Aidnography

One of the most influential global development bloggers announced his retirement from blogging and aid work recently and since I was socialized to some extent in German academia I was thinking of a Festschrift -style farewell publication. Only that Duncan is not an old-school professor. And in the democratic tradition of writing things on the Internet I am not his disciple. And as far as I can see, nobody else has written a post in his memory. But you still get the idea, I guess...   Blogs are linked to people, personalities and their writing style, so the retirement of Duncan from Oxfam will be another blow to global development blogging regardless of what will happen to his blog and the Oxfam blogosphere. As I wrote on the occasion of 500 weekly curated Links I Liked  last year, blogging about development is a project riding into the digital sunset and no amount of Substacks (I really like Oliver Kim's Global Developments and Ken Opalo's An Africanist Perspective , of cour

There is a folder with close to 1,000 Emails in my Outlook that documents the process of publishing our Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality from Silke's first idea in May 2021 to its publication in February 2024! And then there is the space in Teams with more than a dozen folders and hundreds of documents that we used to remotely edit this great volume (criticize Teams all you want, but it has proven to be a very, very useful tool to manage, well, a team across continents, time zones, tasks & a bloody pandemic...). And after all this remote, digital work it was fantastic to open a box with physical copies of the book! The 39 chapter handbook examines how legacies of colonialism, gender, class, and other markers of inequality intersect with contemporary humanitarianism at multiple levels. Authors include academics, pracademics and practitioners and examine a range of contemporary issues including the role of the media and technology, the COVID-19 pandemic, linguistic