Aidnography

Hi all, As the world consumes on ‘Black Friday’ our link review is getting a bit artsy this week to provide food for thought and soul ;)! We are looking at Radi-Aid nominations, online porn & sex education, photographing Nepal’s Maoist leader Prachanda, poetry in Uganda, research on Tinder Humanitarians and one of our ComDev lectures on writing about development differently; but there is also more ‘traditional’ news on cash transfer myths, UN’s cholera legacy, Safaricom’s business practices and humanitarian aid worker struggles. Enjoy! New from aidnography VIDEO: Vote For The Best And Worst Charity Ads Of 2016 "It's a powerful, entertaining way to highlight the positives and negatives of development campaigning," says Tobias Denskus, a senior lecturer in communication for global development at Malmo University, Sweden, and the blogger behind Aidnography. He's been watching Radi-Aid's campaign since it launched in 2013. "Over time...

Hi all, We enjoyed a great teaching seminar with our students in Paris! Now back to work and Friday blogging…  Development news : India’s farm suicide widows; Nepal’s slow recovery; Helvetas fails (in a good way…); can the impact hype lead to useful transformation? UNICEF as (good) venture capitalists; Jeff Sachs wants as to continue fighting against dark forces; investigative journalism in the Arab world; media & participation-it’s complicated; Sweden opened her mansplaining hotline.  Our digital lives: The state of news photographers (85% are men!); Pew on the gig economy;  Academia: How economist professors make 1000 dollars per hour on the side; the 60 million hours biomedical researchers spend on peer-reviewing each other; precarious employment in UK academia. Enjoy! New from aidnography This is the place to be (book review) One of the reason why I enjoyed Lara’s book is that it adds more and new nuances to the on-going debate on how to u...

As I wrote before, I like book reviews . T hey provide me with one of the most attractive aspects of my engagement with ‘communication for development’-reading interesting and innovative books that offer new perspectives on how development-related topics are presented. When one of my colleagues invited Lara Pawson to give a lecture on her memoir This Is The Place To Be , I took the opportunity to read one of the most interesting and ‘strangest’ books of 2016. Drawing on her experiences as a BBC correspondent in Angola and other countries in Africa, her book defies categorization; it is a memoir that contains streams of consciousness writing, reflective paragraphs on journalism and truth a s well as poetic flashbacks between a ‘there’ in Angola and a ‘here’ in the middle-class ecosystem of East London: When we lived in Hackney, I occasionally shopped at the big Tesco’s off Mare Street. One day, I was there searching for ice cream. I was depressed at the time, and the store...

Hi all, Have a break from the misery around us-enjoy your development link review ;)! Development news: Can peacekeeping be fixed after Sudan? Reforming the UN’s HR system; the wars on terror and poverty; reviewing the ICT4D blogosphere; student need skills to get stuff done in humanitarian jobs; how (non-development) expats cope with identity crises; refugees & photographic ethics; more than Nehru’s sister-a new biography on a female politician; Oprah thinks empowerment is like ethnography; art from Ghana. Our digital lives: How sharing stuff leads to destruction of natural wonders Academia: Interrogating evidence through the anthropological lens; the limitation of check-in advocacy; don’t make peer reviews public. Enjoy! New from aidnography Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti (book review) Mark Schuller’s book is an excellent application of anthropological theory, engaged writing and self-reflective deliberation on a topic that deserves more than just another long-read in a...

I had just started reading Mark Schuller’s Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti when hurricane Matthew hit the island. It was a sad and timely reminder to critically analyze and engage with humanitarian efforts on the Caribbean island. I reviewed Jonathan Katz’ book The Big Truck That Went By as well as J’s Disastrous Passion installment of aid worker fiction on Aidnography before which both provide different views of the billion dollar aid effort that had reached Haiti after the earthquake of 2010. And as the American election campaign noise about a particular foundation’s work on the island grew louder, I was looking for more substantial and nuanced insights into the impact of a lot of aid money in a small place. Mark Schuller’s ethnography certainly delivers a lot of these nuanced, critical and academically grounded insights; his book is also a reminder of the value of ‘aidnography’ and how important long-term, on the ground anthropological field work is to elucidate the things w...

Hi all, Don’t leave the office or desk without clicking through your favorite development content summary :) Development news: Chemonics discriminated against 124 African-American applicants; Bono-man, woman, person of the year; Christians urge for better mission trips; 10 big picture communication challenges; 10 new frontier technologies; 10…wait…only 1 foundation president joined PepsiCo board; responsible data policies; media and drones; better health communication; studying development MAs; doctors are a bit like aid workers and like their stress. Our digital lives: How not to be racist (also applies to developm ent...) ; an overview over the misinformation economy; how work works in the digital age. Academia: Ebola anthropology and long-term investment in science.   Enjoy! New from aidnography Just a quick reminder to sign up for the forthcoming newsletter . Development news International development company Chemonics International Inc. agrees to pay $482K to Africa...