Reimagining Development - A Conversation with Dr Uma Pradhan and Dr Peter Sutoris

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

So we try to really understand these as very practical possibilities where multiple ways of being in the world can be brought together, and it may not always be contradictory, and that there is a possibility of understanding and working with this kind of plurality and multiplicity of possible futures.

Hi everyone, and welcome back this week to the podcast. My name's Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. What it means to be an educated person or have an educated population as a country is a big part of what informs the decisions around industrial, economic, and education policy. But built into those questions are some fundamental assumptions about what it means to make progress or to be developed as a society. And even beneath that are particular values about what it means to know and to be in the world. My guests this week have been exploring precisely these questions in the context of international development. But as you'll hear, there are so many resonances with the conversations that we are sharing about change in education. Dr. Uma Pradhan and Dr. Peter Soutouris are the authors of the new book, Reimagining Development: Bold Directions Towards a Thriving World. Uma is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Education at University College London. At UCL, she's part of the Centre for Education and International Development and the Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World. She's authored and co-authored many books, which you can find linked in the show notes. Peter is an Associate Professor in Climate and Development in the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds University in the UK. His work bridges anthropology with education, development studies, and environmental studies. Prior to co-authoring this new book with Uma, he's written two other books, which he describes in our conversation, on visions of development and educating for the Anthropocene. Fantastic. Thank you very much for taking the time to chat, Uma and Peter. Really nice to meet you and really excited about having this conversation. I have, I just mentioned off air, I have a personal interest in this topic as being a graduate of international development and now working in education, but I'm very curious and interested about some of the similarities and connections that we might see between the questions being asked in context of international development and the context of change in education. So firstly, just welcome, really lovely to have you both here.

Yeah, thank you so much for the invitation, Tim Logan.

Good stuff. Maybe it's worth just elaborating on that point a little bit more just to kind of set the context for the listeners. But your previous book, Peter, was an inquiry into educating in the Anthropocene and, and inquiry into the connections between your work in development and what it means for education. So yeah, perhaps Peter, maybe if we start with you, if you could just draw that connection through your previous work and into this new book that you've now both written together, Reimagining Development, just to set that context of the kind of connections between education and development.

Sure. I feel like to answer that question, I actually have to go one further book back, but I will be very brief. Um, so there was, there was a book which came out in 2016 called Visions of Development. Which was looking at the way that India after independence from Britain was trying to imagine its, its future and the kind of trajectory that it was embracing as part of that development process. And in that book, uh, I argued that those visions of the future were quite elitist, that they were basically blueprints that were designed by a relatively small group of people, an elite that was then trying to impose those blueprints for the future on the rest of the population. And that that also explained some of the limitations of that, of that project of development in that part of the world. The book that you mentioned, Educating for the Anthropocene, was in some ways building on that theme as well. And it was bringing it into the contemporary moment and asking the question of, you know, who are the blueprint makers and how are the blueprints being shared around the world? And specifically thinking about the role of education systems in that. And the ways that young people get socialized into thinking about the future in a particular way. And that's really then where this latest book picks up, you know, sort of asking the question of, if not that elitist approach, then what? What is the alternative and how do we imagine something different?

Yeah, no, that's great. And perhaps could you just speak briefly to the work of the center? You, I mean, you are part of the Center for Education and International Development, as I understand it.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, perhaps you could just say a little bit about how do those two things align, education, international development, in, in your work and the work of the Centre at UCL?

Yeah, I've been working in the department that focuses its research and teaching around the issues of education and international development. And my work, my research has been working on the issue of what is considered to be education. What is the questions of what is education and how do we understand the ideas of an educated person? How is education imagined and reimagined? And that's the central question that we have been working around in that department and in the center. And my, my PhD research was around the question of minority language education. And that's where I approach these ideas and imaginations, practices around education and what is considered to be, who is considered to be an educated person. And that's where I have been now researching and more recent work has been around investments in education. What kind of visions shape ideas of education within within these frameworks of progress, nation-building, modernization, right? All these ideas shape what is considered to be education and educated person and what kind of investments are made in this. And that's where I bring in the ideas of development and education within this book.

