Episode 4: Themrise Khan on White Saviorism in International Development

In this episode of the Global Health Politics Podcast, Joseph Harris sits down with Themrise Khan, a Pakistan-based development professional. They talk about Khan and her colleague's Kanakulya Dickson and Maike Sondarjee's groundbreaking new edited volume, White Saviorism in International Development: Theories, Practices, and Lived Experiences, and its impact on the field of global health and international development. 

Transcript

Global Health Politics Podcast

Episode 4: Themrise Khan on White Saviorism in International Development

SPEAKERS

Joseph Harris, Themrise Khan

Joseph Harris  00:00

Welcome to the Global Health Politics Podcast, where we go beyond the articles and books and have real intimate conversations with people working in the field of global health today. I'm your host. JOSEPH HARRIS, Today I'm really pleased to be here with Themrise Khan. Ms. Khan is a Pakistan-based international development professional who has worked in the field of international development for more than 25 years, conducting research on international development, social policy, aid effectiveness, gender and global migration. She received her Master's in Development Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She recently co-edited the edited volume, White Saviorism in International Development: Theories, Practices and Lived Experiences, with Kanakulya Dixon and Maike Sonderjee. Welcome to the podcast.

Themrise Khan  01:06

Thank you, Joseph. It's good to be here.

Joseph Harris  01:08

You've been working in the field of international development for a while now. What drew you to the field? 

Themrise Khan  01:12

Initially, I just ended up having a year free before applying for universities, and I got an internship. I  began working voluntarily with one of the most prominent women's rights organizations in Pakistan. And that was just, that was the beginning. They were an NGO that had been at the forefront of the women's rights movement in Pakistan. So I started with them just doing newspaper clippings and pasting them into these big scrapbooks on issues of violence against women and legislation regarding women, etc. And I just got more and more immersed into the field when I worked with them, and there was another NGO in the same building. Gradually I moved to work with them. They were an environmental NGO, and then I never looked back since then.

Joseph Harris  02:07

What important experiences have shaped and informed your understanding of the field of international development? 

Themrise Khan  02:15

I don't think there's just one. I think there's so many, and it's hard to sort of even list them all. I think when I look back on my career, and I'm not a working practitioner in the field of international development anymore, I'm more of an analyst and writer. I guess an experience to share now looking back, I think one of the biggest insights was that there is a major disconnect between the world of international development and the world of development, national development, let's put it that way. So, the countries that receive money for the purpose of development are very different from the countries that provide that money. There is a massive disconnect. And I think that's the thing that I experienced during my career, in the later years of my career, as I got more and more involved in the sector and with various donors and INGOs, and eventually, what led me to leave the sector, because the disconnect was just growing wider and wider and wider. And I think that's why we can talk about the failure of aid, rather than, you know, it being a success story. 

Joseph Harris  03:37

Your recent work has taken up issues of race, decolonization, white saviorism and North-South power imbalances in development, which you just discussed. Can you see a bit more about what led you specifically to want to write about these particular issues?

Themrise Khan  03:56

Well, race has always been an issue I've been fascinated with coming from a primarily homogeneous country like Pakistan, where we're more ethnically divided along ethnic lines than we are along racial lines. I was also an immigrant to North America, so a brown South Asian immigrant to North America, and I had also observed a lot about race when I was a student there as well, and then when I became an immigrant, I had to face a lot as well, which came as a shock to me because observing it from a distance as a student or as a visitor, and then having to actually experience it as somebody who wanted to make the North their home was a bit of an eye opener for me, and so that got me more and more interested to learn more about race and to write more about it. I do not claim to have any major expertise in the area whatsoever, but I think a lot of my personal experiences have fed into my writing about it. Also, the aid sector is now becoming more and more vocal about it because that did sort of come across during my career as well, in terms of how the behavior of Northern donors and INGO people towards people like myself and people of my country was also an indicator of racial relations. So that's what really got me interested in that part of my work. And I do a lot of work on migration as well, immigration policy and labor migration, and that has a very important racial component to it. White saviorism was something that I actually never, ever thought about at all, snd it is credit to my co-editor who brought the issue to me, and it just hit me then, the way she explained it, how the idea of white saviorism, which has always been around, but as practitioners, we never actually delve into it whatsoever. So when she framed it that way, it was like, my god, this is exactly what it is. And so that was a fascinating topic for me as well, that I never actually looked at all the international donors as white saviors. I just looked at them as people who were, you know, probably doing the right thing. Actually, they were not. So that is how we decided to delve into this topic in more depth and detail because it is a very important component of international development and aid.

