Aidnography

Hi all, I attended Lisa Richey's inaugural lecture yesterday, wrote a new book review & travelled to Germany this morning for a trip to see family and attend a workshop next week! So without further delay: Your #1 #globaldev link review for this week! Great to see so many familiar faces at @BrandAid_World 's inaugural lecture on "commodifying compassion"; expect some #globaldev live tweeting :) — Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) February 21, 2019 Enjoy! New from aidnography Thirst (book review) Like the pinkification of breast cancer awareness, the commodification of mindfulness or the depoliticization of Oprah’s book club, this mix of American ‘can-do-ism’, a good dose of ignoring learnings from the past and a firm neoliberal outlook that avoids any tough political questions (I don’t think ‘climate change’ or any other cause for dry wells is mentioned in the book) are bound to write a charitable success story! Water is always a source of life-never one of c...

After I watched a quite terrible promotional video from charity: water and ended up buying its founder and CEO’s biography Thirst. A Story of Redemption, Compassion, and a Mission toBring Clean Water to the World  I was prepared for the worst. But despite my extensive readings of aid worker biographies and a fairly critical approach towards ‘disruptive’ charitable ideas in development Thirst surprised me in some ways. It is one of the most, for lack of a better word, schizophrenic development tales I have read in a long time, the tale of a 21 st century charity that fundraises millions and positively impacts the lives of millions-and a tale about a lot of things that are going wrong in contemporary development whenever a white American man is looking for ‘redemption’ and needs to find it in a village in Africa. Thirst is definitely a book you should read, but with a different educational trajectory in mind perhaps than the author intended; rather than seeing Harrison’s jour...

Hi all,  A year after the Oxfam scandal broke & the #AidToo movement started it seems like a lot of business as usual in the #globaldev industry... Development news: Erik Solheim & the well-known story of UN leadership problems; Angelina Jolie in meme territory; after the Oxfam scandal; some Tories want to cut UK #globaldev; Belgium's racist past & present; Congo's rigged elections; is Canada's feminist foreign policy a fraud? Miss Curvy Uganda & the objectivication of women; how UNHCR want to address gender imbalances in their innovation stories; Kenya's DNA-based ID system; UNICEF innovation; how to make extractive industries more accountable?  How aid disrupts local markets for journalism; DfID media development efforts; does aid benefit the rich? German museums & their colonial past. Our digital lives: People liked the Gillette ad. Publications: Lower vaccination rates in Pakistan thanks to CIA undercover mission to capture Bin Laden. Acad...

Hi all, This week's review is a bit shorter-but I'm really pleased that it's packed with great content written by women & featuring women plus a lot of food for thought on 'surveillance capitalism' large & small... Development news: WFP teams up with Palantir, welcomes 'mature debate' on data; Gucci & blackface; UK's successful aid; time for a change at the World Bank; women humanitarians in Fiji; curvy women in Uganda; Amnesty's martyrdom culture; the only black woman at the philanthropy dinner table. Our digital lives: Fighting billionaires; surveillance capitalism essay; the strange case of book covers in the digital age. Academia: Are you listening to the right music to be productive? Enjoy! New from aidnography How Development Projects Persist (book review) But Beck’s book is also an important reminder how traditional and ‘innovative’ manifestations of capitalism are constantly expanding, looking for new places, subjects and c...

Erin Beck’s ethnography of two Guatemalan micro-finance non-governmental organisations in the context of local development dynamics and global discourses of aid is a valuable contribution to the aidnography genre, yet also raises some important questions about the future of how anthropologists can research and write about the local manifestations of global development. Based on her extensive doctoral research in rural Guatemala, How Development Projects Persist. Everyday Negotiations with Guatemalan NGOs sets out to create a vivid and intimate account of the women ‘beneficiaries’ of two NGOs. Namaste , a traditional foreign-funded organization, and Fraternity, a grassroots organization with a more holistic vision of personal and community development. The book centres around her comparative ethnography which, perhaps less surprising for an academic audience, highlight Namaste ’s ‘successfully institutionalized audit culture’ in a professionalised context of ‘hiring procedures, (…), ...