Beyond the Traditional Framework

This blog post is part of the symposium “The Rooms We Wanted: What a Year of Decolonisation Seminars Revealed about a Law School”, reflecting on the Decolonisation Seminar Series at the University of Edinburgh.

What does working with knowledge that does not fit neatly into existing frameworks look like in form, praxis and substance? We put this question to Dr Rohini Sen. Her response begins by unsettling the question itself, asking what we mean by knowledge and who decides what is considered knowledge. Building on this, she then draws on instances from her own work where she has relied on forms of knowing that do not fit neatly into academic writing.

Dr Rohini Sen is an Associate Professor at Jindal Global Law School, OP Jindal Global University, working at the intersection of law and the humanities. She teaches and researches critical approaches to international law, critical pedagogy, and queer, feminist, decolonial and postcolonial thought.

Together with Dr Ahmed Raza Memon, Dr Rohini Sen spoke at the Decolonial Research and Methodologies Seminar Series on finding a scholarly voice within the dominant frameworks of international law, working across disciplines, and engaging forms of knowledge that resist translation into conventional academic structures.

Dr Rohini Sen:

Any set of reflections on questions of method and methodology require a certain degree of paring back the scope of our enquiry to something elemental, if not preconscious in some ways. Reflections on ways of working with knowledge that doesn’t fit neatly into existing frameworks call for a notional framing before we delve into its praxis and material aspects. In this instance – what does it really mean to work with other forms of knowledge in conceptual terms? Consequently, what IS knowledge? How do we decide what counts as knowledge? Where are our understandings of such things coming from? The aim here is not to answer these questions in great detail, but to be aware of their presence in our exploration of methods and approaches beyond western canons and prescriptions. A consistent, critical sense of awareness of co-extant cosmologies and epistemologies, even if we are unable to fully comprehend or excavate them is perhaps the most important methodological step to be made in this direction.

A Necessary Caveat

In addition to this methodological consciousness, an important caveat and observation becomes necessary about decolonial thoughts, non-traditional forms of knowledge, other epistemologies and their place in research and methods. There are two intersecting apprehensions that seem to follow conversations on such approaches. First, is the well-placed appropriation often done in the name of critical approaches and decolonial thinking. This is particularly observed in discourses on sovereignty and culture, where critical thinking is replaced with nativist tendencies. This, however, is the easier challenge to academically circumvent given that such forms of appropriation rarely meet the yardstick for self-reflexive and rigorous research. I say academically because materially, the consequences of this kind of research are damning, and I will return to this specific impact towards the end of this reflection. The second apprehension often arises from the first, but is perhaps the more complex and interesting issue in the context of doing research. Terms such as decolonial thinking, non-western and non-traditional forms of knowledge also seem to generate certain kinds of scepticism in mainstream academic circles outside of Global North institutions. These are in part a response to academic appropriation of decolonial thought and in part a reaction to an offering of methodological arrays that seem to challenge Western notions and inheritances of what constitutes rigour, what requires empiricism, and what one can take seriously. Such forms of scepticism are not limited to mainstream Global north academic circles, but are equally present in Global South academia where theories and methods are a) grounded in disciplinary inheritances and b) rigour becomes a question of neo formalism, despite a critical gaze. To be clear, the apprehension arises at the stage of mere mention of these terms and not when one allows for textured reading of such work. But this pre-emptive impression is often sufficient to discourage serious engagement with such knowledge forms and praxis, leaving them to be caricatured reductively or left to be appropriated. Much like our preconscious formulation of the core question in the previous paragraph, we are to simply be aware of these apprehensions as they exist in different disciplinary and academic spaces. Knowing these help us both identify the potential of non-traditional knowledge forms in mitigating such claims and ways of presenting them in reluctant and hostile academic terrains.

These two announcements being made, let me attempt to speak of non-traditional knowledge forms and their place in my research – in this instance, international legal research. The cosmologies and forms of knowledge that don’t fit neatly into existing frameworks are vast, porous and often difficult to speak of in academic terms. Some are more proximate to being made legible in academic research while others, based on who is doing the defining, are relegated to the status of metaphysical if not mystical! Given the constraints and challenges that usually accompany translating such untranslatable processes, I will limit myself to two instances where I have relied on and integrated non-traditional forms of knowledge in my work. One instance follows a method that is increasingly more legible in international legal research while the other, is a more demanding articulation.

