Aidnography

Hi all, I wish I had more energy & the right mindset to celebrate my 400th #globaldev link review properly, but for the time being I am just grateful for all the great, critical, sometimes uplifting & inspiring content that my project encourages me to engage with every week-so a big THANK YOU to all the readers, writers, sharers & lurkers that will probably keep me motivated for a while! Enjoy! My quotes of the week If you look at American workplaces at the moment I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that antiracism was quite easy. The speed at which diversity training programs mushroomed in the aftermath of the anti-police uprisings of the past summer, along with specialist gurus leading them, could easily lead you to think that antiracism was a set of politics best practiced in the bowels of HR departments. No Black bodies left dying on streets, no police stations to burn, just a stack of Robin D’Angelo books and late afternoon management-led sensitivity training sessions. ...

Hi all, Another week, another great range of news, essay, podcasts, open access books & more! This week applications for autumn courses in Sweden opened so do share the link to our only blended learning part-time MA in Communication for Development (now in its 21st year & still free for EU citizens & Swedish residents!) Enjoy! My quotes of the week (D)onors expect women refugee-led organisations to compete for the same grants male-led organisations apply for and report on them on the same schedule. This is not feasible. Men have women taking care of their children, cooking their meals, and cleaning their houses while they are working. Women are doing both. (How the aid sector marginalises women refugees )  Ironically, Chinese expansion in Africa, so frequently depicted by journalists as rapid, exciting, and even violent, was experienced by those on its front lines as dull, repetitive, and monotonous—experiences similar to those anthropologists have observed a...

Hi all, I don't really have much to say today-so I let these great #globaldev readings speak for themselves :) Enjoy! My quotes of the week We found that warmth and competence are the most effective traits for generating donations and petition signatures. Frontline workers and volunteers were the only messengers that the British public rated above average in terms of both warmth and competence. Activists, businesspeople and aid recipients were rated the least warm and least competent. (Who speaks for aid? Spokespeople, race and the problem with terms like 'aid recipient') As foggy and muddy as some of their thoughts and ideas may be, the youth of DHK are informed by their quotidian reality. It is an ideology rooted in a Sankarist ideology that is daring and even risky at times. But this discourse still represents the clearer demarcation line between civil discourse and what is perceived as growing radical or fundamental discourse in Burkina Faso. Unlike the growing non-stat...

The other day a young, bright contact in my network announced that they had accepted a PhD position on a full scholarship at a great development studies institution in Europe. And then I read a post in a large, well-known aid Facebook group where a member announced that they are planning to return to academia, but are looking for a way not to do ‘research for research’s sake’ and instead influence humanitarian policy or practice in the OECD country of their studies. Both of these anecdotes as well as recent discussions with contacts about the pros and cons of embarking on a PhD journey reminded me on how difficult it is to pull off the unicorn PhD that gets you a fancy degree, influences policy and achieves all of this in a participatory way that keeps you and your informants safe, healthy and happy. Is a PhD the most colonial academic undertaking today? This is of course a provocative and very generalizing question, but unlike other degrees, subjects or study experiences I have come ...

Hi all, I will keep it short this week: It's Friday & I survived another week reasonably well ;)! As we are about to celebrate Women's Day on Monday, I want to highlight some of the posts that feature powerful women in the US, Zambia, Uganda & India making a difference as candidates for UN leadership, rideshare drivers or mental health counselors; important research on mental health & gender-based violence in humanitarian responses & great reporting from female journalists from West Africa to Canada round off this week's edition! Enjoy! My quotes of the week The deaths represent a huge loss of culture for indigenous communities, in which much traditional knowledge is passed down from generation to generation in conversations, indigenous representatives said. "Our elders are guardians of traditions, custodians of wisdom, advisors and holders of unique spiritual knowledge," (...) "To see them go is, in a way, to witness another aspect of the d...