Fantastic. And yeah, I mean, there are some knotty entanglements, right, in all of those concepts that you've been, both of you have raised there. And yeah, I mean, if we could perhaps focus a bit more just now into this, the current book, Reimagining Development, how you talk about the kind of being trapped in some of those narratives of progress and civilizing missions and the idea of, I'm not sure whether you talk about this in the book specifically, but the idea of kind of building that human capital, a very economistic kind of idea of what it means to be an educated person, what it means to be successful educationally is somehow this individualized capital accumulation, you know? And so, yeah, I mean, I love all of the things you're saying. It's very much along the lines of why we run this podcast, actually, of asking those big questions as well. So no, super exciting. But, but just, yeah, no, but perhaps you could speak to a bit more about in the book, how do you lay out some of those questions about maybe some of the, either where those entanglements have come from or, or how we might respond to them now?

So I suppose we look at these questions through the perspective of imagining the future and, and reimagining the future. And we argue that there are two steps in that process. One is to sensitize ourselves to the reality in which we currently live. So actually understanding that a lot of these entanglements, you know, a lot of these assumptions that we make are not in fact self-evident, that they are, you know, a historical accident in some ways, that they're the outcome of how our society has historically developed. And once we have that sensitivity and actually understand, we do that in the book through chapters on narratives and claims, you know, the power of narrative and the power of claims that surround us. And that we often internalize. Then that second step of, you know, what could the alternative be? How do we reimagine this present moment into something different? Then becomes the, the focus. And for that, you know, we, we bring in a number of provocations, you know, examples from different fields where these are not the kind of conventional areas where, where one might look for answers about development. We, for example, have an entire poem in the book from a Marshallese poet who's writing about the impact of the rising sea levels as a result of climate change. So this is also something, you know, that we try to do is to sort of really broaden the scope of the conversation about development by bringing in these different ways of knowing and different ways of understanding the world.

Yeah. And what we are trying to do in the book is really trying to bring attention to the fact that the questioning of these kind of dominant narratives of civilizing mission or nation-building or these kind of various, or modernization. It's not just the matter of semantics, right? It's deeply political as well. And once we unravel this and once we try to understand this, it allows us to, in a way, name and contest the terms of inclusion, belongingness, and the way we approach and understand education and development. And for example, what you mentioned about human capital, right? The language of human capital kind of in a way brings these kind of ideas of civilizing, nation-building, as well as economic growth and these kind of, you know, producing these rational, productive, disciplined subjects kind of ideas together and education as a tool of labor market outcomes of economic competitiveness. And by questioning these narratives, these stories that allows these interventions or these kind of approaches to take place, we are able to then look into what is happening here, right? So, and what kind of intervention and why are these programmes being justified, and with that maybe open the horizons of possibilities of various different ways of approaching this rather than being limited by these very limited kind of narratives and stories that dominate our imagination at the moment.

Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? Because it's almost that the heart of it is a question of, for me, the thing that comes up is the really core question of what is education for in a way? What is the job of education to do? And I'm slightly hesitant about this kind of notion of the purpose of education. I think that's quite a limiting question even to ask, but there's something there for me about the kind of the criticality of, as you said, Peter, kind of sensitizing to the present. And, you know, as you're saying, Uma, just kind of understanding how those limits of this version of the present have been put and who have they been put by, right? Like you said, Peter, about the blueprints and the elite decisions that have been made somewhere behind the scenes that that show up in a curriculum or a set of stories that we then kind of feed to our young people with an associated justification that, you know, this is what success means and this is all wrapped up in a nice bow of, you know, this is what going out into the world and being a successful human being is and being, you know, getting a good job, going to a good university, all of those kinds of things. It's, it's a, yeah, it feels really core as a set of questions about really, why are we educating young people? What, what are we hoping to achieve by bringing them into that space and saying we're educating them? So I don't, I don't know if you had any reflections about that.