Joseph Harris  06:31

White Saviorism in International Development has really helped to spark a powerful conversation in international development circles and global health circles about the role of race and racism in international development. For our audience members who may not know the term, can you share a bit about what white saviorism means and why it's such an important idea for us to be thinking about?

Themrise Khan  06:56

The White Savior Industrial Complex was basically an article written by the Nigerian American author Tehu Cole in a 2012 article in The Atlantic. And that was a very African-centered article that focused on a very particular issue, but it basically highlighted thow everybody from white countries were rushing to Africa to save, quote, unquote, the, you know, both starving and the savage black Africans, right? That's how it originated. And then it goes way back into the colonial era, when white Christian missionaries would come to South Asia, East Asia and Africa and try to convert people to Christianity, and that's how conceptually the idea emanated many, many, many, many years ago. In terms of context of aid, we defined it as more of a state of mind, and so we didn't use the term White Savior Complex. We use the term, White Saviorism, as it is a mental state of mind where white northern people consider themselves to be much more able to help, assist, or save those who are not and this mindset really is handed down from generations, and it has to do with power. A lot of it has to do with colonial power, and the idea that everybody who was non-white and lived in non-white parts of the world were not able to manage themselves, and they couldn't survive without white acculturation, white financing, white development, etc, etc. So that's how we defined it, and that's how we put it to all our various contributors to unpack based on their own experiences in the sector. 

Joseph Harris  09:00

Olivia Lasso and Wendy Amatoba write in the forward of your book that the White Savior Industrial Complex is an outcome of racial capitalism that deviates from any efforts aimed at actualizing justice to creating racialized profit economies. Can you say a bit more about how this relates to the notion of white saviorism and global north south imbalances, and just sort of unpack this for our audience? 

Themrise Khan  09:29

Sure. I mean, that's a fantastic forward written by the organization No White Saviors, based in Uganda, and in the global aid industry, and let me frame it in that context because that's what the book is about as well, is that there is this perception, and it's a post-World War Two, post-colonial perception that people in less marginalized countries more marginalized countries, rather than. Are unable to develop the capacity to manage their own development, whatever that might be, and so the only way to do that is for the more progressive, the more obviously, the richer, the freer white community are the only ones who can do that for them. The way they do that for them post-World War Two has been through various forms of aid. So that has that includes both the development aid that we see, humanitarian aid that we see, as well as the more hard aid sectors of what the IMF provides in terms of loans to countries, and so that is the mechanism by which the Global North claims that it is going to create equality and racial justice in the Global South. What happens is the complete opposite because the control, not just of the financial aspect of that development, but also of the conceptual aspect and the practical aspect of that development is still in the hands of the Global North, and they dictate what needs to happen, how it will happen, when it will happen. And with that, you basically render the recipient of that aid almost powerless. They are unable to speak up because they know that their existence is tied to the money that is coming from a much more powerful source, and they gradually accept whatever terms and conditions are laid out towards them to receive that money, and that is how we actually don't get to the root of injustice, whatever injustice we're talking about. And that comes back to my own observation of that disconnect between how development aid is designed and institutionalized and implemented by the Global North and the Global South. It doesn't touch on the actual aspects of justice that we need to be talking about. It's very superficial. And because we are tied to that aid in different forms, whether by employment or whether by loans or whether by a debt, it is very difficult for us to actually use that aid for its actual purpose of change. And that's how change in our countries in many ways is is subverted or it is frozen. We're unable to move forward beyond that cycle of debt, beyond that cycle of global development, that we have also ourselves agreed to accept, so that is how I would unpack that observation, by No White Saviors.

