Power to Co-Produce #4 Embodied Resistance with Kalpana Wilson

Abstract

Urban Trialogue in exchange with Kalpana Wilson

Kalpana Wilson is a lecturer in the Geography Department at Birkbeck, University of London and a founder member of the campaigning organisation South Asia Solidarity Group. Her research and teaching explore questions of race/gender, labour, neoliberalism, imperialism and reproductive rights and justice, with a particular focus on South Asia and its diasporas. She is the author of Race, Racism and Development: Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice (Zed Books, 2012) and co-editor of Gender, Agency and Coercion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She has published widely on themes of race, gender, international development, women’s agency and reproductive justice in journals including Development and Change, Feminist Review and Antipode, and in media outlets including The Guardian and Open Democracy.

In this episode, #UrbanTrialogue exchanges with Kalpana Wilson around her work on the relationships between race, capital, embodiment and resistance in transnational historical and contemporary contexts. The episode reveals continuous material processes of colonisation, particularly in the Global South, in the name of international development or even of climate crisis mitigation, which ultimately criminalise the use of local knowledge. During the episode, Kalpana visits various grassroots movements in India to exhibit the decolonial ways of being, such as farmers moveement against the power of corporate capital or the Shaheen Bagh movement by Muslim women in action for their basic rights. This session was recorded during the scientific mission at the Floating University Berlin with the support of the “Cost Action 19129 Decolonising Development”.