To me, what you said comes back to this idea of imagination, and I suppose one of the assumptions of the argument, or behind the argument that we make, is that human beings are inherently imaginative beings. You know, we all have our imaginative potentials. And, you know, perhaps one of the roles of, of education in society is to, you know, at the very least not get in the way of that potential. And, you know, perhaps also ideally, you know, to, to actually bring us closer to it and to understand ourselves as these complex layered beings that are capable of thinking about the future in all kinds of ways. I think that is a big part of actually a healthy democracy is that you, you know, you've got citizens, you've got people. Living in that democracy who are not only able to do that, but also see the value of, of doing that, you know, who feel also empowered to imagine a different kind of future and then take steps towards bringing that future into being. So that is where I would see the, the role of education in that process.

One of the things that we are trying to do in the book is also, and really trying to understand human lives as more complex than numbers and statistics and targets, right? So it's, it cannot be reduced to these that are mathematical. Proofs of being able to reproduce results and really trying to understand also how, and it requires creativity, critical understanding, and that's where these stories and poems and those are the kind of things that we are drawing on in this book to appreciate an approach that is centered on more human ways of being in the world. And here we'll be trying to really also understand development, not by rejecting it, but really trying to say that the work is, lies in not trying to erase it, but trying to reimagine it.

Yeah, no, that's amazing. I'd love to pick up on that idea because you talk about epistemicide in the book, and I think that feels incredibly powerful and connected to what you're just saying there, Uma, is about this idea that the way that the kind of almost scientific and statistical, you know, the quantitative version of what it means to be successful or what it means to be developed or what it means to have, you know, GDP and all of those kinds of metrics. That come to, you know, kind of identify a developed nation or, you know, an educated person might be the number of qualifications they have, et cetera. In the process of that, both in a, in a kind of a country level, region level, or an individual level through education, there's an erasure of, or there can be an erasure of other ways of knowing and being because we are saying, well, this is, this is what you can see. This is what we can count. This is what matters. And, well, we'll just ignore that other stuff because that's just kind of either irrelevant or, or even worse, doesn't exist because it can't be seen. It's invisibilized by the dominant metrics, et cetera. So yeah, could you say a little bit more, maybe, I don't know if any examples of where you've seen that happening in a, in development context, or just, yeah, say a bit more about, because that's something I've spent quite a number of episodes exploring is how do we enable spaces for more diverse ways of knowing and being. To be really taken seriously in educational contexts?

Yeah, what we try to do in the book is to really also appreciate these kind of diverse ways of knowing in development and as well as education and unsettling this dominance of data-driven frameworks. And what we feel is that it requires recognizing that knowledge is to some extent situated, right? It's relational. And there are communities and there are groups that possess epistemologies that are rooted in different kinds of other kinds of tradition, oral tradition or memory or spiritual practices that might be often dismissed as unscientific or irrational as well. So challenging this kind of the way people might understand knowledge or knowledge making that development might have historically erased. And we have a number of examples, for example, like there've been missionary schooling, tribal schools, hostels, imposition of various kinds of bureaucratic logics that refuse to treat knowledge systems that doesn't follow a particular logic, right? And that requires some kind of ethical commitment as well and inclusion to kind of understand epistemic justice, where recognizing whose knowledge counts and under what conditions. And in practice, this may look like, you know, privileging stories of historically silenced groups or, you know, Indigenous elders or displaced communities. Farmers and resisting also the impulse to translate these knowledge into these measurable policy metrics as well. And in research, maybe it might look like co-creating questions, valuing storytelling or other forms of understanding as legitimate methodologies within development practice. And it's not just about romanticizing all these kind of forms of knowledge, but also holding space for these plural contested or, you know, these kind of different ways of making sense of the world.

Yeah. Amazing. Peter, did you wanna comment on that? Sure.

