Rethinking Pedagogical Design in International Development Studies to Foster Epistemic Justice

Abstract

Acknowledging the genocide and scholasticide in Gaza—and the ensuing student encampments in solidarity as a critical rupture—this article reflects on how lecturers, students and alumni within an International Development Studies (IDS) programme at a Western, internationalized university grapple with epistemic injustice, decolonial praxis and institutional complicity. Using a collaborative auto-ethnographic approach and insights from a co-created workshop, we examine how IDS’ normative commitments to justice and decolonization are strained by everyday teaching practices, university management and the emotional and political complexities of learning during interconnected polycrises. Drawing on regenerative development theory and the Three Lines of Work framework, complemented with decolonial perspectives and critical pedagogical frameworks, we explore the significance of pedagogies of discomfort, hope and entanglement in responding to the 2024 campus protests in solidarity with Palestine. We propose three key pedagogical premises—paradigm shifting for systemic change, co-creative dialogical learning cultures and the cultivation of imperturbability as a core capacity—as pathways towards more regenerative, accountable and justice-oriented learning spaces. These premises may inform the work and inquiry of development educators, students and practitioners seeking to foster epistemic justice in how, what and why we teach and learn about present and future polycrises.

I. Introduction: Setting the Scene

It is 6 May 2024, and we are working with a group of undergraduate students. Today’s class focuses on the role of education in conflict and peacebuilding. We discuss how education can reproduce harmful, alienating, polarizing and violent interactions between humans. We speak of scholasticide as a form of epistemic injustice, and how some scholars argue that this is part of the current genocide in Gaza. In our classroom, we collectively aim to hold space for multiple perspectives and approaches— welcoming both silence and respectfully speaking up. There are images of current Palestine solidarity encampments in universities across the globe on our slides. The classroom is warm, and the sun is out today. We decide to go outside and work together in pairs on the piece of grass in front of our classroom, when we hear noises. We walk over to the window to see the first tents and protest signs emerging on the lawn. We realize that in this exact moment, the first student encampment in the Netherlands is starting in our own university. As students start to come back into the classroom, their faces are hard to read. We find our way back into a seated circle and start a conversation about what’s happening outside and what this brings up in us. We let go of the design of the rest of the session, as what we are discussing is quite literally happening in front of our eyes. We use the remaining time to reflect, pose questions, connecting the first part of the class to what we now see emerging on our own campus. At the end of class, we agree to stay in touch and that regardless of people’s stances or perspectives, we are open to listening and talking. I leave the room feeling torn. That sensation will intensify in the coming weeks… (Lecturer IDS, 2024)

The May 2024 student encampment and subsequent protests at the University of Amsterdam, like elsewhere, received global media coverage, sending a message of global solidarity and a call to universities to respond firmly and ethically to the unfolding genocide and scholasticide in Gaza (Dader et al., 2024; Hajir and Qato, 2025). These protests articulated boycott, disclose and divest demands for accountability and urgent action from university executive boards. Prior to the encampments, such calls for accountability and collective action had been expressed through numerous petitions and meetings between staff and students away from the public gaze in classroom and university boardroom settings. In the case of the programme of International Development Studies (IDS), students had sent a letter to teaching staff to take action in solidarity with Palestine in January 2024—three months after the Hamas 7 October attack and disproportionate Israeli military repercussion in Gaza. In it, they expressed the need for discussing the unfolding genocide openly and appealed to staff to ‘walk the talk’ by responding to human rights violations, oppression and (de)colonization—themes featuring prominently in the IDS programme as it seeks to come to terms with the broader field’s colonial origins and entanglements. It was discomforting evidence of the ‘student disillusionment and dismay at the sharp, painful, cleavage between theory and practice’ (Hajir and Qato, 2025: 3) that has been observed across universities in Europe, the USA and the UK. The silence on Palestine and on genocide, Hajir and Qato (2025) further contend, is an extension of the destruction of the Palestinian education system, or ‘scholasticide’, not in the least among scholars typically calling for ‘equity’ and ‘justice’ for the oppressed against interconnected systems of domination; this is the case of many IDS scholars and students.

Emerging from its more imperialist beginnings, the field of IDS has progressively started to engage with decolonial thinking, seeking to de-link solidarity and global justice from Western, ‘universal’ ideas, institutions and practices of development, aid and ‘progress’ that are engrained in colonial mindsets of inferiority and superiority (Rutazibwa, 2018; see also Icaza and Vázquez, 2022; Kapoor, 2023;Sultana, 2019). Such delinking efforts (Mignolo, 2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2021) require a continuous re-orientation of the field, including its onto-epistemological orientations and positioning. Aiming to foster epistemic justice, there is a need to avoid addressing pertinent colonial issues in self-serving and depoliticizing ways and to ethically respond to power asymmetries in the ways in which knowledge is being (re)produced. Challenging the ways we know the world, Idahosa and Bradbury (2020) argue, starts with critical self-reflexivity (see also Le Bourdon, 2022, emphasis added). It is about opening oneself up to the discomfort of asking what impact one’s political subjectivity has in perpetuating and reproducing relations of domination, rather than occupying a comfortable space by addressing problems as ‘over there’, distancing oneself from action. Thus, our lived experiences throughout the protests and debates concerning the genocide in Gaza within our faculty and programme took us—international students and predominantly white European lecturers of IDS—on a journey of jointly reflecting on the following questions relevant to the field:

How can we—as scholars, educators, students in the field of IDS—increase our shared consciousness to meaningfully engage with past–present–future epistemic injustices?