Joseph Harris  12:49

In my reading of this, there's also a very exploitative element of this as well. Right? 

Themrise Khan  12:55

Absolutely, absolutely. The exploitative element is our own labor. For instance, I'll give you an example. I give this example again and again. So it might sound very repetitive, but it is something that has struck me a lot. So I used to do a lot of program and project evaluations for donors in Pakistan, and I was always the national consultant the evaluation was done. And we have an excellent chapter on the "white gaze" and evaluation in our book as well, which details this. But my own personal experience also echoes this in the sense it used to be the white consultants coming from whatever donor country it was would actually do the evaluation, and the national evaluator, which would be me or another one of my colleagues or counterparts, would end up being a glorified tour guide or translator in this, instead of being an active and equal participant. So even though I learned a lot, even though I got along very well with all those international teams, all my observations about the programming and about the cultural and social and economic aspects of the communities, including how the project may or may not be impacting on them, never actually would get into the actual final evaluation. It was very frustrating because not only were you not an equal participant in this, you just realized that the approach is so doctored and pre-decided by the donors that there's no point even having me on the team if you're not even going to listen to somebody. And I don't even represent most of the communities we'd go to, right? I'm an urban, privileged brown woman from the city, and we would go into tiny remote villages or towns, and I certainly don't represent the women there or the communities, yet I had some understanding, at least of my own people. But that never used to translate into practice. And so that's, I think, a very good example of how the systemis so completely pre-managed and pre-orchestrated from the donors' end, from the Global North end, that we have never really been able to have our say in how we see our own development. 

Joseph Harris  15:14

You talk in the book, and when I say "you," I really should say you and your co-authors talk in the book about many of these different kinds of inequalities that really become so stark on the ground when people are doing this kind of work, from the different kinds of transportation that, for example, white consultants use. You talk about these white SUVs, to quote, local transportation, and also the challenges, the really knotty challenges, as you mentioned just now, about being a consultant from a country, but one who occupies a very different positionality than people in a community that is, you know, part of a quote target population.

Themrise Khan  15:53

Yes, exactly. I mean, transport is one of our contributor's example that he gave in his contribution in the book. And I personally experienced this myself. I mean, I've had the privilege of being, you know, a passenger in those massive white UN Land Rovers and Land Cruisers, right? But it was only most of the time when I was accompanying a white person, a donor, either a consultant who was visiting or somebody from, you know, the institution themselves, and most of the other work that I would do for them, I would do myself. I would do it either in, you know, my own transport, or in a taxi. I was never seen as somebody inclusive, as somebody who is part of this local system. And it was later on, at that point in time when I during my career, a lot of this didn't hit me. I was on a high, working in the sector, right? I was at the peak of my career. I was getting contracts left, right, and center, from every single donor, international, multilateral, bilateral, you name it. I was never short of work. I was visiting from seminars and conferences to field work. So it really gives you a high. And I think that's one of the dangers of this field. You feel like you're on par with them when you're on such a high right? When you are traveling with them, socializing with them, having meetings with them, but in the background, you realize you're actually not, because you're not making those decisions, and neither are partners. I mean, I was just an independent consultant, you know? I was one person, where all the Pakistani NGOs who were receiving funding, or who were, you know, equal partners, or government departments. I've worked with a number of Pakistani government departments and my counterparts there, even they, to a certain extent, now that I look back on it, were not seen as equals. You know, I mean, the Pakistan Government is always seen as incompetent by everyone, right? And, of course, it was, but that gives nobody the right to undermine it, so now all these elements are coming back to me because at that point in time you really don't pick up on them. You pick up on them when the frustration starts setting in that you realize everything that you're doing is actually not leading to anything positive. It's just you're going around in circles. There's no change in women's empowerment. There's no change in parliamentary legislation. There's no change in fiscal reform. There's no change in primary education or girls' education or health. A lot of us now are feeling that. I felt that a few years ago after being in the field for in my career for 25 years. There are people who started five years ago in the sector, and they're already feeling it because I think we've come to that point globally as well, where the world is a completely different place. We are a very unstable society globally. So that, I think, is being picked up more and more, and I think that's a positive thing. 

