'In', 'for', or 'with'?

[Cunliffe D J (Comp)]

Hi All,

I think there is something in this conversation that strikes to the
heart of what we (or most of us I guess) are trying to achieve.

Annie Ross wrote about the artificiality of borders between people and
that "...academic life likes to teach us academics that we
are somehow different (smarter, more this or that), but we are not.  if
we
all knew that, there would be fewer problems. ... there is no 'insider'
ther is no 'outsider'.  that is the big secret."

While I am entirely happy to accept that academics aren't smarter etc,
(guess who spent 45 minutes walking around Bristol Airport car park in
the rain in the dark on Sunday night because he hadn't thought to make a
note of where he parked the car!) I really think that there are some
important issues around the insider / outsider boundary. If we fail to
recognise and manage these issues then at best our efforts will have no
effect, and at worse will cause damage.

As an Englishman living and working in Wales and as a non-Welsh speaker
(practically) working with the Welsh language, I recognise that I am
'outside' along several dimensions. Whilst I am happy to accept the
label "incomer", hopefully I have managed to avoid being branded as an
outright colonist. 

No matter how long I live in Wales, or how good my Welsh becomes (I
wish!) I cannot ever foresee a time in which I would actually BE Welsh -
either in my own mind or the minds of others. 

To my mind the best I can do is to recognise this and to try to identify
appropriate ways of managing it. 

Being a simple computer person, my preference is for simple practical
guidelines like those contained in (part of) Decolonizing Methodologies
rather than high brow discussions of the need to re-radicalise the
post-colonial agenda within the post-modern neo-liberal context (hmmm...
can't help feeling that I ought to have included feminism in there
somewhere...)
 
Be seeing you,

Daniel.