How might this increased consciousness translate into regenerative, justice-oriented learning cultures and pedagogical designs?

What does such a learning culture mean for the ways in which we need to develop our capabilities as learners, educators and engaged researchers in IDS?

Reflecting on these questions, we concentrate on the challenges we encountered as individual lecturers and students, and as an IDS community in relating to a (long-term) apartheid politics in Israel, the (then) unfolding genocide in Gaza and our university’s Executive Board’s efforts to limit the space for extra-curricular teach-ins, and what was understood by many as the weaponization of social safety in order to stifle critical dialogue. This compelled us to consider afresh the ways in which our IDS programme was nested within complex institutional, societal and global systems.

Below, we explore how critical reflexive praxis helped us to (re)examine the assumptions embedded in our motives for teaching and researching IDS. Alongside theories on decolonization, epistemic injustice and transgressive education, this article draws on regenerative development theory for its meta-theoretical framing and methodological design (Mang and Haggard, 2016; Sanford, 2023; Wahl, 2016). Regenerative thinking allows us to bridge critical thinking about systems changes with actually being part of such transformations, namely, connecting inner and outer development. Thinking regeneratively requires a conscious shift in thinking from a polarized and binary view of the world (e.g., where colonial difference is sustained) to a more dynamic living systems approach to understanding change (Sanford and Haggard, 2022). Rather than a problem-solving mindset which orients towards ‘fixing’ things, a regenerative paradigm invites a potential-oriented frame of mind. Regenerative thinking has inspired the design of the three guiding questions, which we elaborate on in our analytical sections. In our concluding sections, we consequently distil three pedagogical design premises we hope can travel beyond our collaborative spaces and institutional bounds to reflect on and operationalize epistemic justice in the broader field of IDS and beyond.

II. Theoretical Inspirations

Debates on decolonization of teaching, learning and knowledge production (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Sultana, 2019) have pushed IDS scholars and activists to ‘decolonize the self’ and their practice (Idahosa and Bradbury, 2020; Le Bourdon, 2022; Patel and North, 2022; Sheik, 2020). Educators have grown increasingly aware of the need to come to terms with their own identities and biases to responsibly facilitate discussions that include multiple ways of knowing within academia, and that doing so requires more than adding ‘non-Western’ voices and ‘stir’ approach (Bunch, 1987: 140, as quoted in Langdon and Agyeyomah 2014: 3). Instead, it entails an active questioning of Eurocentric norms held by educators and students; reflecting on the politics of language(s); and a representative and non-hierarchical inclusion of (non-Eurocentric) marginalized and indigenous voices in teaching resources (De Oliveira Andreotti, 2014; Langdon, 2013; Spiegel et al., 2017). Mignolo and Walsh (2018: 88) speak of disruptive pedagogization processes and ‘verbality’; we thus define epistemic justice as pluralizing the singularity in dominant epistemes and knowledge production through activist and open-ended disruption, so we can rehumanize (epistemically and materially) marginalized actors and imagine a different world. ¹ Collectively, such reckonings could contribute to a broader decolonization process, thereby inspiring us to work on the first guiding question: How can we increase our shared consciousness to meaningfully engage with past–present–future epistemic injustices?

Secondly, theoretical inspirations from academic fields on critical and transgressive pedagogies (bell hooks, 1994; Sultana, 2019; Wals, 2019) further enable us to reflect more deeply on the second and third questions: How might this increased consciousness translate into regenerative, justice-oriented learning cultures and pedagogical designs? And consequently: What does such a learning culture mean for the ways in which we need to develop our capabilities as learners, educators and engaged researchers in IDS? Given we intended not to simply critique but also contribute to rethinking how IDS might better address questions of epistemic injustice, these questions are intentionally both conceptual and praxis-oriented (Freire, 1994).

