A call to rethink African scholars beyond “local experts”: mobility, race, and gender in Europe

Abstract

Development discourses have been widely criticized for creating hierarchical dichotomies, such as “developed” (the global North) and “developing” (the global majority), with the former being the ideal standard to which the rest must catch up. The development paradigm has infiltrated academic spaces globally, including international research collaborations, creating various categories such as (non)scientific (local) expertise. We see such hierarchies as mechanisms of legitimation to maintain the ongoing subjugation of African scholars based on the historical and contemporary asymmetries in global knowledge production. Informed by the experiences of five female African doctoral researchers in the Netherlands, this paper problematizes and disrupts the concepts of “Expert” and “local expert”. We question the relevance of these concepts in a context where global knowledge production continues to feed from coloniality and also question the old power relations that continue to enable knowledge inequalities between the global North and global South.