Aidnography

Hi all, Welcome to the last link review for 2016! My annua l development blogging review will conclude the year next week and in the meantime enjoy some interesting r eadings as a bre ak from the holiday stress ; )! Development news: Aid consultants-value for money? Pentagon waste; algorithms can’t replace humanitarians; Jeffrey Sachs is not happy with Economics; humanitarian actors and power players-too close to comfort? Does automation mean the end of develop ment? Helping as ego-stroking; dangerous mining in Colombia; more Nepali men die in their sleep; the Bollywood-feelgood-complex Our digital lives: Celebrities fuel the corporate machine; new media brands & environmental journalism; Holacracy is just management BS  Publications: Doing Development Differently; open innovation; Education in Emergencies; training global health comms professionals Academia: Fighting oppression in academia Happy Holidays ! New from aidnography The corporatization of aid enables gr...

As much as I understand the Sisyphusian dimension of the task, I feel that I need to respond to recent Times and Daily Mail reporting on overpaid development consultants and excessive executive pay packages for UK charity executives: Britain's foreign aid budget pays out billions of pounds to consultants (Brendan Cole, International Business Times, 8 December) Priti Patel and Dfid must crack down on the foreign-aid fatcats (Ian Birrell, inews, 18 December) Begging bowl barons: my MoS investigation into charity chiefs earning up to £618k a year off back of the aid boom https://t.co/N7TbkrrkUX — Ian Birrell (@ianbirrell) December 18, 2016 This time it is a bit more complicated me than simply wringing hands about post-factual news reporting , because aid budget spending on consultants and for-profit consultancy firms or pay packages in excess of 500,000 GBP/year for David Miliband at International Res cue Commit tee should be criticized publicly. 'The charities ne...

Hi all, Only one more week before a short holiday break! Development news: Holiday giving the right way; UNICEF in pictures Then & Now; Wonder Woman retires from UN job; Drowning-a massive cause of global child death; J.K. Rowling dislikes orphanages; a id enters-rents hike in Nigeria; Andrea Cornwall on gender, development and academia; do they know there’s evidence? SenseMaker & development projects; mapping the logistics of the U.S. military-industrial complex. Our digital lives: A political TeenVogue ; the 3D printing revolution that wasn’t. Publications: Caring for humanitarian carers; engaged excellence; community monitoring to combat corruption. Academia: Associations & their paywalled journals; better policies for more diverse panels. Enjoy! New from aidnography What’s next for #allmalepanel? I have written about all male panels before and I am regularly following the #allmalepanel hashtag for updates on that topic. (...) Re...

I have written about all male panels before and I am regularly following the #allmalepanel hashtag for updates on that topic. I also n oticed that t hree new academic articles (paywalled) were published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics (scro ll down to ‘ Conversations ’ ) . Recently, I noticed three developments that add more nuances to the debate on gender and panel diversity-and more broadly on how ‘we’ meet and conference. Why so many men/people on a single panel? Even though this requires a bit more research, it really seems that 7 has become some kind of magic number. Look forward to this panel on #G20 #globalhealth , despite the #allmalepanel fail. pic.twitter.com/O98mL7CMXa — Katri Bertram (@KatriBertram) December 7, 2016 Maybe people only share panels with a particularly large number of men, but in general I have a gut feeling that panels seem to grow in different surroundings such as academia, policy and other public events. So even if we assum...

Hi all, One moment you are reading an interesting story-the next moment it’s already time for the Friday link review! Development news: UK reviews development consultant spending; Compassion International wins Rusty Radiator (for video, not their organization's name...); Afghanistan’s first female rapper; ‘Made in Rwanda’ & the complexities of Chinese engagement in the garment industry; front line health work successes in Uganda; why Ford president shouldn’t have joined PepsiCo board; political correctness, feminism and bad taste-Cards Against Humanity edition; white fragility. Our digital lives: #blacklivesmatter and digital movements; representing the new Africa; sociologists take celebrity seriously. Publications: The Bright and Dark Sides of Data-Driven Decision-Making; Gendering War & Peace Reporting; The cost of coherence; Trends in UN Peacekeeping fatalities. Academia: Ethnographies of the neoliberal university; making academic conferences accessible and in...