Critical self-reflexivity challenges knowledge production and practice by questioning the assumptions that shape our interactions on a personal, intellectual and social level, rather than thinking about one’s positionality in relation to the research subject and context alone (Idahosa and Bradbury, 2020; see also De Oliveira Andreotti, 2014). To acknowledge nestedness, we therefore work with the regenerative framework of the Three Lines of Work (Lopes Cardozo and Petersen, 2024; Regenesis, 2020; see Figure 1). It illustrates how decolonized practice requires change at three levels (see Figure 1). The Third Line of Work represents the programme of IDS at our university as engaging with the world. Working at this level requires developing a shared sense of consciousness and vocation to work on epistemic justice as a systemic transformation process. Contributing to a larger change process at the programme level (Third Line) requires building the capabilities of a broader collective/community to care for this change effort within teaching, learning and working together (Second Line of Work). Consequently, this cannot happen effectively and sustainably without each individual committing to work on developing their inner capabilities at the First Line of Work, which we develop here through critical self-reflection (Idahosa and Bradbury, 2020).

Figure 1.

Three Lines of Work. Adapted from the work of Regenesis Institute (see also Lopes Cardozo and Petersen, 2024: 8).

An ‘Indirect Work’ theory of change (Sanford and Haggard, 2022) further informed the design of the three guiding questions around what shifts in consciousness are required for our (and potentially a broader) IDS studies field, the types of learning cultures we suggest to enable such shifts, and what capabilities would allow for an active and creative engagement as agents within living phenomena: our university as nested within society and the world.

III. Auto-ethnographic Methodology

To elicit diverse voices, we deployed a collaborative auto-ethnographic research design (Bochner and Ellis, 2016), which is also increasingly recognized as a promising form of collaborative, contemplative writing (Chang et al., 2016; Wessels and Grünwald, 2023). This co-constructed storytelling method enabled us to distil patterns and insights for our individual and collective reflections. These insights were then translated into pedagogical design premises. A key moment in this collaborative trajectory was a co-created workshop held in June 2024 to build trust, share experiences and articulate views on academic activism, trends in IDS and institutional embeddedness. The quotes presented below were collected during this workshop.

The workshop was facilitated by two external colleagues, who co-designed the workshop with one of the lecturers who took the initiative to organize this workshop and writing process, drawing on a co-created method of a ‘campfire conversation’ (see Lopes Cardozo et al., 2025). Seven out of the fourteen core lecturers in the IDS teaching and research programme participated in the workshop, ranging from recently appointed assistant professors, long-term lecturers, to full professors from the Netherlands and beyond. Three of the participating staff held management positions. Four participants were students—one Dutch and three non-Dutch, one male—who voluntarily responded to an open call to participate in the workshop and follow up writing process, including one recent alumna of the programme and two students who had co-written and signed the open letter holding their lecturers to account for their inaction in the face of an unfolding genocide (see the Introduction). In this context, both students and staff experienced the workshop itself as an act of reconciliation and a call for action. What we share here can be considered part of the outcome of this reconciliation process, in which we translate what we have learned about ourselves and our field into pedagogical design principles that we aim to commit to in our future practices. All workshop participants were invited to join the collective writing process; four lecturers (three Dutch and one Belgian, three female and one male), three students (one Dutch, two female and one male) and the two independent facilitators (male, Dutch) embraced the endeavour.

Through a structured process of reflection and dialogue, excerpts were selected collectively to illustrate how, notwithstanding some shared privileges within a largely white European group, our diverse personal learning journeys—as students and as lecturers— intersect with broader social, cultural and institutional dynamics, including with our own university. The University of Amsterdam is a focal point of attention in the Netherlands. It is the largest university, with a history of protests and a progressive image. It is based in the capital, the largest city in the Netherlands, with an equally progressive image. Amsterdam, however, also carries the burden of its mercantile and colonial past, with much of its wealth accumulated during the supposed ‘Golden age’ based on exploitation overseas. More recently and of particular relevance to the responses to the genocide in Gaza, 66.000 of the 80.000 Jews living in Amsterdam were murdered during the Shoah, 10% of the city’s population in that era (Bovenkerk, 2000). Whereas the Dutch government was swift in expressing its unconditional support to the State of Israel after 7 October attacks (De Jong, 2025) and reports of discrimination against Muslims and antisemitism have increased since 7 October 2023 (Walz and Fiere, 2025), the mayor of the city tried to hold space for the various communities and their voices in the city, and was the first mayor calling the Dutch government publicly to take action against the Israeli Government (Municipality of Amsterdam, 2025). This sets the context for the sensitivities and complexities around the demands in the protests on campus, and the frustrations about the various (policed) responses by the university’s board and the municipality.

In the following sections, we start from the third line of work in our analysis of the need to develop a shared consciousness in the field of IDS. Then, we move our analytical focus to the potential of co-creating a different learning culture and community in the second line of work. Finally, we zoom into the first line of work as we reflect on what capabilities and pedagogical strategies are required in IDS in the face of uncertain futures. We have used the three lines of work to structure our discussion, but acknowledge that the issues we discuss cut across all three lines.

