Introduction: Geographic Imaginaries and Development Studies

Imaginaries: “The ways that other places, people and landscapes are represented; how these imaginings reflect the preconceptions and desires of their inventors, and the relations of power between subjects and objects thereof.” - Edward Said

Visual images: "powerful ‘cultural objects’ that can convey complex accounts of the social world and, since images are not produced in a vacuum, they unavoidably carry embedded systems of values and ideologies.” - Tommaso Durante

“Every now and then, your lens needs refocusing.” - Popular saying

Rivers and bays, plants and seeds, dignity and displacement, livelihoods and dispossession, staying put and fleeing: these were elements around which four scholars—three Brown University students writing senior theses and one professor, all studying the idea of development critically—found common territory, over the past year, for interrogating received notions, for letting peoples’ histories speak beyond the written archives, and for aesthetics-in-practice. In each case, the images with which the scholars worked--whether photographs, drawings or maps—were important to inquiry and knowing, not just as beautiful illustrations, but as assertions, provocations and arguments themselves. They were evidence that would not stay still, imaginaries with impacts both deliberate and unanticipated. In some of these wayward images, people seemed entirely absent, but the landscapes and waterscapes bore glimpses of who, outside the frame, had been there or might be coming back. In others, both subjects and geographical features were deliberately posed to be more legible by official power. Some images bespoke a beauty of place, season and ways of being that exceeded the problems of inequality and injustice, but also never let go of their indisputable centrality in the lives around which studies were being centered. This exhibit is a small part of the multifaceted, translocal story we four contributors wanted to tell of differing geographies to be seen, felt and listened to, another way of sharing some of the ideas emerging in our work. In doing so, we draw upon not only critical development studies, but exciting new work in landscape studies, indigenous knowledges, environmental histories, critical black geographies, and feminist epistemologies, among other fields. Had the terrible virus not intervened, Development’s Wayward Geographies would have been a physical “epistemic walk” through the corridors of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, at graduation time. But perhaps this way, through the digital doorway, your senses and thoughts may travel even more widely in time and space, as ours were compelled to do.

The co-curators,

Geri Augusto, Gerard Visiting Associate Professor of International & Public Affairs and Africana Studies, Brown University; Development Track Director, Watson Institute and Frishta Qaderi, Development Studies, Brown '20