SINGAPORE – To attempt to sum up the inimitable academic and activist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak would be folly, but four words she uttered on Nov 19 come close: “Practice is a theorising.”
The 81-year-old has spent more than 40 years working in very poor places, but admits to not having found a methodology for how best to serve people who live there. She contrasts her attitude with those who choose to “make a topic sentence out of their little heads”.
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