CRP explores how control over resources and representations is used to maintain current patterns of political and economic dominance, and how an awareness of such phenomena can help to increase social justice. We focus on how people are elaborating alternative systems of discourse and practice to challenge current global distributions of wealth and power. We explore ideological and practical struggles over the goals and practices of development. We conduct multi-site fieldwork to incorporate the range of actors engaged in specific development interventions and to account for the range of forces that shape development policies. We investigate how different kinds of knowledge are produced by academics, professionals, and politicians, as well as by the indigenous, local, and lay groups anthropologists have traditionally studied.
Power is involved in the way people produce, access, and use knowledge.
The producers of some forms of knowledge wield greater power than others. We study how participants involved in projects that cross cultural, geographic, or disciplinary boundaries negotiate the production of knowledge.