Links & Content I liked 07

The new year has really kicked off with some interesting and thought-provoking posts around the blogosphere, but this week I also threw in a few lighter items for entertainment! 

The Work Projects Administration (WPA) Poster Collection

The Work Projects Administration (WPA) Poster Collection consists of 907 posters produced from 1936 to 1943 by various branches of the WPA. The posters were designed to publicize exhibits, community activities, theatrical productions, and health and educational programs in seventeen states and the District of Columbia. The results of one of the first U.S. Government programs to support the arts, the posters were added to the Library's holdings in the 1940s.

Strictly speaking, this has little to do with international development, but the collection is definitely worth browsing through! And it has a focus on community activities, public health & safety, infrastructure and even free trade so I guess these are still relevant topics from an era before 'development' was even invented...

Development

Where are the interesting aid thinkers?

The second is the fact that aid bloggers aren’t really addressing the failure to think in an interesting way. We’re not doing the interesting thinking, and we’re not calling people out. I think it’s because most of us are part of the aid establishment, and we all have our next job to think of. We don’t want to be known as wacky troublemakers any more than the next aid worker does. What we really need then is aid journalists. Outsiders, with no vested interested in the system.

An interesting dialogue between Alanna Shaikh and Paul Currion with a range of interesting comments on the original dialogue, too. I tend to disagree with Alanna's thoughts. First, I really doubt that organisations care enough to identify and penalise 'wacky troublemakers'. Some aid bloggers or academics really like to believe in 'black lists' or the idea that people in [insert large, evil aid organisation] really remember that critical report they wrote 3 years ago. What matters in many cases is whether or not you have done a similar job before and less that you are a critical thinker with great potential to think out of the box. The most common reaction is that no matter how interesting your thinking is you will get ignored unless you comply with the standards of CV-writing, proposal-writing, publications and aid-speak. So many 'interesting aid thinkers' are likely to have a double-identity as a 'conventional' academic or consultant and ideally have other avenues to 'live out' their interesting thinking. Second, I am not sure whether we need more 'aid journalists'. Or, to be more precise, I am not entirely sure whether aid journalists are really people with no 'vested interest in the system'. Maybe this used to be the case, but today aid agencies, journalists, the military, academics are all part of 'the industry' in one way or another. I find it interesting that Robert Chambers is mentioned as an 'interesting aid thinker'. I could not agree more - but Robert is practically retired and I am not sure whether the current academic system would have provided long-term, full-time employment for someone like Robert and his ideas. One of the key problems I see is that academia has succumbed to the neoliberal discourse with huge implication for research, fund-raising - and, very important, teaching. Today's growing generation of graduates from ever-larger and professionalsed development studies programmes has unlearned 'interesting thinking' even before they embark on their careers.
So where are interesting thinkers then? My cautious answer would be to rely less on brand names of universities, think tanks, consultancy firms or aid organisations itself, but to look for candidates with less straightforward CVs, because they are/were self-funded, had to piece together smaller scholarships for their work, took time off for fieldwork and deliberately did not want to join large bureaucratic organisations and their incentive and promotion structures.

Fairtrade International Investigation Leads to Questions of Bloomberg's Journalistic Integrity

When a journalist accuses Fairtrade producers of forced child labour, the charges must be taken seriously followed by a thorough investigation. However, when a reporter's story proves to be unsubstantiated, there is a need to question the media. In relation to Bloomberg's story on child labour on a Fairtrade certified organic cotton farm, my own inquiry found the farmers cited in the December 15th story were not certified as the article claims. Despite contacting the editors directly with the discrepancy, they held to their story.

Talking about 'aid journalism'. Apparently this is another example of what happens when a professional journalist embarks on a story to prove aid wrong...

Peace Journalism or Pacifist Journalism?

As we consider what pacifist journalism might look like, perhaps we should examine how pacifist journalism might differ from peace journalism. Here are some ideas:
A. Peace journalism gives peacemakers a voice alongside those who advocate violence. Pacifist journalism would silence warmongers and openly promote only peacemakers.
B. Peace journalists avoid using inflammatory, demonizing, victimizing language so as to not further inflame or provoke those who might promote or engage in violence. Pacifist journalism would embrace negative language and use it to demonize those who advocate violent conflict. Pacifist journalists would use sensational language and images as propaganda to negatively portray wars and warmongers.
C. Peace journalists seek to maintain their objectivity and to balance their stories. Yes, they are framing their stories differently, with an understanding that what they write and how they write it could trigger violence. A pacifist journalist, one supposes, would openly reject the notion of objectivity in favor of spinning information to promote an anti-war, anti-violence agenda.

I have been following Steven Youngblood's blog on Peace/Conflict Sensitive Journalism for a while. This has been a core debate in peace studies for many years and I'm glad that Steven raises this question gain in the realm of his practical work.

