This story has also been published on the EADI Blog

“I hope for a world where International Development Studies cease to exist.” was the first line of my motivation letter to the University of Amsterdam (UvA). A provocation, yes – but also a belief. A way to signal that I saw the contradictions at the heart of the discipline – that a field born out of colonial legacies, and sustained by the hierarchies it claims to dismantle, cannot be reformed without eventually ceasing to exist. I thought this was an idealistic position. What I did not realise was just how intimately I would come to feel the weight of those contradictions – in my emotions, in my learning, and in my hope.

My Master’s thesis, conducted across the UvA and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, focused on what is called affective decolonisation: the emotional infrastructures that underpin and uphold colonial knowledge systems. Through interviews, focus groups, autoethnography, and imagination-based methodologies, I explored how emotional norms, specifically those rooted in whiteness and coloniality, shape what is considered “valid” knowledge, and who gets to speak, be heard, teach, or simply be in Development Studies classrooms.

But this wasn’t just a research project. It was a reckoning – with the university, with the field of development, and with myself.

The Emotional Architecture of Development Studies

From the first day of class, we talked about decolonisation. Texts from Global South scholars. Words like “reflexivity,” “criticality,” and “positionality” floated around seminar tables. And yet, with time I could feel something was missing. Beneath the surface of these good intentions, a quieter, deeper emotional order remained intact. Emotions that disrupted, destabilised, or disoriented this undercurrent were a nuisance to the norm. Discomfort was given space but only in regard to old approaches and blatant racist dynamics. Anger was acceptable, but only if it remained abstract. Grief was fine if kept theoretical.

This affective order was not accidental. It was maintained through unspoken rules about how to act “properly academic”. This is not to say that any of this was ever on purpose but rather a natural byproduct of a colonial order we all are a part of. These rules were racialised, classed, gendered, and rooted in ideals of rationality to the colonial order of classrooms. Additionally, they reinforced a very particular kind of student: detached, composed, confident but not too confrontational, critical but not too disruptive. And if you didn’t match this script, your words were harder to hear. Your feelings were too much. Your presence, too political. At least, from a student’s perspective.

At both UvA and IDS, students spoke about these dynamics with quiet exhaustion. Some had already learned to suppress the parts of themselves that didn’t fit in. Teachers, too, were navigating unfamiliar terrain – often committed to decolonial goals, but unsure how to hold space for the emotional complexity that came with them – stating that “a certain skill set is needed that you just don’t learn on your way to becoming a teacher”.

Protest, Palestine, and the Violence of Silence

As I was writing the thesis, the genocide in Gaza intensified. Student protests erupted across Europe, calling out universities for their complicity in settler-colonial violence. At the University of Amsterdam, those protests were met with police batons and dogs, tear gas, and arrests. I was there. I saw comrades dragged by riot police. I heard the cries. I felt the confusion, rage, and heartbreak.

It felt surreal to write about “decolonising” education in the middle of this. In fact, it felt worse than surreal – it felt complicit. I was researching how universities reproduce colonial violence while the same institution I was writing about sent militarised police onto campus to crush anti-colonial resistance. At times, I wanted to burn the whole thesis. It felt hypocritical to continue writing about affective injustice when real people were being silenced, displaced, and killed – and our universities refused to even name it. Given my positionality as a white privileged woman, it felt absurd to focus on emotions while others were deprived of their actual livelihoods. 

The institutional response was, predictably, steeped in liberal neutrality. The rectors of Dutch universities issued a letter justifying their continued partnerships with Israeli institutions by invoking “open debate” and “academic freedom.” But what kind of freedom protects perpetrators while criminalising protestors? What kind of neutrality ignores genocide and apartheid?

These moments made it clearer than ever: emotional injustice is not just a classroom issue. It is a structure. A system. A shield for power. The inability of institutions to name genocide is not just political – it is affective. It is a refusal to feel. A refusal to grieve. A refusal to be involved.

Feeling My Way Through It

Conducting this research was emotionally intense because it wasn’t just an academic project - it was personal. I was studying structures that I was also embedded in. I didn’t just observe affective injustice – I felt it, in real time.

There were moments of doubt when I asked myself whether I was “too emotional” to be writing this thesis. I worried about being seen as unprofessional or biased. Was I not nuanced enough? And I noticed how often I checked myself in class: Was I being too passionate? Too critical? Too angry?

These internal questions revealed how affective discipline works not just through institutional policies, but through our bodies. I carried this weight into classrooms, into writing, into conversations with supervisors. And yet, these feelings became part of the method. They helped me recognise that emotions are not peripheral – they are knowledge in themselves.

Autoethnography gave me a way to honour this. By writing from within my own experience, I tried to resist the distancing tendencies of academic writing. I began to see how telling my own story wasn’t a retreat from analysis, but a way of grounding it in lived, embodied reality. This was perhaps the most decolonial move I made in the entire process: refusing the false neutrality of disembodied expertise.

Hope, Discomfort, and Transformative Pedagogies

Affective decolonisation, I argue, is not a side project. It is the heart of the matter. Because you can’t decolonise knowledge without decolonising the emotional conditions in which knowledge is produced. You can’t have epistemic justice without emotional justice.

I drew on pedagogical frameworks like critical hope, pedagogy of discomfort, and radical openness to imagine alternatives. What would it mean to build classrooms where discomfort is not feared but facilitated? Where emotional expressions are not managed but honoured? Where the goal is not safety as comfort – but safety as liberation?

These are no utopian dreams. They are already being practiced – in pockets, in moments, in classrooms where educators and students refuse the affective status quo. But they require emotional labour. They require risk. They require institutions to let go of the fantasy of neutrality and instead grapple with their histories, their complicities, their silences. And they require resources; mental health services for students and teachers, and most of all time to reflect and be with the struggle.

The Limits and the Possibilities

I do not claim that my thesis and the work I hope to do in the future will offer definite solutions. This work is messy, partial, and full of unanswered questions. But I would like to say it is honest. And it is an invitation – for others to feel, to question, to challenge. It highlights the need for community, emotional connections and a willingness to be uncomfortable. 

Some days I wonder whether any of it matters. Whether another paper about decolonisation will change anything. But then I remember that emotion is a kind of resistance. That to feel is to refuse numbness. That to name injustice even in an academic register is a form of solidarity. Not enough. But something.

As Paolo Freire reminds us, hope is not the certainty of arrival, it is the movement in search. My thesis was a movement in search. Of justice. Of voice. Of feeling. Of freedom.

Carla Diem holds a Research Master’s in International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam and is currently pursuing a second Master’s in Philosophy.