My Fellowship Year: Reconstructing My Social Change Mission

The biggest lesson I’ve learned from this fellowship is that we all, in our different ways, with our different areas of interest, approaches, geographical locations and scopes, can fit together, and become a strong multidimensional force to fight inequality, writes Jite Phido. 

“It’s a sabbatical,” I said to my bemused colleagues when I announced my imminent departure in July 2021. Heading the programmes team at a leading social and behaviour change communication non-profit in Nigeria and having spent the previous five years working on participatory and inclusive interventions for violent conflict prevention and combatting violent extremism, I was burned out and needed a break. I wanted to reset, learn new things, and find a community and new energy for the transnational exchanges that are needed to eliminate inequality once and for all.

These were the expectations that I had when I left my home in Lagos, Nigeria, for the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE) programme in September 2021. A year later, I can say that my experience as a Residential Fellow on the AFSEE programme has been one of the most transformative experiences of my entire life.

Encouraging self-reflection and critical thinking 

Anyone applying for a fellowship like AFSEE likely has more than a passing interest in inequality. From my perspective as a Nigerian, African, Black feminist woman ethnically from the conflicted oil-producing Niger Delta region, but born and raised in cosmopolitan Lagos, designing and producing participatory media programming amplifying marginalised perspectives and voices was my approach to tackling inequality. Admittedly, working for a local NGO in the Global South within a global growth-focused developmentalist paradigm and with agendas heavily influenced by interests in the Global North, a lot of my thinking and my previous training aligned with those ways of thinking; that inequality could be addressed by inclusive development that benefited the most marginalised.

From the very first module of the AFSEE programme, all of us fellows were asked to be reflexive as we analysed our activisms and praxes through lenses of the histories and measurements of inequalities, the fallacies of social mobility and meritocracy, the long-ranging legacies of coloniality, ideas of degrowth, and so on. As a practitioner from Nigeria intimately acquainted with the aspirations of the communities I had worked with for access to “development” and equitable distribution of fiscal, infrastructural, and social resources, some of these ideas felt incredibly radical and far away from my reality, but they also helped me to self-reflect and see my own work in a completely new light.

Reconstructing my mission for social change

For a practitioner from the Global South, it was in some ways a privilege but in many other ways an oddity sitting in a rarefied academic institution in the Global North studying inequalities and the epistemic injustice inherent in the Northern validation, production, colonisation, and institutionalisation of knowledge. After more than a decade out of school, it took some getting used to having your thoughts and ideas and ways of knowing graded and validated through a North-centric framework, and it often felt ironic given the subjects we were discussing. But it was this irony that most helped me to contextualise my work as a practitioner and my experiences of the past decade and their place in fighting inequality.

The first lesson I learned during my fellowship was critical reflexivity. It’s easy to get attached to the mental models we construct for ourselves, and our work, and it is difficult to criticise the way we, or our movements, may have become complicit in reproducing hierarchies and inequalities. Questioning everything, even what we believe is the right way to tackle societal problems, opens our eyes to blind spots and prevents us from perpetuating harm.

The second lesson I learned was to pick and choose what applied from inequality theory and to amplify knowledge validated by Southern lived experience equally to those published in elite journals. In practising critical reflexivity as you study at an elite academic institution that valorises certain ways of knowing and doing, you run the risk of becoming hypercritical of your own work and experiences working to eliminate inequality. Yet, doing the fellowship with experienced inequality practitioners from around the world, we were able to deconstruct the valuable lessons we learned in class, and also identify the gaps in Western ways of knowing and validating. The generosity of my peers in sharing their experience-based interpretations of the course readings, research, and theories within their contexts, and listening to my own ideas was arguably more valuable than the courses would have been alone.

Most of all, even while noting the lessons learned from professional experiences, I grew to appreciate the experience and the work I had done before, the colleagues, partners and communities that made it possible, and to respect the validity of their hopes, dreams, and aspirations within the current global paradigm. In a just society, there are different ways of knowing and being, and philosophies and models of challenging social and economic inequities. The biggest lesson I’ve learned from this fellowship is that we all, in our different ways, with our different areas of interest, approaches, geographical locations and scopes, can fit together, and become a strong multidimensional force to fight inequality.

Applications for the 2023-24 fellowship are open from 10 October 2022 until 12 January 2023.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.