From My Own Experience

In the course of my doctoral work, I took a close, empirical look at the ways in which Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) is taught across different jurisdiction with a focus on the notion of ‘critical’ as understood by such scholars and teachers. My work involved interviews, ethnography and studying a ‘field’ that I both constructed as much as I squarely belonged to it. In the course of my analysis of how scholars performed critique in the classroom, what formed the fulcrum of my observation were unspoken Global South ‘cultural cues’ that could be experienced and intuited but not methodologically inherited from anywhere. The knowledge I relied on was experiential insight, professional insight and observational categories that were familiar to me by virtue of who I was and what I did. Now, while feminists have long emphasized the personal as epistemological alongside political what I was doing here was a little more than espousing my feminist politics. I was bringing insights and experiences into my analytical frame that I and very few like me had access to. This insight allowed me to spotlight the many ways in which Global South teachers foregrounded, played and drew from their racial-ethnic-gendered identities in classrooms (in sharp contrast to their Global North counterparts).

What I am alluding to goes beyond conventions of observation, coding and data analysis even as these were squarely present as methods I adopted. My conceptual framing came from things I have experienced but not quite articulated as a Global South scholar teaching TWAIL; it came from my particular experience of teaching in Global South institutions and working with the shadows of epistemic inferiority that was constantly projected on work that came from my side of the world; it came from recognising temporal lag to resources we faced in this part of the world even as we were brimming with ideas; it came from recognising how much of our knowledge (including about international law) came in intangible, unquantifiable forms such as experiencing hegemony, navigating complex, dynamic roles in modernity, exchanging stories, teaching in classrooms and, sharing unwritten moments of solidarity in academic spaces where we were forced to inhabit assigned intellectual boxes. Equally, it came from recognising the hybrid that people like me were, traversing these worlds with ease and difficulty alike. I drew from my body’s failure to survive in difficult moments of epistemic violence as much as I did from my own markers of caste and class privilege, including of being able to speak English fluidly. I presented much of these insights into legible forms of academic analysis, chapters and texts. However, I also made explicit the many ways in which what was available to me as knowledge was profoundly experiential in ways that are not just rooted in the articulation of personal in feminist politics. It was the legacy of a form of shared history which followed me and those like me into institutional spaces. The nature of my research allowed me to accommodate this into a traditionally recognised genre of PhD writing but not without pushing some of its expected forms and formats.

The Practices I Live By

My second example is challenging to conceptualise, let alone articulate. However, I’d be remiss to not mention it in a reflection of working with sources of knowledge that refuse to yield to simplistic demands of rigour and empiricism. My work on Feminisms and Critical Feminist Approaches to International Law – written and spoken rely heavily on my engagement with contemplative traditions and thoughts as ways of living. In tandem with my academic journey, I am a long-standing practitioner of Tai Chi, somatic work, Jungian psychoanalysis and contemplative critical thinking. I use the world contemplative here to cover the vast traditions of philosophical and metaphysical enquiries that ground our expansive sense of selves into the intellectual framework of what may be called post secular critique. These daily practices have sharpened my ability to make nuanced academic arguments on ways of imagining law(s), understanding the complex, embodied and fragmented feminist subject; recognising the limits of textual knowledge; liberating critique from despair and agitation and, repurposing it into curiosity, joy and discipline. These contemplative traditions have allowed me to reestablish a meaningful relationship with feminisms and critique as continuous praxis and not a set of diffused feelings or mere self-identification. They have turned me to inner work that take keen account of insight, feeling and being as it does of the shadows of oppression, power, exploitation, death and other unspeakable horrors we witness every day. Some of these make their way into my written work when I find myself in conversation with the brilliant work of Vasuki Nesiah where she asks us to learn to reframe the terms of our debates and examine the ground beneath our feet as those that are given to us, preformed. Taking her invitation seriously, I find myself advancing her complex analysis of revisiting the definition of the terms religious and secular to questions of myriad forms postcolonial feminist conduct and agencies in the Global South. In less tangible forms, such engagements with these contemplative domains of knowledge show up as modes of carefully problematising scholarship and asking better questions; allowing for light and shadow to exist simultaneously in my work and recognising that misery is the least critical response to the darkness of/in the world. Stepping into these life worlds and cosmologies has made me alive to different ways of doing critical intellectual and academic work. These have become recurrent praxis that may or may not find their way into neat academic forms but, it is impossible to engage with them and not find oneself unmade continually in the course of one’s research.

Conclusion

So, I come back to the question of – where does one put these things that one becomes aware of when they cannot be accommodated into one’s written work? My contingent answer: they become profound parts of you informing everything from the way you look at the world to how might you ask more meaningful research questions. And that is often the most durable bequest in one’s intellectual and academic journeys ahead.