Authentic Consent and the Decolonial Trouble of “Studying Up”

Studying gender in African Union and national politics, I came across a scenario in which my interview requests were ignored until someone from the donor community vouched for me. As field-based researchers, we often rely on our networks to facilitate access to interlocutors. How should we interpret situations where the relationship between the facilitator and the desired interlocutor is characterised by a degree of dependency and asymmetrical power relations? In this article, I build on autoethnographic vignettes of moments when consent was refused; when consent was given upon international donors’ intervention; when consent was given upon intervention by a “gender and development” community member; and finally, when consent was given upon intervention by national staff of a development partner. Theoretically, I grapple with how decolonial approaches to “studying up” may inform the notion of “authentic consent”, interrogating race and nationality, professional communities, and gender in knowledge production. By examining the implications of skewed North–South power relations for negotiating consent, the article examines the challenges of implementing decolonial research strategies when “studying up” in Ethiopia and Kenya. Drawing on my fieldwork experiences and the scholarship outlined above, I argue that authentic consent is both relational and steeped in complex and context-specific power relations.