Aidnography

Hi all, I'm at a workshop about communication for development in the context of Germany today hosted by the University of Leipzig. There should be plenty of material for a blog post next week! In the meantime, enjoy your weekly link digest with plenty of interesting readings for the weekend! Development news: New challenges for UN peacekeeping; Louise Linton marries; key trends in humanitarian funding; British Red Cross received a lot of useless 'stuff'; Colombia's gold rush revisited; tax avoidance & illicit flows; UN struggles with open data-one pdf at the time; even the Guardian falls into white savior trap; Helen Clark hit the glass ceiling; the limits (and opportunities) of 'small is beautiful'; a long read on Bridge academies; spatial analysis in Madagascar; the impact of edutainment; the geography of humanitarian knowledge; the future of evaluation; photographing Afghanistan; remembering a priest from Nicaragua. Our digital lives: Reuters Instit

Hi all, Happy midsommar from Sweden! Enjoy reading this weekend! Development news: Combat charities in Mosul; one year after the World Humanitarian Summit; does Daily Mail’s criticism of aid matter? NGO-government relationships in Kenya; the WHO DG reflects on her tenure; Africa is far away from being a digital knowledge economy; a refugee city in Uganda; the rhetoric of partnerships lives on; Rwanda’s dictatorship; famine as weapon. Publications: Reviewing ‘Stay & Deliver’; global humanitarian assistance report; women & world employment trends; social media tools in Kenya; do age-of-marriage laws work? (Spoiler: No!); do certification schemes help farmers? (Spoiler: Not really!). Our digital lives: Philanthropy and the program officer; the rich give little; Silicon Valley’s flawed theory of history. Academia: Reviewing MOOCs; higher ed institutions demand public scholarship-but don’t little to protect staff from backlash; open access in international organizations. Enjoy

I recently shared an article by Milli Lake and Sarah E. Parkinson on political scientists ‘out-dangering’ one another in their field research in fragile states. The ‘exotic’ site of the past has turned into a ‘volatile’ one where presumably a lot of publishable and communicable ‘action’ will happen. The authors warn us academics to ‘ take the practical and ethical components of (fieldwork) planning and implementation more seriously ’. Only this week did I learn about ‘combat charities’ thanks to a short CNN video that apparently shows the Free Burma Army fighting in Mosul and an article in the Washington Post on the family behind one of its leaders who had moved to Mosul ( ‘ It was just an average day for the Eubanks, who describe their work as a calling from God ’ ).  In some ways, the two stories are connected and I wonder whether some radical humanitarians ‘ out-danger ’ one another and the international development and humanitarian community paying the price for more blurr

Hi all, Welcome to a packed Friday link review! Development news: The UN’s ‘new way of working’; political inaction and the Congo; Canada’s feminist foreign policy; Facebook roles out disaster mapping; how to fix the humanitarian system; automation will destroy jobs in Africa; can Africa’s youth ‘hustle’ their way out of unemployment? The gender digital-divide in Myanmar; climate change projects as empowerment opportunities; opinion leaders use social media for development information; a little donation will not end poverty; how can practitioners & academics come together? 220 pounds for a visa for Nigeria? Twitter responds :) Our digital lives: Design education’s lack of understanding power; mansplaining; print it out and they will change! Publications: E-Book on dependency theory; ODI on the Grand Bargain; IMS on media environment trends; anthropology of social media in South India. Academia: Can facebook become a learning platform? A poem on a university’s brand new commu