IV. Developing Shared Consciousness Around Entangled Polycrises and Epistemic Injustices (Third Line of Work)

Pluriverse Paradigms

Reflecting on a shared consciousness in the field of IDS, one lecturer commented during the recorded workshop conversation:

It is important that we uphold the diversity of paradigms and methodologies, because as an education program we have many kinds of students and many kinds of lecturers, and we thrive because we are a community of differences. (IDS Lecturer, 2024)

Similarly, a student observed:

A particular form of diversity that stood out to me was the range of privileges and positionalities, even among what seemed like a homogenous group of Western, middle-class students. The diversity in academic disciplines also played a significant role, with psychology, economics, health, and social sciences each bringing their own perspectives and biases into classroom discussions. These varied backgrounds inevitably shaped the conversations and questions that emerged. (IDS Masters Student, 2024)

Yet, as the excerpt below demonstrates, in considering this ‘pluralizing’, challenges were encountered:

While very different, the objects, songs and poems shared in our workshop were telling for some grand questions that many of us seem to struggle with; questions about the validity of Western knowledge and epistemic injustice more broadly. Both call for a broadening of perspectives, avoiding erasure—interestingly in all directions (not only erasure of indigenous knowledge, but neither erasure of ‘Western’ knowledge). Further questioning my thinking, I wonder: How can multiple ways of knowing coexist within our university system? How to ensure we do them right from within our own positionalities? How do we avoid tokenism, misinterpretation, appropriation, but also, and importantly, moral relativism? (IDS Lecturer, 2024)

Idahosa and Bradbury (2020) warn us in constructive ways that it is essential that transformative change is not paralysed by essentialist framings of positionality and identity—sourced in a fear of getting it wrong. While we are modest in what we—from our vantage point of a Western-based, internationalized university programme—are doing in terms of the ‘radical action of transforming the university into a pluriversity’ that can claim less-hierarchical, decolonial knowledge co-production (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2021: 93), our collective efforts were aimed at pluralizing the university space. This involves ‘redefining the mission of the university away from its complicity in epistemicides and cognitive injustices into a committed and indeed activist institution of higher education which confronts its ‘problematic past while creating futures founded on social justice’ and, hence, epistemic justice (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2021: 93). In addition, we recognize the continuing need to further (intersectionally) diversify our teaching team.

(Un)conscious Silences

Fundamentally, the decolonization of teaching, learning and knowledge production in IDS requires an acute sensibility to the legacy of colonialist epistemes and hierarchical academic structures, which requires ‘speaking truth to power’ about Palestine and the genocide in Gaza (Hajir and Qato, 2025). Whereas several members of the teaching team shared the position on the need to engage with the horrendous instances of violence witnessed in Gaza, we collectively felt silencing and conditioning effects within our own university. Moreover, some of us felt a need to conform to institutional pressures, thus reproducing silence regarding the genocide in Gaza in educational practices. As one student put it: ‘History has shown us that it’s not just what is said that matters, but also what is left unsaid or deliberately ignored’ (IDS Student, 2024).

The reproduction of silence exposed an uncomfortable reality: that we—as privileged knowledge producers—can fall into the trap of mirroring our ‘Master’s House and its Tools’ (Hajir and Qato, 2024: 301); of becoming complicit in the perpetuation of epistemic injustice, in spite of IDS’ aspirations to question the very systems of power and inequality that perpetuate a conflict with colonial dimensions, such as that of Gaza and Palestine more broadly.

The events in Palestine thus left us (the educators) to grapple afresh with the limitations imposed by our location in institutions entangled with the very imperial systems we also critique. Since pedagogical choices—whether conscious or unconscious—are shaped by broader institutional structures and societal discourses, holding educators accountable for choices made requires a nuanced approach acknowledging their position within larger systemic frameworks, alongside a collective responsibility within teaching teams to develop meaningful mechanisms and structures for peer support and professional development possibilities. Such mechanisms are crucial for educators to relate themselves to the challenge of teaching within and about past, present and future local-to-global injustices. Importantly, this work must be collaborative with student communities, taking their concerns, aspirations and capabilities seriously.

The aforementioned example of students holding staff accountable to a decolonial praxis and calling them to stand in solidarity with Gaza addresses the initial months of staff silence regarding their roles as representatives of a web of complex institutions that are complicit in human rights violations and epistemic erasures. Arguably, standing in solidarity with Palestine means different things for the diverse set of authors—and their respective roles in the university system—in this article. In a way, the collective process of developing this article together is an ongoing attempt to reconcile and develop a constructive space for collective learning and reflection—rather than stand in opposition.

