Book chapters for Sara de Jong

Posted on 13 June 2024

Identities and Intersectionality and Armed with Words

Image of Professor Sara de Jong

Professor Sara de Jong has contributed a chapter to two books both out today!

The first is the latest edition of "The Companion to Development Studies" a comprehensive resource published by Routledge. This colorful new edition brings together insights from leading experts in the field of development studies, addressing a wide range of critical topics.

Professor de Jong's chapter is on Identities and Intersectionality.

Abstract

This chapter highlights the importance of identity constructions in aid work. ‘Intersectionality’ is introduced as a key concept for analysing identities, since it captures how categories of difference, embedded in structures of power and inequality, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability, are inseparable and co-constitutive. The chapter presents the growing interest in the development workers’ identities in development studies and the public realm. I suggest that considering the identities of development workers and their interplay with development policy, practice and discourse, offers an entry point into macrolevel phenomena such as global inequality and meso phenomena like organisational structures.

Sara's second chapter is in the book "Translation and Decolonisation: Interdisciplinary Approaches" published by Routledge. The book offers compelling explorations of the pivotal role that translation plays in the complex and necessarily incomplete process of decolonisation.

Sara's chapter is called ‘Armed with Words: (De)colonising Translation in the US-led NATO war in Afghanistan (2001–2021)’

Abstract

Afghan local civilian interpreters employed by international forces operated in a space inextricably marked by and complicit with the logics and violence of coloniality. Analysis of the translation practices in a space that weaponises translation needs to recognise the conditions that constrain the potential for subversion. I argue in this chapter that this does not preclude that interactions in translation can – at times – confront and undermine neo-colonial logics and relations. Based on unique data from in-depth interviews with male Afghan interpreters who worked for international forces during the US-led NATO military intervention in Afghanistan, this chapter presents three decolonial translational challenges posed during interactions in translation. The first traces how a missed translation of a joke reveals the anxiety of Western soldiers and briefly uncovers and unsettles the hegemonic order. The second translational interaction showed how efforts to instrumentally and ignorantly use Farsi training to establish rapport backfired into creating further distrust. It also created a moment where a local interpreter’s task shifted from translation to the silencing of an international soldier. In the final example, I trace the way in which local interpreters responded to the selective translation and appropriation of a Dari phrase with their own affirmative sabotage of the falsely equivalent English phrase to demand their rights to protection. Drawing on postcolonial theory and decolonial theory’s epistemic aims, this chapter shows that attention to interpretative interactions can deepen and complicate understandings of power and highlight neo-imperial dependencies, anxieties, and ignorance in the US-led NATO war in Afghanistan.