Centring the ‘Self-in-Process’

Abstract

The actor, agent and subject have held a central place in development studies, particularly since the development impasse of the early 1990s. Since then, the effort to ‘illuminate the micro-foundations of macro-processes’ (Booth 1993: 62) has also entailed a focus on the actor embedded within a socio-economic context, in order to reveal the ways localised actions feed into broader processes of development (Cowen and Shenton 1998). Scholars have drawn upon practice theory which places practices at the centre of systems of domination, and potential transformation (Ortner 1984) and post-structuralism (particularly the earlier work of Foucault) to bring together localised actions with explanations of macro-processes, as well as to provide powerful indications of development’s unintended effects (Ferguson 1994; de Haan and Zoomers 2005; Long 2001; Rossi 2004a). Considering these important interventions, why do we need yet another reminder to make the self central in research about and for development? What do we gain from a reconsideration of personhood?