V. Co-creating Learning Cultures as a Community: Pedagogies of Discomfort, Hope and Entanglement (Second Line of Work)

Navigating Tensions

In an environment where the discomfort resulting from being confronted with viewpoints or experiences other than your own could be experienced as ‘unsafe’, lecturers often felt caught between the opposing forces of being held responsible for a ‘safe educational environment’, interpreted as maintaining a certain level of neutrality to guarantee that students (and colleagues) with diverging opinions would feel safe to do so. The fear of misinterpretation or (institutional) backlash can clash with the feelings of accountability and responsibility educators feel for creating a respectful and courageous learning space, which could foster ‘a more demanding relationship with history and with the world’ (Gopal, 2021: 897). In the words of a lecturer:

More worryingly perhaps was an uneasy sense with assuming responsibility in a climate where [our] University management was calling for social safety and where lecturers’ exercising self-censorship in speaking out on these issues and thus not taking a group position on the Gaza question. In hindsight, our lecturer group’s response to student demands followed a rather distant and proto-institutional approach, in that it became marred in trying to achieve consensus and designing steps like writing petitions to different layers of the university administration in our own competence as individuals, who have to mobilise other individuals. (IDS Lecturer, 2024)

This reflection, as well as the following one, about the tensions, unexpected situations, hidden frustrations and challenges of navigating uncertainty, illustrates the need for and importance of collectively committing to growing a more caring learning community.

It is as if in each unforeseen and shaky situation we have to look each other in the eye and ask ourselves ‘how are we going to handle this one together?’ Navigating the uncertainty together asks from us that we relate and share responsibility for the learning environment we want to create. That first and foremost requires commitment, which once experienced might foster trust. (IDS Lecturer, 2024)

Co-creating a more caring learning community does not imply all becoming the same. Instead, and building on Barthwal-Datta and colleagues (2024), we consider a pedagogy of care through the prism of belonging, the metaphor of the prism highlighting the plural and fractal features of identity and privilege. Using this prism, we—lecturers and students—can consider how our identities and privileges interact, combine and are (re)configured in different contexts, nurturing reflection and sense-making (Barthwal-Datta et al., 2024: 250) Working from/with a pedagogy of care and a prism of belonging is about fostering kinship, an IDS community, which can be understood as an act of resistance in academic institutions given their tendency to emphasize individualism and competition (Motta and Bennett, 2018). Below, we explore three complementary pedagogical approaches which resonated from our conversations: pedagogies of discomfort, hope and entanglement.

Pedagogies of Discomfort

Based on our shared, yet varied experiences of discomfort, we argue that discomfort can be transformative. As one lecturer put it:

Showing up is the first thing. I like this saying that is attributed to Beckett: ‘ever tried, ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ We are bound to fail, at least in the eyes of some. Yet, isn’t not trying worse? Reflecting on the violence in Gaza in the classroom is tricky, and will not be well received by all. Yet, not doing so feels worse. (IDS Lecturer, 2024)

The excerpt above shows us the possibility and need to consciously incorporate discomfort in our learning and teaching. Embracing a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ opens up a new type of decolonial engagement that is not just related to the ‘intellectual decolonialization’ but rather focused on the affective aspects of IDS and decoloniality that ‘are the embodied experiences of anger, love, guilt, solidarity’ (Zembylas, 2023: 301; Zembylas, 2022). Such affective reflections, while uncomfortable, need to find their way into (auto-ethnographic) reflective journeys as we acknowledge and address our privileges in relation to teaching/studying in development (Le Bourdon, 2022).

A pedagogy of discomfort (Boler, 1999; Boler and Zembylas, 2003; Zembylas and Boler, 2002) is a pedagogical practice that can motivate students and educators alike to challenge their ‘cherished beliefs and assumptions’ (Boler, 1999: 176). Berlak (2004) suggests that discomfort is not only inevitable but even essential if the goal is to challenge our deeply held ideas about the world and to engage with global challenges. Since IDS is itself deeply intertwined with (epistemic) injustices, it seems to us that it is not possible to meaningfully engage with such challenges without a certain level of discomfort. Following their reading of the transcript of our workshop discussion, another lecturer reflected that:

The transcript tells the story of being confronted with the full complexity of […] global injustices. This feels for some students like entering a tunnel and possibly losing hope. For me, teaching IDS means accompanying students’ journey of critical self-exploration (in relationship with the world) …. This requires both teachers and students to learn how to go through this iteration of seeing the state of the world as it is … as turbulent and deplorable … and really engaging with it, with heart and mind …. And then learning to find your way through the tunnel to find hope again, because you may eventually find that humble but meaningful action; not as an individual exercise, but as a collaborative, community building exercise in whatever (IDS) community you are part of. (IDS Lecturer, 2024)

The extract above speaks to the idea of sitting with discomfort. The lecturer’s reflection on supporting students to examine their ‘relation with the world’, furthermore, resonates with the conception of a pedagogy of care as centring on building community (Motta and Bennett, 2018) and Barthwal-Datta et al.’s (2024) ‘prismatic’ approach to belonging.

Notably, discomfort can be generative, which is illustrated by the following words of a student: ‘Also, there is hope maybe in a very uncomfortable moment, I find hope in a very desperate moment sometimes’ (IDS Student, 2024).

The journey through discomfort is neither meant to be nor needs to leave students— or lecturers—disheartened. When we remind ourselves that challenging systemic issues is inherently uncomfortable, such a journey can enable us—students and lecturers alike—to (re)discover a sense of purpose and action.

