Hikaru Komatsu (Associate Professor, IPCS)

We, National Taiwan University (NTU) scholars and students, often have opportunities for international exchange. Through international exchange, are we just exchanging knowledge? In actuality, we are often reproducing and reinforcing the current, Euro-centric knowledge-production culture.

We can, however, use the same opportunity to shift the Euro-centric knowledge-production culture. This article introduces such an attempt to shift the existing culture through the IPCS's participation in Global Association Master's in Development Practice (MDP). The primary purpose of MDP is to prepare students to identify and address the challenges of international development (Figure 1).

Once I started participating in MDP last year, I immediately found the Euro-centric (particularly Ameri-centric) nature of the program. All the meetings were held outside my working hours (9 am – 5 pm). Some were held at midnight in Taiwan time. Additionally, MDP put no effort to make their program multilingual. These are surprising, considering that this program is entitled "Global Association" rather than "American Association" and that MDP currently emphasizes decolonization of development.

I had wanted to shift this Euro-centric, colonial culture of MDP. Recently, I had a good opportunity: I was asked to deliver a talk in a MDP session that focused on bridging theory and practice in international development.

To highlight the Euro-centric and colonial culture of MDP, I started my talk with the introduction of development practice in a World Bank project in Cambodia that I had served as an advisor (Figure 2). This project aimed to improve research and education capacity of major public universities.

I witnessed that Cambodian university professors canceled all their prior appointments once the World Bank team called for a meeting. I also witnessed that the World Bank team always requested Cambodian professors to write and speak in English. This is ridiculous. If all the Cambodian professors had sufficient time and good English writing skills, they would not need the assistance of the World Bank in the first place.

After introducing the coloniality of the World Bank project in Cambodia, I then moved the focus from Cambodia to MDP. Specifically, I asked the audience to contemplate the reasons why NTU professors and students needed to get up at midnight for MDP meetings and why we were always expected to speak English.

In the subsequent Q&A session, no question was raised from the audience. This implies that the audience had rarely thought about the coloniality of MDP.

Unveiling coloniality of MDP is not comfortable for both the speaker and audience. However, I believe that this is one major role that the IPCS/NTU should play in MDP. The IPCS is arguably the most active participant from non-western countries in MDP. We are more sensible about the coloniality than western participants in MDP. If someone would not play this role, MDP would continue reproducing and reinforcing coloniality of international development.

I believe that most readers of this article are scientists and have few opportunities to engage with international development. But you are not necessarily unrelated to the issue of coloniality. Even when you are exchanging purely scientific knowledge in an academic conference, you are simultaneously reproducing and reinforcing the worldview of modern science (Komatsu & Rappleye, 2017; Komatsu et al., 2019). Many humanity scholars have long suggested that the worldview of modern science, which traces its roots back to Christianity, is one major cause of our environmental crisis (White, 1967: Plumwood, 1993). Don't you think you should contemplate what you are doing through your international exchange?

References

1. Komatsu & Rappleye (2017) Incongruity between scientific knowledge and ordinary perceptions of nature: An ontological perspective for forest hydrology in Japan. Journal of Forest Research 22, 75-82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13416979.2017.1283977.

2. Komatsu et al. (2019) Culture and the independent self: obstacles to environmental sustainability? Anthropocene 26, 100198. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2019.100198.

3. White (1967) The historical roots of our ecologic crisis. Science 155(3767), 1203-1207. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.155.3767.1203.

4. Plumwood (1993) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York: Routledge.