Yeah. I mean, I guess maybe takes the question a slightly different direction, but to me, what, what you were saying was quite interesting was how one would take this, this notion of epistemicide. And apply it to education. We applied to development in the book by pointing out that in many of the stories and the claims that have historically been dominant in development thinking and practice, we tend to treat what used to be known as the Third World and is now known as the developing world as a blank slate. You know, we sort of assume that there's, there's nothing here. You know, this is a place to be developed. There hasn't been any, you know, development prior. To the arrival of what we call capital D development in the, in the book. And that is the epistemic side, right? It's, it's sort of sidelining all of those knowledge systems, ways of knowing, ways of being that, that might have preexisted this capital D development. We revisit this classic of anthropological literature, Keith Basso's Wisdom Sits in Places, where we look at how stories that indigenous populations have created about their landscapes actually stress humility. You know, people are discovering the landscape and, and trying to understand it. Rather than arriving with the mindset of trying to change it or remodel it somehow. And to my mind, there is a parallel way of thinking in education where we approach the human being, you know, the, the person who is to be educated, not as a blank slate, not as this container to be filled with knowledge or, or skills or understanding or even wisdom, but you know, as a unique individual who, who comes to the education process already with, you know, valuable, important, interesting insight into what it means to be human in the world, which by definition is going to be different for every unique individual in the world. And, you know, we end the book with a chapter on this notion of radical humility. So, you know, to my mind, this idea of radical humility, approaching the process of whether it's development or, or education with humility ultimately is, is the answer.

Amazing. Yeah, I, I've not heard of that work. Wisdom Sits in Places. That sounds like definitely somewhere I want to go. But I don't know whether you know Joseph Heinrich's work, The Weirdest People in the World. Have you come across that? He's a human evolutionary biology professor at Harvard and an anthropologist, but I was actually listening to some of his stuff this weekend and there's something very interesting in that work. So he, I mean, he broadly kind of compares, I guess what you could call more kin-based societies with the more individualistic. I mean, WEIRD being the acronym for Western educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. But the thing I find from an education context really interesting about that is even not just the notion that individuals are blank slates, but even just the very notion of the importance of the individual building one's own capability to show that you are trustworthy or reliable or competent in a context where kin-based relationships are much less important because they've been destroyed by the Catholic Church, et cetera. I mean, he charts the whole history. But because of that lack of kin-based structure, it's almost like the emphasis falls on you as an individual to prove yourself that you, you know, there is a basis on which you can build new relationships with people who are not your kin by showing how competent and trustworthy, et cetera, you are. So even the very notion, I think, of development and being educated is somehow entangled up with all of that. And that idea that actually there's something more about kin-based, place-based, you know, not to romanticize, but just there are clear differences in probably the global majority being much more like that than these, these weird countries as he talks about it. I just, yeah, I find that a really interesting piece of research, but also connection to some of the things you are both already saying. But then perhaps I could just pick up on something you said, Uma, about plurality. And again, that's another thing that I've been really exploring a lot on the podcast is if we take the fact, which I think is clearly a fact that you are making a really strong case for in the book, and many other people are, that there are many, many ways of knowing and being in the world, and many of them have been oppressed and marginalized and excluded from being taken seriously by these dominant paradigms. The response to that is something around plurality and, and holding spaces where those things can all commingle together somehow. Because it's, you know, clearly the kind of the positivist, the scientific, the quantitative, that's not going away, but it needs to maybe find some radical humility to your point, Peter, and move over so that we can actually create some spaces where more ways of being, plural ways of being and knowing are made available to our young people. I mean, for me, that's, that's where the focus is.

Yeah. No, as, as Peter mentioned earlier, we start the book with the discussion regarding a big D development and little d development, a big D development being where where there's a linear and very singular understanding of one shared endpoint for the world. Whereas little d development would be a range of ideas about the world's futures in plural. There are multiple possibilities there, and that's where we kind begin to explore the ideas of plurality and multiplicity of possible futures that could manifest in development as well as in education and where it no longer defined by the singular, linear, universally defined ideas. And we talk about these as not just simply utopian ideas, that they are, these are practices that are already there in practice in different communities. And we talk about, for example, Zapatista, you know, the movement where, you know, the self-organized processes and ways of educating and bringing ideas of health and governance systems and offering alternative ways of living where there's communal decision-making is et cetera, and ideas of buen vivir as well. So we talk about these different examples in the book in, I think chapter 5 is we talk about these examples of plurality and multiplicity of different possible futures bringing in, you know, knowledge and lived experiences of different marginalized groups, right? Like, and where we can begin to appreciate knowledge-making practices of the indigenous communities or Or women, and one of the examples that we talk about is Kudumbashree, where women's sociality of talking to each other or being with each other, which would otherwise be dismissed as gossiping or just, you know, wasting time, could be a way of connecting and keeping the communities together. And how that could be a mode of governance in different ways and how one of the Indian states has actually like built on that to build governance models. So we try to really understand these as very practical possibilities where multiple ways of being in the world can be brought together, and it may not always be contradictory, and that, that there is a possibility of understanding and working with this kind of plurality and multiplicity of possible futures.

