Beyond positionalities – engaging with academic and willful resistance through complex communication

Dominant framings of development research often focus on limited notions of responsibility as part of research and may fail to recognise the agency and willfulness of the marginalised. This paper conceptualises a deconstruction of responsibility through Sara Ahmed’s “Willful Subject” and María Lugones’s “Complex Communication”. Willfullness is a diagnosis of the failure to comply with the authority of the dominant. Complex communication contributes to practices of self-construction, including resistances to dominance. Through a reflexive re-examination of field encounters and deep conversations with community members impacted by large-scale land investment schemes in southwest Tanzania, the paper achieves two objectives. First, it highlights moments that require researchers to interrogate how they may fail to represent resistances if they are not open to self-construction. Second, it demonstrates that being responsible (for) is about co-determining the specific ways in which researchers willfully align their actions with the struggles of the marginalised Other.