Joseph Harris  19:12

So there is a kind of reckoning that it sounds like is coming. 

Themrise Khan  19:16

I hope so. I'm not keeping my fingers crossed. I'm not very hopeful about it because this requires a massive, massive shift. You know, it requires a governmental policy shift, which is, I don't even know if that's going to happen given geopolitical relations around the world, but definitely, I think many individuals are feeling the lack of change. They're feeling the disappointment. But again, the question is: so what do we do? What can we do? And I think that's where we are at now.

Joseph Harris  19:56

And you talk in the book, and your colleagues talk in the book about how this moment of racial reckoning in the US following the murder of George Floyd is sort of implicated in this broader experience. Is there anything you want to say about that?

Themrise Khan  20:10

I don't really want to speak to that very much because I think that is something that is quite specific to the European and the North American movement, which is fantastic, but what it did do was trigger a more global movement about racism, and that filtered into the international development sector as well, so that's where that connection lies. Now, how the international development sector is taking that on is a completely different story altogether. There's a lot more vocalism on the issue of race and inequality in the sector, but a lot of it is also falling on...a lot of it is lip service, and a lot of it is also falling on deaf ears. I mean, racism is something the world has faced for generations and centuries. It's not just something where you snap your fingers, and it's going to disappear. Also, it exists everywhere. And my argument is it exists everywhere ,and it exists everywhere differently. It exists in Pakistan as well, and our context of racial discrimination is very different from the context of racial discrimination, let's say, in the USA.

Joseph Harris  21:25

Earlier you mentioned this chapter on evaluation in the book. It was called "Evaluation of the White Gaze in International Development" by Sadaf Shallwani and Shamma Dossa. It's a particularly powerful chapter in the book that explores the role that evaluation plays, both in reinforcing white saviorism, but also white supremacy more broadly. My question to you is: is decolonial evaluation possible? What would that look like?

Themrise Khan  21:54

That's a good question. As an evaluator myself for part of my career, what I can say about evaluation is that it is itself a very wide construct. We are still not clear about why evaluation needs to be done. For instance, like I understand, obviously theoretically, why it should be done, but who said it has to be done the way it is? So if you look at evaluation in international development. It's a one-stop shop, so we are currently...have been using the OECD model of evaluation, which has five components to it, and that's the evaluation I learned how to do. And as far as I know, I think that's still in use, although OECD has tried to revise and update its criteria years ago, but by and large, we're still using the same model of evaluation. So firstly, we have to question ourselves, why are we doing that? Who decided that this was the only model of evaluation that we have to do in this sector? And I think once we answer that question, we'll be able to answer your second question about, can we decolonize evaluation more than it is? I would say we need to question the idea of evaluation firstly. Secondly, we need to ask who is evaluating whom and why? And why can't the evaluated evaluate the donor? These are questions that nobody ever asks. When we used to go into the field with the evaluators, the international white evaluators, who used their white gaze, they were questioning communities as to how has this project benefited you? And the communities would regurgitate some sort of an answer. Most of the time it was incoherent because they weren't exactly sure what to say. They also knew they had to protect the money coming to them, so they didn't want to badmouth it. So we would have very few bad answers from the community. It was all mostly all good. We're benefiting very much, and our community has benefited this way and that way, but we need more money because we need to open another school, or we need to hire more teachers, etc, etc, right? It was always a ploy to get more money, and that's where I would try and bring in the cultural aspect, saying, you know, they've welcomed you with garlands and showered you with rose petals. Do you think they're going to give you a bad review, or do you think they're going to say that the project is bad? That completely trumps the entire criteria, the evaluation criteria that OECD uses right there, right? So there is a lot of this dichotomous aspect to evaluation, and eventually I left it because I just found that we're not  producing anything of value. There were a couple of evaluations that were very critical. But ultimately, what would happen, because it was done by a consulting firm for whatever, or whoever the donor was, the donor would pressure them, and they would say, take it out. Take out this negative part . And the consultants, they were on the payroll, so they had to do it. So, I mean, there you go, even if something negative was included, or critical, it would be ultimately be removed, right? And that's why all evaluations say "lessons learned," could do better doing well. So for the entire world, it's not about decolonizing evaluation. What is the purpose of it? We need to question that first.