That's amazing. Peter, did you wanna come in on that?

I'll just, I think Uma covered it really well. I'll just, a small point about this very idea of the, of the imaginary. Which, you know, we tend to use when we speak about imaginaries to refer to a particular vision of the future, you know, the Western imaginary, the capitalist imaginary, and so on. We try to complicate that in the book as well by arguing that many imaginaries actually are hybrid. In fact, they consist of a kind of tapestry of ideas. And that also applies to, you know, some of these Western ways of, of thinking about the world, you know, even within the sort of capital D development establishment, there is actually a range of ideas, a range of motivations, a range of things that people are doing. It's not entirely homogeneous either. So we try to suggest that in, in, in some ways this kind of simplified way of thinking about imaginaries of the future, you know, gets in the way of some of this complexity and that these sort of binary ways of thinking about it are not very helpful.

Yeah. Interesting. Could you just say a little bit? Do you mean they get in the way because they are then argued over as which one is kind of most desirable or most right, you know, and, and remove space for the actual lived nuances of how people actually are? If you could say a little bit more about that.

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think, yeah, what I was getting at was that oftentimes when these conversations become polarized, you know, people sort of dig trenches and you, you end up having these intellectual fights over, you know, what certain words mean, over concepts, over abstract ideas. And that then sometimes misses the point, including the fact that most of the reality, the actual reality on the ground is not quite so black and white. And, you know, this is also why in the book we are not arguing for getting rid of the concept of development entirely. I recently gave a talk or I was being interviewed at a literary festival here in London about the book. And one of the questions from the audience was whether it wouldn't be better to simply just replace the word development with something like thriving or well-being, something that doesn't have that kind of colonial baggage. And my answer was that actually there is this accumulation of knowledge and understanding in the development world, in the development sector, in the development industry, not all of which is bad. You know, there are many, many people out there who are well-intentioned, who are trying to do good work. Within deeply flawed systems and structures. In the book, we talk about how development, just like anything else human, is the outcome of these intertwining forces of wisdom and ignorance. So yes, there is ignorance, and there's a vast literature that points out that ignorance, but there is also some wisdom, and there is also some well-intentioned effort. So I think there is value in recognizing that there are elements of truth on all sides of the debate, which is not to say that the sides of the debate are equivalent, They certainly are not, but just recognizing that there is value in listening, you know, to what people have to say coming from all these different perspectives.

Yeah, no, thank you. I really appreciate that. And it, I mean, it really speaks, I think, to, I picked up the first quote that you have in the book, which I love, and Arundhati Roy, I love as an author anyway, but you use that as the opening quote of the book. And I think that really speaks to that. The potential for real polarization of the conversation. She says, I'm not an anti-development junkie, nor a proselytizer for the eternal upholding of custom and tradition. So it's like if you're anti-development, you therefore must be saying, well, you know, all of this wisdom that's come up through custom and tradition is wholly wonderful and we should just stick with that. There's just so many traps, binary traps, aren't there, in those kinds of conversations, as you say. It's much messier than that. And, but, but also just to reflect, so interesting how you could almost replace the word development in a lot of what you just said with education or schooling. You know, the same conversations are happening. It's like, should we actually abandon the, the concept of schooling or education because it's so entangled and trapped in the, the colonial project, et cetera. But actually, like you say, there's a lot of accumulated wisdom if we can listen well and see through some of the, yeah, the complexities that show up in that. But just to, maybe finally, if I could come to that idea of attentive listening and you talk about the ethic of care. And I think again, that just shows up in many, many conversations that I have. And so perhaps Uma, could you say a little bit about that idea of listening and care?

