Aidnography

Hi all, Welcome to the final link review of 2015!  This one is a bit longer (the Internet apparently does not have holidays…) with plenty of good reads for the long weekend! In Development we look at supply and demand for data in a donor dominant world; community-driven reconstruction in Nepal; indigenous communities vs. ICT4D in Costa Rica; how bad is microcredit for Africa?; IKEA shelters may not reinvent refugee accommodation; photographing ‘Africa’. Our Digital Lives looks at the college dropouts-turned Thiel fellows; feminist data visualization; COP21 & data; Twitter bots as activism. In Academia a Harvard medical professor talks privilege; Elsevier’s new African open access science journal; the rise of hype language in academic publishing; another reminder why US for-profit colleges suck.   Enjoy! New from aidnography My development blogging & communication review 2015 Development news 2015 Humanitarian year in pictures Here is our pick of the best pic...

Dear all, It only feels like yesterday that aidnography went live, but this is actually my fifth end-of-the-year reflection post after 2011 , 2012 , 2013 & 2014 ! In the 2014 post my first headline was Aidnography as a small, permanent writing retreat and that is still how I feel about the project most of the time. As you can see from the list of posts below, my comments/ reflections are eclectic, often inspired by current affairs and loosely linked together by the broad topic of 'communication for development' in practice (development commentary), research and academia. Quite frankly, I was a bit surprised about the amount of book reviews I managed to publish this year. Even though they may not be the most eye-catching posts, they are an important part of this blog and in 2016 I am planning some review essays to provide more books with a space and focus a bit more on key topics rather than just individual books. As satisfied as I am with the steadily growing number of...

Hi all, In-between my last book review for the year and my forthcoming annual blogging review post I am happy to share a comprehensive final link review before the holidays! Development news features updates on UN whistleblowing and concerns about gender parity for senior positions; precarious outsourcing in the fashion industry; overlooked crises; UK’s self-serving aid strategy; tips for successful NGO-academic collaborations; a plea to treat non-profits as businesses; you can’t get rich and change the world; Ford Foundation’s new focus on inequalitities. Digital lives on the working poor of vlogging; new research on why slacktivists matter & how open learning can become part of professional development. And in Academia , we look at students as customers; how elite scientist need to die for progress & another new study that finds that ‘pre-print’ versions of paper pretty much read like the final versions behind expensive paywalls. Enjoy! New from aidnography State Crime on ...

A detailed archival and ethnographic study on conflict, mining and Papua New Guinea, guided by Marxist theory, may not be everybody’s idea of a ‘must have’ item for the holiday gift list. But Kristian Lasslett’s book ‘ State Crime on the Margins of Empire-Rio Tinto, the War on Bougainville and Resistance to Mining ’ is an important and extremely well-researched piece of scholarship that deserves attention even if it is not a mainstream recommendation; then again, I hope that readers of Aidnography return to the blog because they are able to discover something outside said mainstream. At the conflict’s heart was a conjuncture defined by clan structures, patrimonial political relations, a ‘weak’ state (PNG), an emerging sub-imperial power (Australia), and mining capital (Rio Tinto) (p.3). Lassletts’s extraordinary achievement is that he manages en detail to fill abstract entities (‘the state’, ‘Australia’) with concrete meaning to show how a localized conflict that started in 1987 ...

Hi all, It is Friday and time for some week-end reading recommendations: Development news: Microloans don't solve poverty; accountability reforms are complicated; a new project on leaving the aid industry behind after 30 years; how to improve M&E for mobile services; UNU-WIDERs digital communication reform; men leaving Nepal; the political marketplace for (non-) violence; the future of Think Tank researchers. Digital lives: Open data & the criminal justice system; PhD thesis on Spain's 15M movement. New publications on Media and Information Literacy and openness in education. Academia: The value of the 'ivory tower' & and review of the open access publishing debate. Enjoy! New from aidnography Why I prefer Academia_edu over Academia_eu I use Academia_edu a lot, I find it very useful and with low opportunity cost and I am not keen on an alternative ‘Academia_eu’ platform that has huge risks of becoming a white elephant-an expensive, laborious, elite-ins...