Joseph Harris  25:16

In your own chapter, you bring up the idea of the "matriarchy complex." Can you share with our listeners a bit about what that means and why it's important?

Themrise Khan  25:26

So this was something really interesting that had been wanting to write about this for a long time, and the book gave me an opportunity to do that, is that being a woman, being a brown woman, South Asian woman from Pakistan, a lot of the people who would come from the North would be would also be women. So they'd be like white evaluators or white project managers or white consultants, and a lot of the women working in the donor agencies in Pakistan who were posted here were all white women. Some of them became my friends as well. But by and large, I felt that they had the same attitudes and issues that men did, and that there was a gender issue at play here as well, and that the women were equally condescending and were equally trying to show their power as much as white men did. And so for me, I just wanted to have the play of words. You know, we talk about patriarchy in gender and development all the time, but we never talk about the fact that women themselves have a very big role to play in the industry. And so I just used a play of words and said, "It's not just patriarchy. There's a matriarchy complex happening here in that a lot of the women who work in international development from the Global North also feel that they they also have issues of power over us," and that is something that needs to be talked about, and we don't talk about it enough. And it's not just white women. It's - and this is where we talk about white saviorism as a state of mind, even if you're non-white, but you are representing a white western donor, you imbibe the same mentality that a white western donor would. So you would be condescending, you would be patronizing, you would try and throw your weight around. So it's not just a white male savior that we're talking about. We're talking about saviors of all kinds coming from a position of power. So that's what I tried to highlight in the chapter, also tying it into colonial era days when the wives of the white British officers would pretend to be mothers to the brown and black servants who would work in their house houses in South Asia or in Africa, right? They felt they had to mother them. They had to look after them because they don't know how to look after themselves. So there was also that connection that I found during during the research. But it's a very, very important point that we need to talk more about, that women are equal participants and equal perpetrators in the power dynamics of the international aid sector.

Joseph Harris  28:01

Much of our conversation so far has really centered on international development aid and its impact in a national and local context. Can you say a bit more about what kinds of positive transformations are needed at the global governance level that might impact or change systematically some of these relationships?

Themrise Khan  28:25

That's very hard to say, and I don't think at this point any of us have an answer to that because the entire geopolitical system globally has become so complex that it is impossible to untangle. I mean, we're seeing the way the global community is reacting to Palestine. For instance, even countries that are pro-Palestine are unable to shift mindsets, right? It is very, very much dominated by just one political mindset. And so when you're in a situation like that, what we're currently calling one of the worst genocides of the century, if we can't even globally, countries can't even band together to be able to address that issue, then I think changes in global governance is something I'm not even expecting it at all. And also because we have issues in our part of the world as well with governance. We can't only talk about global governance being the white western world. Global governance is also governance in our countries in the South. Our countries are also facing a massive political crisis. We have a crisis of leadership. We have a crisis of finance and investment. We've got social crisis going on in our countries. I think a country needs to change on its own, and every country needs to spur and drive its own transformation and its own change because we're still dependent on so many other countries for that. We are now getting more and more entangled in all those global geopolitical trends and patterns that are happening. And so unless we extricate ourselves from that, I don't see a transformation happening at the global level, particularly in governance. So I really don't have an answer to that at this point in time, but it is obviously an extremely crucial issue.

Joseph Harris  30:28

Well, obviously these are terribly difficult, and some might say intractable problems, or at least problems that we are going to have to continue to work on in the longer run. Is there work by scholars or practitioners that inspires you bite of these great challenges we face?