Pedagogy of Hope

As noted, discomfort can be a powerful catalyst. Hope, in its turn, can serve as the guiding light within the tunnel of discomfort, illuminating our path towards meaningful collective engagement with global injustices. In Pedagogy of hope, Freire (1970) calls for dismantling the banking model of education through hope, with a means of democratic dialogue aimed at ‘opening up to the thinking of others’ (Freire, 1992: 110). The essence of this article is rooted in the creation of a space for collaborative reimagining and dialogue, inviting voices from our community to converge at multiple levels. Creating this kind of space requires particular forms of pedagogy and curricular decisions. A lecturer’s reflections are illuminative in this regard:

But there’s a responsibility, I think, for the program to work on creating more space, and more time focusing on purpose and existential questions, like: why did I choose this study path? How can my motivation be connected to a more meaningful contribution? Because I think, if we want to practice a pedagogy of hope, it cannot be done purely at a theoretical abstract level and it cannot be done without touching people’s intrinsic motivation of what they really care about, both for teachers and students. (IDS Lecturer, 2024)

As with an ‘ethic of discomfort’, a connected ‘ethic of hope’ was highlighted as a key pedagogical challenge for educators. This requires working on creating a balance between understanding structural injustices, while simultaneously exploring the potential for transformation and more just futures (Applebaum, 2012; Boler, 2004). In this line of thinking, Freire (1992) suggests practicing a pedagogy of hope in an ontological manner, the emphasis being on acting in the world to expand opportunities for social justice. Doing so can be a struggle and generate different questions in relation to the ‘ethics of hope’. One of the participating lecturers commented:

While having a moral obligation as educators is important, it is perhaps a form of violence to pretend to be hopeful in a world where there doesn’t always seems to be much hope…and could that be in itself a form of oppression? (IDS Lecturer, 2024)

A compelling response to the challenges of falling out and finding back hope is given by Giroux (2003: 37):

Against an increasingly oppressive corporate based globalism, educators and other cultural workers need to resurrect a language of resistance and possibility, a language that embraces a militant utopianism while constantly being attentive to those forces that seek to turn such hope into a new slogan.

In this way, hope is not just a sentiment, but an active, radical stance that we as a broader IDS community may need to use to navigate the tension between reality and potential. Or, in the words of De Oliveira Andreotti (2014), this requires developing an attitude of ‘sceptical optimism’, or ‘hopeful scepticism’, through discerning historical patterns of mistakes, our own implicatedness in these, and engage with pluralistic knowledge systems and complexity analysis.

Pedagogy of Entanglement

Holding the relevance and complementarity of both pedagogies of discomfort and hope, from our conversations and reflections emerged a third pedagogical route referred to as pedagogy of entanglement (Bingham and Sidorkin, 2004; Wessels, 2022), as ‘our self is intensely co-constituted and entangled with the (student or teacher) other’ (Barthwal-Datta et al., 2024: 254). Such pedagogical approaches centre around a rethinking of the relationships between people, environments and systems in terms of interconnectedness and co-evolution. Students and educators alike are entangled with complex global issues and are hence always implicated by and complicit in their continuous unfolding (Wessels, 2022). Such are the implications of a relational, living systems world view as we introduced at the beginning of the paper.

In our collective dialogue and as illustrated in our auto-ethnographic reflections, such an entangled and relational pedagogical orientation creates a centre stage for collaboration, co-creation, reflection and a shared sense of responsibility, where both learners and educators immerse themselves in the tangled realities of the world, embracing uncertainty as an essential part of the journey towards understanding and development. This approach is also echoed by the reflections of one of the lecturers, who mentioned:

How can we use our discomforting experiences in discussions with fellow lecturers and in co-creation sessions, to move out of the ‘intellectual decolonising or decentring’ solution space of methods and pedagogies and into the space of repositioning and relating through such shared experiences that foster mutuality, community and a shared sense of purpose? (IDS Lecturer, 2024)

These observations align with Freire’s (1994) work on democratic dialogue and the need to challenge our individual and collective assumptions through collective relearning. Insights shared by students and alumni of our IDS community similarly point to the need to foster collective listening and meaningful learning opportunities where diverse perspectives are acknowledged and embraced. As a (former) student (Figure 2) commented:

For me an important element of belonging is the capacity to be heard, to be listened to, within an environment, within a group, within a design. […] I feel that we could start to [build] bridges among each other to co-create a togetherness, to relate to what our collective goal as international development practitioners and designers would be. (IDS Alumni, 2024)

Figure 2.

Drawing by IDS Alumni, Made During the Workshop as Part of Auto-ethnographic Reflection (IDS Alumni, 2024).

