm serious right and then once you say okay but is there any help that a rich person could give a poor person you can do a bunch of things very simply they come down to make the rules easier for poor people to get ahead and or give them some money and maybe access to knowledge and information right so if we're interested in helping global inequality the best thing that people located in the west can do is lobby actively for fairer global economic rules taxation all of that kind of thing and make space right trying to exit from the picture is quite difficult but it's something around which both a number of conservative and radical positions are going to converge around the idea of a kind of ethical retreat from trying to organize things because even though in principle it might be possible for there to be loads of international technical assistance and expertise and a thriving local democracy and a functioning political system and the building of institutions in practice the absorption of energies into the one precludes the other I would say so I think we just need to start thinking about development as human problem solving for well-being and you know planet and so on I mean those are very kind of woolly way of putting it but when we think about it that simply then we can abandon I think without too much heartache the language that society is developing this way you must do this to develop all of which is deeply contestable and context based so what we're really talking about I would say is democracy our people and my understanding of democracy is that our people are empowered to solve their own problems in ways that they collectively deliver and choose upon that's very complicated in a globalized international system there's a whole Brexit debate going on right now which is in some senses about this very same problem but the democracy problem I would say subsumes the development problem that they've been kind of attacking each other for too long I'll say a couple more things so I know I've talked too much about that Matt's tension between Marx and Foucault really about the sort of nature of language I think is the tension between the ordinary functions of language communication status and the Marxist thing being the critique the cloaking I think that's important language language both cloaks and producers to cloak to articulate oneself in one way to not articulate oneself in a bunch of other ways and I think that's why democracy and accountability are important because you have the opportunity to object to ways in which things are configured if there are the structures and the power enabled to do that if anybody's interested read Matt's book on neoliberalism because he's done a great kind of anatomisation of the key concepts in neoliberalism which I think is very cognate to this stuff the last thing I would say is how to break the cycle I don't know just like I do think it's about to some extent withdrawal yes okay so I think it is about just actually withdrawing in some respects okay thanks Mary thank you mine's going to be very quick and it refers to some of those issues in a slightly different way which is that if we're talking about language we're talking about people who are speaking we're talking about speech acts we're talking about the contexts in which those speech acts take place we're talking about a very wide range of voices potentially and it's inevitable perhaps in a conversation of this kind that the actors and the speakers will be kind of grouped I suppose into different kinds of categories and we've talked very much about development and development practitioners as something which is kind of driven by some in for reasons which we understand driven by external actors actors who are powerful actors who are wealthy actors who are in a position to if not coerce then impose views kind of preferences and so on if we think about development and development processes as more kind of collaboratively processes of social transformation which are kind of supported which are potentially transformative for groups of people at a number of different levels and we step back from the institutional parameters maybe that we've been talking about we might be able to think about ways of I suppose maybe doing a different pitch for buzzwords from a whole different constituency and asking what development looks like and what would be key words from those perspectives which sounds a little bit naive at some level but also in an integrative way might offer some scope for a different kind of conversation and we don't want to just be thinking in terms of a whole raft of different actors who are monolithically sealed inside their own subjectivities and personalities and can't talk to each other so I guess that would be my parting word so many questions that are so interesting it's really hard to find a kind of pithy answer but I very much agree with what the previous two speakers have said and I guess for me in conclusion I'm thinking wouldn't it be fab to have the linguists in SOAS put together a module for development that would look at all of these things around the ordinary language around performative language about pericutionary, illocutionary acts, the linguistic philosophers and the people here have got serious expertise, political rhetoric and use that as a way of decoding some of these languages and finding new political imaginaries from our existing practices so I'm going to take that idea away and see if I can do something with it I think it could be really really interesting maybe even as a summer course just doing some of that really teaching us about the ways in which language works and I think you know let's not get too simplistic about the ways in which our understandings of how we use language, the communicative acts that are part of the ways in which we make our worlds through language we make the versions of the worlds by trading terms and by inhabiting them, by rejecting them and pulling away from them and finding different ways in which we can repopulate our worlds and our social connections through language so it would be interesting to do some sociolinguistic thinking around all of that to the question of development I was very struck when I first started reading about development I didn't feel any association positive association at all with the term or the industry and despite spending many many years engaging with it margins with the idea of development as planned intervention and those two words I think are really part of the problem, planned and intervention who makes the plans what are the plans about, how long are the plans for what kind of what's the engagement of people in those plans and also what the idea of intervention is all about and what it amounts to so many of the comments you've made and comments from the panel I think are really useful for us to think with and if we reduce development to planned intervention we can criticize the hell out of it but actually for many people development is just about getting a better life getting access to healthcare having some of the things in life that we would all want peace if your children to grow up to have the ways of getting a job and I think when we strip it back to those things as Mira has said we find a different place and I had a very salutary experience of teaching going into the university from having worked in a policy institute working with development on development and teaching first year students and teaching this course that was aimed at decolonising the ways in which they thought about themselves as potential development actors and decolonising development and we came to the last session of the course having stripped every single piece away from this development thing and I said to them just go out in small groups and make up a project at a plasticity university and they came up with all these really brilliant things and there was so much good energy and they wanted to transform the world and so it is that reconnecting with that energy to transform to make things better at being mindful of the coloniality of attempts in the past and getting away from this idea of intervention that is done by people distant others which I think we need to is pulling us back to those things which Mira said so much more eloquently on participation a specific thing so I look back earlier the 1970s so if you look back at the 1950s and the 1930s it is very interesting I wrote a paper on it and I look back particularly at the writings of Llew Garden Cameron who were the architects of indirect rule and found some and they also put in place a panchai system in India so that all came out of that the ideas about participation from that period and in the 1950s in the period of so-called decolonisation again handbooks were written on how to do participation so it's all been kind of thought before and so I asked Robert Chambers guru of participation who was a district officer in Kenya in the 1950s very aware of this work and had written about it in a very interesting in the 1970s a book of his 1971 or 1973 but you know you've seen this stuff has come around it's been before it's been before in the 70s it's been born in the 50s why don't you say anything about it he said oh we know I'm always hopeful that the next time this comes around people are going to fill it with different meanings and again that's something positive to go away with some of these words might have been corrupted for our times and in our times but the things that they signify that are things that we want to believe in we carry on filling them with and elsewhere I've written about myths and fables and how we tell ourselves stories and you know stories that have protagonists in them who do amazing things but also myths part of the function of myths and again from linguists sociolinguists part of the function of a myth is not to match reality in any way but to tell you a story that makes sense of a world you'd like to have to be in or that will take you somewhere in terms of your imaginary for the future so I think again there's something to be said there about the stories we tell ourselves about struggles for injustice against injustice and for equality or whatever we might like to think of as development rather than telling ourselves a story that deconstructs and strips away the very possibility of us working on those things a very last thing is to think about one word one development buzzword that you absolutely would not want to let go of because that's also quite an interesting exercise so what word is so important that even if it's been really abused and misused you really think no this is one that's worth having a fight over so that's also I think can be quite empowering join me in thanking all of our panelists