Themrise Khan  30:46

What inspires me is the work of those who people don't know. So for instance, what inspires me is the labor that is out on the streets of Pakistan every day. And I know this can sound very cliche and to a certain extent, very patronizing as well, but I seriously feel that everyday when I'm out and I see the people of my country toiling in 45-50 degree heat, with no electricity, with no water, with no shelter, with no social security, with no income. but yet they're still going somehow because they know they have to, because they've got to feed their kids, they've got to look after their family. That is what inspires me. It shouldn't have to be this way. It shouldn't be this way, but the fact that this is how we are carrying on, not knowing what the future holds, going day to day, mouth to mouth, it is those people that inspire me, and those are people we don't really talk about in a lot of our discussions and discourses. We talk about communities as a whole. We never talk about all the challenges those communities have to go through at multiple levels, or what a household has to go through at multiple levels. And for me, that is, that is why I keep bringing this up again and again, that sectors cannot survive by looking at just the big picture. They have to understand the very, very fine print that goes along with how populations survive, and that can only really be understood by people who live there in my own country, I am the elite. And I'm not even the elite, Elite. I'm just a sub-elite somewhere down there. But there's so much that I continue to learn about the social dynamics of my country every single day, and I thought I knew everything. So that's what inspires me the most. I'm not trying to put down anyone else. I think there's a fantastic network of practitioners and scholars out there working but I really feel we need to focus our energies on the person right down there.

Joseph Harris  33:02

White Saviorism in International Development has been so impactful and powerful. Can you share a bit about what other writing projects are on the horizon for you after this great volume?

Themrise Khan  33:15

That's a good question. I have no idea. At the moment. I would love to write more. I think my co-editors and myself are at this point that the book took a lot out of us to bring out, and we were just so overwhelmed with the response, and we continue to be overwhelmed, even though it's been a year and a half since the book came out, a lot of people come up to us and say, "When are you doing a volume two?" And they have a point because there are so many other areas that we didn't cover in this book, and we'd love to do that at some point in time. Everybody's busy doing their own thing. I'm focusing on looking more into alternatives for aid and trying to bring more nuance to the discussion, but I hope there's a volume two soon. We, at some point, need to get back together and talk about it, and we've never discouraged anyone else from doing it either. You know, this is, this is a topic that should be embraced by anyone who is interested in it. So let's see what the future holds.

Joseph Harris  34:22

You mentioned the reception it's gotten, and I'm very glad to hear that. Can you say a little bit more about the reception it has had and impact that you've seen in these conversations in development?

Themrise Khan  34:35

I mean, the conversations are very scattered right even now. The book has clearly had a very, very strong impact on a number of scholars and academics in the Global South, and definitely on practitioners. Sorry, in the Global North, and definitely on practitioners in the Global South, like they see themselves in a lot the stories, and that's why we chose stories by practitioners, because I think the resonance is there at the policy level. I don't think this book, the way it is, can have much of an impact. Our purpose was to begin a conversation on this topic, and that the book has achieved tremendously. People are talking. People are still talking about the book. I mean, we're having this conversation now, and you know, we, as co-editors, we keep trying to put it behind us and move on, but we can't because we keep getting pulled into the conversation again, which is fantastic. I mean, we, we couldn't be happier, all of us. But I think there's a lot more to unpack and to dig deeper in, which even the book, I think, just touches the surface on, which is why I think, it needs, the discussions need to be broader, which is why we're all really happy to talk more about the book because I think it needs to go deeper. And I think policy-wise, there's still a gap. We need to have a lot of policymakers read the book as well and try and understand how this relates to them.

Joseph Harris  36:07

While the book really centers on this notion of "white saviorism," you talked a little bit when you visited the Global Health Politics Workshop about this other term that is getting a lot of currency in international development and global health circles, "decolonizing" development and global health. And it's a term you've used in the past, but I remember you saying that you've kind of moved away from and have some reservations about it. Can you share a little bit about your reflections on on that idea?