VI. Developing Our Capabilities in the Face of Uncertainty: Discomfort as a Tool for Self-work (First Line of Work)

From a regenerative and indirect work approach to developing capabilities to better deal with a rapidly changing world, we need to grow our understanding of how we think. This means to better self-assess and question our habitual, often biased thinking patterns and ways of acting in the world (Sanford and Haggard, 2022: 53). Connecting our academic studies and work with who we are is unavoidably an uncomfortable and challenging pedagogical process. Put differently, discomfort also serves as a tool for self-work, a catalyst for inner transformation, and learn from layers in yourself from which you were previously disconnected (Barthwal-Datta et al., 2024: 249). Through partaking in pedagogies of discomfort, it can in turn spur social transformation (Zembylas, 2015), which Foucault (1994) describes as an ‘ethic of discomfort’. For students, the collective workshop showed preparedness for introspective work that could lead— through affect and deepening engagement with discomfort—to an experiential relearning of everyone involved. A lecturer reflected on her relearning:

During the student protests—in my view, there was a point when hope was lost and cynicism, especially towards the educators, held sway. To avoid [a] repetition in the future, I took away some lessons. These include connecting ‘the very big picture’ to ‘the very small things.’ Doing so creates space to reflect on our sphere of influence and what is the sphere of possibility. (IDS Lecturer, 2024)

Finally, we argue that to genuinely practise ‘just’ IDS through self-work, articulating positionality with appropriate levels of vulnerability and honesty is essential. As a student stated in their auto-ethnographic narrative:

While positionality is widely regarded as an ethical cornerstone in IDS research, its implications within our classrooms remain largely unexplored by both students and teachers. We rarely discuss why we are in IDS, what our underlying theories of change are, or even the principles that shape our worldviews. Despite their profound impact on our classroom interactions, these elements remain underexplored. The day-long workshop we had in June demonstrated to me how much easier it is to understand and connect with others when we delve into the ‘why’ behind our work. (IDS Student, 2024)

Lecturers similarly yearn for more opportunities to meaningfully connect with students and reveal their own positionalities to allow for a more open and honest learning environment. This was, for instance, expressed by one of the lecturers during the recorded conversation in the workshop day:

I feel very grateful and humbled that students and colleagues – you all - made the effort to be here. That, in itself, already feels like a reconciling movement. To meaningfully and justly engage, I can no longer hide behind conceptual abstractions and jargon, or the privilege of not fully belonging to a conflict situation – hence taking a more distant outsider-view. It is painful and valuable to attempt to walk a path of regenerative engagement with justice challenges. What does it mean to truly engage and care for students’ development? To hear them when they are silent? When they are loud? (IDS lecturer, 2024)

Similarly, a student retrospectively wrote about the workshop:

The poems and objects shared by everyone deeply moved me. It was beautiful to witness how these seemingly diverse and personal expressions intertwined, forming a meaningful web of connections. While the question of how IDS engages with the injustices happening in the world may seem overwhelming when considered in isolation, the starting point is always rooted in our personal experiences and shared histories. Shouldn’t education, too, make space for this? (IDS student, 2024)

While surely not easy nor comfortable, engaging with these positionality questions as a process of inner transformation is a meaningful and essential learning and (action) research process for all learners (lecturers and students alike)—especially in a field like development studies. Below, we further explore what the value can be of integrating insights from a pedagogy of discomfort, a pedagogy of hope and a pedagogy of entanglement in our educational spaces as a learning community of lecturers and students in development studies.

VII. Evolving Pedagogical Design Premises: Learning and Being as IDS Community in a Changing World

Based on the insights shared, we aim to propose pedagogical design premises to further develop our endeavours as IDS community, and hope that sharing these as part of our ongoing work may be helpful for others engaging in similar processes. We distilled three premises from our collective workshop, auto-ethnographic narratives, analysis and writing process. These premises align with the earlier posed questions on the shifts in consciousness, (learning) cultures and capabilities needed to meaningfully engage in IDS education with global challenges and injustices, and include:

conscious paradigm shifting,

co-creative dialogical learning cultures and

developing imperturbability as a capability.

Paradigm Shifting

As reflected above, given that we are concerned with epistemic injustices and are part of an IDS learning community, we cannot close our eyes to the metacrisis (Shaukat Lupson, 2023). It feels like our responsibility to consciously retrospect to historical injustices, introspect internal patterns and biases and actively prospect what is required now and tomorrow in our IDS education to contribute to more just futures. Through ongoing individual and collective engagement with regenerative, critical, transgressive and decolonial theories, we can challenge our overt/covert assumptions and beliefs and explore what paradigms are behind such thinking. In other words, it is important to grow our collective awareness of how we think and how paradigms inform our thinking and ways of learning and knowing—our epistemologies, as also exemplified in the work of Nagar (2019).

