University academic invited to speak at the World Bank
Wed Feb 24 2016 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)
University academic invited to speak at the World Bank
24 February 2016
Dr Ritesh Shah
The term ‘resilience’ is usually associated with positive images of individuals and communities coping with the aftermaths of disasters, but for one academic, the terms can also be used irresponsibly when it comes to supporting education in a post-conflict recovery.
Dr Ritesh Shah, of the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Education and Social Work, will travel to Washington DC to speak at a World Bank forum to challenge how the term resilience often places responsibility and blame into the hands of individuals and local organisations. In fact, in situations of conflict, the onus of responsibility and action may need to be shared more broadly, he says. The forum is a pre-event to the World Bank’s Fragility, Conflict and Violence (FCV) Forum being held in Washington, DC from March 1-3, 2016.
In his presentation “Is Education Resilience a Relevant Guide for Response in FCV Contexts (and how or why not?)”, Ritesh will reflect on his experiences from work he did in Palestine (West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem). He visited the region three times between 2011-14 and worked with USAID, CARE International, Norwegian Refugee Council and Mercy Corps as an evaluation consultant to various projects aimed at supporting the resilience of individuals and communities.
“Through this work I became increasingly critical of how donors and programme implementers were drawing on the language of ‘resilience’ to justify their actions, particularly in a situation such as Gaza where conflict repeats itself and is caused by structural inequities.”
He initially delivered a keynote address at the University of Newcastle in late 2014 about his experiences. That led him to develop a paper reflecting on this.
The paper, titled “Protecting children in a situation of ongoing conflict: Is resilience sufficient as the end product?” was published late last year in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. In the paper Ritesh outlined how in such programmes shifting responsibility to both cope with and respond to conflict onto the backs of students, teachers and schools may inappropriately move attention away from the broader conditions causing this conflict. Such responses within education, he argues, are unsustainable and immoral, particularly if the aim is to support children’s rights to education during and after a period of conflict.
“Since being published, the article has attracted a lot of attention. I was contacted by agencies like the British Aid Agency, Norwegian Refugee Council and the World Bank stating that it has provoked discussions and debate in their organisations about what they understand resilience to mean and when it is justified and/or ethical to use such language or not.”
Out of these discussions, the World Bank invited him to speak to its team of Education Managers, as well as representatives from various donors and NGOs at the forum. It is a talk Ritesh is looking forward to.
“What is nice about this invitation to the event at the World Bank is that it exemplifies the type of academic service and impact I want to have—on communities of practice in the development sector who are funding and/or supporting educational programming in conflict-affected parts of the world.”
“To be able to bridge my academic scholarship and role as ‘critic and conscience’ is what I’ve been striving for, so I’m pretty pleased to know that my work is having a real world impact on the way these organisations operate. Hopefully it will prompt them to act in more ethical, moral and socially just ways.”
Contact
Anna Kellett, Media Relations Adviser
Email: anna.kellett@auckland.ac.nz