Decolonising Research Series: Interview with Dr. Anu Ranawana

This series of podcast episodes will focus on Decolonising Research, and feature talks from the Decolonising Research Festival held at the University of Exeter in June and July 2022.

The thirteenth episode of the series features University of Exeter PGR Olabisi Obamakin interviewing Dr. Anu Ranawana, Research Specialist at Christian Aid.

Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Transcription

00:09

Hello, and welcome to rd in the in betweens. I'm your host Kelly Preece. And every fortnight I talk to a different guest, about researchers development, and everything in between.

00:34

Hello, and thank you for joining this online resource. My name is Bisi Obamakin. I'm a theology PhD student at University of Exeter. Today, we are joined by Dr. Anu Ranawana, sorry, who is a theologian and political economist. And he's gonna be joining us to discuss the theory of the theory behind decolonization. So thank you for joining this discussion. I really appreciate your time. Yeah, a little bit about yourself, what you do and what your research specialisms are.

01:08

Thanks Bisi, I'm so excited to be here. I absolutely love anything to me, like so. So I'm really honored and excited and all of those sorts of things. So a little bit about me, um, you said, I'm a theologian and political economist, I also always like to say, I'm a postulant theologian, because I'm really kind of still still on my journey. As a theologian, a lot of my work and my background has been in international development as a researcher in international development, but also working in the terms of looking at aspects of global justice. So in a sense, I come I come to theology from sort of from the ground of global justice. So I'm very, very sort of rooted in all of that. So because of that, I wear about six different hats at the moment. I'm a research advisor for Christian Aid. I'm doing a project at the University of St. Andrews, where I'm looking at the importance of storytelling to anticolonial, feminist theology, in Asian culture. And I also teach a little bit at the Queens foundation on aspects of justice, and mission. So I juggle a few different things. And so that's yeah, that's me. Amazing.

02:22

I also wanted to ask you, like, how did you get how'd you get involved with like, decolonial work? And that kind of thing? Like, how did you get involved in it?

02:31

In? Well, I mean, in the sense that I think, I've always been something that I've, I've thought about being someone from Sri Lanka, which was a former, and not only a British colony, but a Dutch colony, and a Portuguese colony. So you always think about who you are as a colonized subject. Because there's the kind of internalization of of, of the colony doesn't really go away, even, even even after independence. So in that sense, I think that's always a part of, of your conversations. And I think, in trying to understand what one's intellectual as well as sort of personal identity, I started reading, as we all do, I started reading people who had been writing on this issue, so people like Sylvia winter, or me, Suzanne, or fennel, who opened up these questions that, you know, you've always been trying to find out about yourself to find out about your country to find out about the global scape. And so, you know, in that sense, one of the things that, that these sort of writers do these thinkers do is that they push you to say, to push you beyond your kind of boundaries of, you know, what do you know, what, what don't you know, like, Are you sure of the ground you stand on? And that's kind of incredible. But I think what's really sort of affirmed me and forced me to be passionate about this kind of work has also been being involved in social