Co-creative Dialogical Learning Cultures

This also means that we need to continuously work with the second question on the type of learning culture this would require for IDS. Three key insights came to the surface through our collective work in this article: in order to allow for constructive discomfort and relational learning (relating to oneself, to others and the world), we need to further explore the potential of co-creative and dialogical learning. Co-creation was a recurring theme in our reflections, and the very methodology we employed in the ‘Just Teaching in IDS’ workshop and crafting this article stands as a testament to how co-creation across roles within a community can offer valuable insights for rethinking IDS as an evolving field. In addition, the importance of fostering learning and connections beyond polarization and across differences became urgently apparent in our timely reflections on the impacts of the genocide in Gaza and consequent solidarity movements on our respective roles. Rather than the sometimes apathetic effect of ‘safe spaces’, we thus argue for the need to develop respectful and courageous learning spaces and cultures which are fostered through a collective sense of care and commitment to an open (ended), collective inquiry. From our analysis, the question arises whether the combination of a pedagogy of discomfort and a pedagogy of hope can only truly become meaningful insofar we continue to ground them in a relational worldview—thus how we are individually and collectively entangled in the world in unique, concrete, and local ways. Haraway (2016) thus invites us to stay with the trouble since, as we are entangled parts of an unfolding world, we cannot but co-produce certain local realities rather than others, and for this we can become increasingly response-able.

Developing Imperturbability

Similarly, we recognize the importance of continuously engaging with the third question on the ways in which we need to develop our capabilities as learners, educators and engaged researcher-practitioners in IDS. A core quality and capability which deserves our attention and commitment may be ‘imperturbability’ (Sanford and Haggard, 2022: 52). Imperturbability here refers to the ability to ‘maintain one’s centre and agency in difficult or even chaotic circumstances, [which is] not only valuable for individuals but for societies and organisations’ (Sanford and Haggard, 2022: 52). Thus, rather than purely an individual responsibility, developing our own capacity to be(come) more imperturbable is an indirect approach to developing change agency, and key to individually and collectively learn to work with uncertainty (Sanford and Haggard, 2022). A core aspect of fostering imperturbability lies in managing one’s inner state, and how this inner state translates into our reactions, relations with those around us and our work in the world. The above-mentioned complementary—and arguably interconnected—pedagogies of discomfort, hope and entanglement may offer valuable and practical ways to foster the development of imperturbability, and as one student commented, ‘bringing the outside in and the inside out’.

This calls for carefully designed pedagogical activities and interventions which foster constructive discomfort and care, rather than apathy or polarization. And while our IDS programme has experimented and in parts of the programme consistently engaged with contemplative pedagogical approaches over the past years to embody and operationalize these calls for a decolonization of the field of work and studies (Diem, 2024), this, however, requires a more coherent and collectively carried approach.

VIII. Concluding Invitation

If IDS as a field aims to fulfil its purpose of meaningfully addressing epistemic injustices, this requires an awareness of and a shift in our own world views, or paradigms, both individually and collectively. In this article, we, a team of lecturers and students of the University of Amsterdam, aimed to explore some of the dilemmas of engaging with epistemic injustice within our IDS programme in the context of the 2024 student protests related to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We informed our methodological design and analysis with insights from regenerative theory and design frameworks, complementing these with insights from decolonial theories and transgressive pedagogies. We situate our explorations as part of a broader shift in the field of IDS to decolonize and meaningfully include non-Western perspectives (Connell, 2012; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018; Nagar, 2019) and a focus on ‘repurposing’ the Western university by challenging its complicity in genocide (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2021). Engaging seriously with positionality across third, second and first lines of work also invites those working and learning in the field of IDS to reflect on the name—and consequent identity—of the field, its roots and aspirations. In addition, our approach extends into pedagogical design questions, and a developmental process or pedagogization, which point to the need for continuous introspection, caring spaces which invite discomfort and courage, a challenging of institutional hierarchies through co-creative methods, and learning cultures which foster (self and system) accountability, diversity and dialogue.

But when is our ‘walk of the talk’ truly enough, and will it ever be? As an educational community, how can we navigate this complex reality? How do we foster a sense of collective responsibility—or response-ability (Haraway, 2016)—while co-experiencing constructive discomfort? Is it possible to create a space for experiencing discomfort that encourages reflection/action, not apathy among educators and students alike? These are questions we offer as food for thought, not to suggest as the only solution to the matter. It is through these questions that we seek to contribute to re-engaging with ‘just IDS’ education.

In navigating the difficult question of Rethinking pedagogical design in IDS to meaningfully engage with emerging global injustices, we are reminded that learning about justice is a living practice, constantly reshaped by the world and our place within it. We engaged in a co-creative reshaping using the Three Lines of Work framework, steering us to open a space where global challenges meet the heart of our educational practice, intertwined with the injustices that ripple through our world and our classrooms. The more we move towards pressing global issues, the more our educational spaces must hold space for them, allowing these conversations to flow between the inside and the outside, and back again. We sought to take you, the reader, along with us on this journey, as we navigated these dilemmas together, inviting us all into ongoing conversations and continued learning.