Aidnography

One of the things I realized this year is that I am actually reading more interesting books than I am able to review individually for the blog. To try out a new format and share some interesting reads with you before the holidays and before 2016 will be wrapped up, I am sharing two new and also very different book reviews with you. As always, my approach is reviewing through the lens of ‘communication for development’ with an eye on media, communication and different angles of ‘development’ or phenomena that I think are relevant for ‘our’ aid industry as well. Wesley Lowery’s book is based on his experiences as a Washington Post correspondent who has been covering police brutality in the USA and community responses beyond #blacklivesmatter. Nicole Dennis-Benn’s novel takes us to Jamaica, following the lives of three women and their struggles with social change and society’s expectations. “They Can’t Kill Us All”  Wesley Lowery’s “They Can’t Kill Us All”-Ferguson, Baltimore, an...

Hi all, We are enjoying a busy semester and there are also a few things going on behind the blogging scene, but on Fridays you should enjoy your link review and reading suggestions for the weekend! Development news: The global tech innovation hub hype; the gendered inequality of America’s low paid jobs; Australia’s ‘old aid’ approaches no longer work; on the West’s changing humanitarian foundations; cash transfers work; data science challenges; data is political and part of the surveillance economy; must-read: Essay on Afghanistan, mental health & so much more; don’t write to orphans; Card against humanity digs a giant hole. Our digital lives: ‘I don’t belong in tech’; when start-ups become companies; Alphabet’s Jigsaw wants to change the world; why we need to rethink the centrality of work in human existence. Publications: Sexual violence in the aid industry; Power, Poverty & Inequality revisited; Gilded Giving; conflict reporting in the smartphone era Academia: Cana...

Hi all, As the world consumes on ‘Black Friday’ our link review is getting a bit artsy this week to provide food for thought and soul ;)! We are looking at Radi-Aid nominations, online porn & sex education, photographing Nepal’s Maoist leader Prachanda, poetry in Uganda, research on Tinder Humanitarians and one of our ComDev lectures on writing about development differently; but there is also more ‘traditional’ news on cash transfer myths, UN’s cholera legacy, Safaricom’s business practices and humanitarian aid worker struggles. Enjoy! New from aidnography VIDEO: Vote For The Best And Worst Charity Ads Of 2016 "It's a powerful, entertaining way to highlight the positives and negatives of development campaigning," says Tobias Denskus, a senior lecturer in communication for global development at Malmo University, Sweden, and the blogger behind Aidnography. He's been watching Radi-Aid's campaign since it launched in 2013. "Over time...

Hi all, We enjoyed a great teaching seminar with our students in Paris! Now back to work and Friday blogging…  Development news : India’s farm suicide widows; Nepal’s slow recovery; Helvetas fails (in a good way…); can the impact hype lead to useful transformation? UNICEF as (good) venture capitalists; Jeff Sachs wants as to continue fighting against dark forces; investigative journalism in the Arab world; media & participation-it’s complicated; Sweden opened her mansplaining hotline.  Our digital lives: The state of news photographers (85% are men!); Pew on the gig economy;  Academia: How economist professors make 1000 dollars per hour on the side; the 60 million hours biomedical researchers spend on peer-reviewing each other; precarious employment in UK academia. Enjoy! New from aidnography This is the place to be (book review) One of the reason why I enjoyed Lara’s book is that it adds more and new nuances to the on-going debate on how to u...

As I wrote before, I like book reviews . T hey provide me with one of the most attractive aspects of my engagement with ‘communication for development’-reading interesting and innovative books that offer new perspectives on how development-related topics are presented. When one of my colleagues invited Lara Pawson to give a lecture on her memoir This Is The Place To Be , I took the opportunity to read one of the most interesting and ‘strangest’ books of 2016. Drawing on her experiences as a BBC correspondent in Angola and other countries in Africa, her book defies categorization; it is a memoir that contains streams of consciousness writing, reflective paragraphs on journalism and truth a s well as poetic flashbacks between a ‘there’ in Angola and a ‘here’ in the middle-class ecosystem of East London: When we lived in Hackney, I occasionally shopped at the big Tesco’s off Mare Street. One day, I was there searching for ice cream. I was depressed at the time, and the store...

Hi all, Have a break from the misery around us-enjoy your development link review ;)! Development news: Can peacekeeping be fixed after Sudan? Reforming the UN’s HR system; the wars on terror and poverty; reviewing the ICT4D blogosphere; student need skills to get stuff done in humanitarian jobs; how (non-development) expats cope with identity crises; refugees & photographic ethics; more than Nehru’s sister-a new biography on a female politician; Oprah thinks empowerment is like ethnography; art from Ghana. Our digital lives: How sharing stuff leads to destruction of natural wonders Academia: Interrogating evidence through the anthropological lens; the limitation of check-in advocacy; don’t make peer reviews public. Enjoy! New from aidnography Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti (book review) Mark Schuller’s book is an excellent application of anthropological theory, engaged writing and self-reflective deliberation on a topic that deserves more than just another long-read in a...