Early career pracademics in international development: satisfactions and challenges

Abstract

This essay reflects on the satisfactions and challenges of early career researchers entering the field of development work from an autoethnographic perspective. During my doctoral and postdoctoral research, I engaged in small-scale cooperations with local non-governmental organisations in Tajikistan by assisting them with project development, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation. I saw pracademia as a more ethical and pragmatic way to engage with practitioners by supporting their work, while simultaneously pursuing my fieldwork. However, several obstacles arose in the process which reflected the unique ways in which international development and academia function. They concerned differences in organisational frameworks, epistemological and ontological approaches to social reality, as well as temporalities of these two fields.

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