Sure. Yeah. In the, in the book, we propose like 5 ingredients of dialogue but action and how we might be able to reimagined development in different ways. And one of the things that we talk about is attentive listening and caring as a more political act as well. And this is broadly based on the idea that, you know, when we work with others, we need to move away from understanding it as intervention upon others, right? It's more of a relational and ethical engagement. And attentive listening in that way, you know, resists this kind of extractive logics where We are just trying to get information, listening as only a way of getting information so that we can develop these projects or have these targets and program designs, but actually really trying to pay attention to the silencing that would take place due to race or gender or caste or ethnicity or geographical locations or other aspects of human identity. And that's what we kind of try to, you know, get to by using this concept of attentive listening. And this allows us to really sit with the complexity of human lives and the contradictions and the silence and without rushing to really fix or translate it or resolve these problems in different ways. And that's where we feel that, and listening in a way sounds very simplistic. It is a very, in a development, logics of development, development practice, it sounds like a very simplistic approach, but we feel that it's in that simplicity, you know, attentive listening brings these kind of profoundly transformative acts. Because in practice it is really about staying with this kind of discomfort of maybe fully not understanding the stories or the problems or the marginalized voices and not reaching to these premature conclusions or reaching to these policy timelines. And that's where we feel that care as a practice, it's not just an affective concept, but also a political act. And we are trying to really understand care as more going beyond these feminine or familial obligations of care, like where women are caring for each other or female, you know, the care idea of care is only within families, but also a contract between state and citizens, between different actors and really trying to understand and appreciate the interdependence and the vulnerability that comes with it. And here we are, I mean, we draw upon examples of social welfare programs and creating these kind of safety nets that would signal towards policies that prioritize mutual responsibility rather than these kind of neoliberal logics of individualization. And that's where we feel that both attentive listening and care could challenge these dominant ideas of development and educational paradigms that value efficiency and meeting targets, but really valuing these practices of being human and understanding each other and taking seriously different kinds of world in which people might inhabit.

Habit.

Yeah, I mean, it's a courageous act, right? I mean, it feels very, feels very far away from— look at the news in Israel and Iran bombing the hell out of each other, or, you know, taking a stance of care feels like a really political act at this point, very deeply. Yeah, it also feels quite connected to the idea of radical humility, Peter. I don't know, they feel adjacent as concepts.

Yeah, so I mean, in, in the final chapter on radical humility, we, we sort of put together this sort of four legs of radical humility where we talk about post-growth alternatives, we talk about collective wisdom, we talk about deep time, and we talk about agonism. So, you know, I, we probably don't have time to go into all of those, but perhaps, you know, if the listeners would like to find out more that they can read about it in that final chapter. But yes, I think these things are all, are all connected. You know, to my mind, even just thinking about that expression, attentive listening, where You know, your attention is on the person who's speaking. When you look at development practice, sort of mainstream development practice nowadays, there are all kinds of ways in which listening gets invoked. There are all kinds of participatory assessments, participatory methods for understanding, you know, how people on the ground think about things, feel about things. But that's not where the attention lies. The attention lies on, you know, the larger project. Often that whichever organization is trying to pursue, you know, is basically using those assessments or those tools to support. So the attention is not actually on the people who are speaking, but rather those voices often get co-opted in the name of some kind of a pre-decided agenda where maybe there's a little bit of space to tweak things here and there, but fundamentally the agenda is a given. Whereas if you shift the attention actually to the people who are speaking, then you have to ask, you know, what is the agenda in the first place? Which is a form of radical humility, is to actually acknowledge that we may not know what the agenda is. We have to define the agenda, you know, in the first place. I think that's quite a lot of courage and self-reflection to take that step.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's as Uma was talking about, that you get stuck in the extractive, cuz you know, the lived experience that you're harvesting to coin a phrase, or, you know, these, these kind of very extractive verbs we use for the kind of research process or whatever. There's, yeah, lots of traps there. But I wonder, I mean, just, I kind of don't want to finish, but without mentioning Deep Time, just because that really stuck out to me as a really interesting, I wonder whether what you just said there, Peter, about getting some perspective somehow on the task that you're involved in, and maybe you're sitting with someone and you're doing, you're doing some research, you're doing ethnography, whatever, and you're, but you're not really present because you are thinking about your what you're gonna write with this, or the conclusions you're drawing, or as you said, you get caught in this project that you're involved in. But actually the more radically humble move is to really be present and attentive to that person. And I wondered whether situating it within a concept of deep time, which in a way just sounds like it's from a different conversation even when I say it, but it, it's somehow it really puts everything in perspective, right? Is it like if we're seeing things in a broader frame, maybe it puts into perspective the task that we're doing and then it helps us to be more present. So I don't know, I'm kind of answering my own question there, but I just wondered if you could say just a little bit about why deep time is important when we, if we're thinking about reimagining development.