Themrise Khan  36:37

So I totally moved away from this term, even though I recall I just used the word decolonizing in one of my responses a little, a few minutes ago. But yes, I came on board when I left the sector as a practitioner, because of decolonization as a term, and because I thought at that point in time, this is about four years ago, that it did resonate a lot, and it gave me the ability to enter this critical discourse on aid. But the more I thought about it, and the more I heard and observed how it was actually being used, the more I felt that it was quite inappropriate, and I've written a lot about that as well, and that is because for me at least, the connection of decolonization is literally blood. It is literally how the colonized got rid of the colonizers from their country, right? That was the original process of decolonization, right? And it was a, it was sacrifice. It was personal sacrifice. It was national sacrifice, and for a lot of countries, including my own, to achieve freedom from the colonials, and to see it being used as something that is much more superficial because I think that's what gets me the most, that it's such an overused term. And I strayed away from it about, I think, two years ago, and I said, I am not giving any talks on decolonization. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to use the word, even though now and then I've had to. And that just goes to show how ingrained it's become so quickly in the sector, which is, you know, a scary thought in itself, that we don't really give much thought to how we approach issues and how the terminologies that we use as well. And I just feel that if you really want to decolonize aid or anything at all, you're going to have to kick the colonizer out all over again, whereas right now, the discussions using the term are more about so how can we make things better? So how can we change things around? But it's not talking about removing the colonizer at all, which in our case would be the donors or the INGOs. So that is my my disagreement with the term, and why I feel very uncomfortable using it, and why I feel it's not appropriate to the task at hand.

Joseph Harris  38:58

For a final question, I want to ask your thoughts about advice you would give graduate students, either Masters going in to get a degree in development, as you did at LSE, or perhaps PhD candidates who are interested in doing degrees in and work on international development and global health. What piece of advice would you give them?

Themrise Khan  39:22

So I hate being asked this question because I have the worst answer for it, and it's just one word: don't. And again, I know a lot of people will get really put off by this. And I've even been asked by some people: you can't say that to students, you know? I mean, they're, you know, putting their futures on the line, and all their parents funding or their own scholarships on the line to, you know, to get this education. And I just feel: don't. If I had had the opportunity, if I had known how the development sector was going to pan out, I would never have done this degree. My own experience of my degrees, I have an undergraduate degree in Global Development, as well as a Master's, and that was it. I mean, a PhD...I'm not the PhD type of person, so I drew the line at a Master's. But my own experience of it was, not just because I was in Western schools, but because everything in the approach, the concepts, everything was so Western-centric. That that's how our minds were ingrained, and it still is. I mean, the problem with academia overseas is they are...it's still very, very possessive of its own curriculum, and that curriculum is still primarily very Western-centric. And as long as the development sector, academia, and the development sector is Western-centric, you are never going to make a difference in the sector at all as a practitioner or an academic or what have you. So my advice is also, don't also...we're talking about a global imbalance. And I've spoken so much about how condescending, patronizing, and arrogant. You know, white development practitioners have been, not all of them, but most of them, have been in countries like mine. You don't want to create another breed of that, another generation of that. You want to see that end now. You want to see that sort of exchange end. It's not even exchange. It's a one-way traffic. We never go there. They always come here. So I would say, don't, especially not PhD, because I've seen a lot. I've had, you know, to babysit. I hate to use that word, but a lot of PhD students coming from the US and Canada to Pakistan who wanted to do their fieldwork and such and such. And I had to take them out on, you know, another tour of a village and all that, and it was just, I'm sorry there was, there was absolutely no connection whatsoever. So short answer: don't get into this field.

Joseph Harris  41:53

Thank you so much for the time today. For our listeners, White Saviorism in International Development: Theories, Practices and Lived Experiences, is edited by Themrise Khan, Kanakulya Dixon, and Micah Sonderjee. It's published by Daraja Press. If you haven't read it yet, I urge you to go out and get it. It is a powerful volume, and we hope and look forward to Volume Two in the future. Themrise Khan, thank you so much for joining us today.

Themrise Khan  42:20

Thank you so much, Joseph. Happy to be here. Thank you.