No more peace conferences!!!! (the conflict in Jonglei)

For those that might not know, a peace conference is basically just an event where the politicians and community leaders from both warring parties come together, have a nice meal, hand out some t-shirts, and tell some wanker consultant about what THEY think the cause of conflict is and how THEY think the issues can be resolved. A whole bunch of pretty resolution and recommendations are written down....and then ends up in some file to never see the light of day again. This obsession of peace conferences basically stems from its successes in resolving some of the inter-community conflict, back in the day. Since those successes, whenever there is a conflict, peace conferences have become the de facto solution.....but it has been so long since they have been successful. The organisers typically exclude the people who are involved in the conflict, and when the belligerents are involved, they will say whatever sounds good at the time just for the sake of saying them.....people behave differently in the presence of different people?!.....that is just shocking! (anyone who has ever done a community focus group discussion will know what Im talking about).

Bored in Post-Conflict never wastes time with diplomatic language or the subtleties of aid-speak which is great...and as most of the time s/he has a point about conferences in general and peace ones in particular...

Differences between internal and external blogging

• If you want to reach professional peers or like-minded individuals from beyond your own organization (but mostly the tech-savvy ones), or to promote your and your organization’s work externally, and also to get critical feedback then external blogging is the way to go. It’s also a good way to build your personal online brand and build external professional networks.
• If you want to reach colleagues to learn from and also influence them then internal blogging is the way to go. While you might reach a larger audience through an external blog – your contributions might well have a more direct impact internally where it might be easier to directly apply learnings from the discussion into our work. The main challenge at the moment might be that consumption of content on our internal tools is still relatively low  – once more people are regularly reading and contributing then this effect could be much greater.

Ian Thorpe reflects on the differences between internal organisational blogging and external blogging with the whole wide world...The question I had after reading this was about the future of this approach. As interesting as the articles are that he compares, they are also fairly abstract and not that organisation-specific, i.e. sharing practical, yet general information. What I would like to see in the future would be to share more specific questions and challenges externally and use the audience for input (on draft reports, policy papers, M&E approaches etc.). I realise that this form of real-time transparency is unlikely to happen, but wouldn't it be fantastic to get feedback on a report and enhance its quality (and impact) if committed readers could comment before it goes through the final editing and sanitisation process (not that the UN would ever do such a thing...) so people can actually learn beyond politically-accepted results-based management language?!

Meet the Writer Being Sued For His 17,000 Twitter Followers 

But his subsequent Twitter account was @Phonedog_Noah, and that has led to an eyebrow-raising lawsuit from his former employer. The reviews website Phonedog claims Kravitz’s Twitter account, now renamed simply @NoahKravitz, is the equivalent of a corporate customer list that the writer upped and left with. The site wants $2.50 for each of Kravitz’s 17,000 Twitter followers over an eight-month period, which adds up to $340,000.

You have to be imaginative to envision a day when development Twitter Followers will actually be worth something, but this is still a new and interesting question: What happens to your Twitter community if you change organisations? Most development Tweeps put a 'comments are my own' disclaimer in their profile, but there is often a link to their organisational affiliation - so what will happen if, say a senior World Bank Tweep leaves the Bank and joins a radical Marxist research institute?! All jokes aside, this may become an interesting questions some day...

Anthropology

The Hub Nearby (where you get everything you love to miss)

Nairobi, Bangkok, Bali, Darwin, Miami, Johannesburg, Dakar, New Delhi. What do all these cities have in common?

You guessed it: All of them are officially serving sushi.

Anthropology meets Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like! 


One of my favorite scenes

To refresh, it’s 1962 and Tom Hanks plays Lawrence, a spoiled preppy who takes his roommate’s place in the Peace Corps in Thailand to avoid a gambling debt.

OMG! Tom Hanks and John Candy did a 'development movie'! I hadn't heard about 'Volunteers' before, but will definitely try to get hold of a copy. It's interesting to read Ken Levine's dialogue between Hanks and a local drug lord, but I wonder whether an updated version of this plot/movie would still have such a scene. In today's world, Tom Hanks would probably end up at a workshop in a fancy Bangkok hotel and would be forced to talk to a PowerPoint presentation on community development without having a clue, but naturally using aid-speak gibberish he read in a book on his flight in...

Academia 
From university to government: non-academic career options

This presentation is meant to offer insights about what grad students should expect if they are considering employment in government compared to a university setting.
Presenter: Shelley M. Rinehart, executive director, policy development and planning/energy, government of New Brunswick; professor of marketing at University of New Brunswick.

I haven't watched the whole presentation yet, but I'm not convinced that her marketing/policy development background would work in development-related fields as well...

Around the Web: Some posts on The Research Works Act (Now chronological!)

To end on a more serious note, there is a very interesting debate gaining momentum about the US-Research Works Act and its potentially detrimental effects on open-source academic publishing.

One of the many posts sums up the key issues:

For those who missed the furor last week over a bill that was referred to a House Committee in mid-December, the Research Works Act is intended “To ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector.”

To do that, it would prohibit federal agencies from insisting on open access copies of articles reporting the results of research that has been funded by those agencies, policies like the one the NIH mandated in 2008.

The Association of American Publishers is ecstatic about the bill, and one detects the fingerprints of their lobbyists all over it.

This is going to be an important debate about the future of academic publishing and may become a text-book case on how the large commercial publishers have used their money and power to lobby for more restrictions on publicly-funded research, ultimately making it more expensive for everybody to access scientific research.