Sure. So I think the, the way the book engages with the concept of deep time is actually quite different from how a lot of the other existing literature uses or discusses that. That concept. You know, it is, it is an idea which often gets invoked in fields like geology, you know, where we're thinking in, you know, millions, hundreds of millions of years. It's also an idea that some of the futurists in places like Silicon Valley have, have invoked to justify, you know, some of, some of their claims about some of the sacrifices that we need to be making in the present, you know, to enable these sort of highly utopian faraway futures, you know, where human beings may no longer exist, but we have all, you know, we've achieved a singularity and we have uploaded our consciousness into the computer, you know, that, that sort of thing. So the, the book doesn't do either of those things. It's instead using deep time more as a metaphor to basically challenge this short-termism of much of the mainstream development thinking. And simply by asking the question of how do these, these efforts, you know, what is the relevance? What is the significance, the meaning of these efforts that we are engaged in during our lifetimes to the world before we were born and the world after we die. In other words, where does this piece of the puzzle that we are currently working on fit in that larger picture? And even just by asking that question, you know, so we are not necessarily going all the way to sort of deep time lenses, you know, theoretical lenses, but we are, we're moving a little bit along that continuum a bit further towards deep time. And it then forces us to think about a development effort or a development project, not as something that is defined simply by, You know, this is the number of years for which it is funded, you know, and we've got this framework of, you know, 3, 4, 5 years and we're trying to achieve something and we have to prove that we've achieved something in that, in that amount of time. But, you know, really asking this question of where does this fit in the larger scheme of things? And I think that is one entry point into radical humility. And also recognizing that sometimes some of these grand claims that we make about the work that we do are, you know, greatly exaggerated and that sometimes actually kind of lowering the ambition actually in some ways is what is needed.

Yeah. Fascinating. It's such an interesting counter-narrative, right? We want to lower the ambition of our young people that we, I mean, we, all the narratives are exactly the opposite, right? Reach for the stars and all of those things. It's a difficult narrative to hold in, yeah, in educational circles. Interesting. I like it. Perhaps we could just finish. I don't know if there's any other final reflections you had or if is there any other ways other than reading the book? Obviously we'd invite everybody to go and read the book, but any other ways that you might kind of like people to engage with the work or the ideas or think about them in their own lives or work?

It'd be great if people are able to read the book and see the, the, the ideas and examples that we discuss there. Yeah, I mean, what we try to do in the book, as Peter mentioned earlier, is that really not rejecting the idea of development. Yes, of Of course, we talk about colonial dominance as part of the development's DNA, and, but we also want to emphasize, and what we talk about in the book, is that hope for the better future and solidarity for those less fortunate from the others, that that is also an idea of development, right? And we have to really embrace these possibly contradictory ideas of development and really understand the competing ideas and agendas that are the idea and practice of development brings forward. And I think that's what we are trying to do in this book and really trying to question and critically approach the way development is understood and practiced today, but also find ways in which we can reimagine it and make it something that is relevant for the current crises and the context that we are living in so that we draw on these kind of range of knowledge that development practice and development literature has accumulated, but also try to build on it and see how we can take this forward.

Great. And once again, I mean, it feels like you could almost replace the word development with education there in, in all the conversations I have on the podcast and, and that going on around reimagining and transforming education as well. And I was happy to see, um, Manish Jain and Kirt Bista, you quote in the book in that final chapter, who are both previous guests on this podcast. So It's nice to be in this same, same community exploring these same ideas. So, Mary, thank you so much for your time and really happy to be able to have this conversation with you.

Thank you so much, Tim.

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