Aidnography

Hi all, We welcomed more than 150 new students to our Communication for Development courses this week so I'm equal parts exhausted and thrilled about the forthcoming semester with a great group of global students! My quotes of the week As I shared video footage with friends in Puerto Rico, they remarked, “I know the sound of that wind.” Is this what it means to be intimately connected by horror? Is there a new creolized language and aesthetic we have now become fluent in by default? We are island people. Where do you go? We live on slim margins. ( Hurricane Dorian Makes Bahamians the Latest Climate-Crisis Victims)   Giving charity and doing voluntourism are self-gratifying ways of filling this void that they feel – and are a whole lot easier than doing the work to find the root cause of what is wrong in their own lives. ( “We Aren’t Just Vehicles for your Guilt and Privilege”: A View from Nepal (Part One) Enjoy! New from aidnography Everything you have told me is true (book revi...

I immensely enjoyed Mary Harper’s Everything you have told me is true- The Many Faces of Al Shabaab , even th ough her book covers difficult topics around Somalia’s troubled governance and Al Shabaab, an entity many would easily label a ‘terrorist organization’. Mary Harper is the BBC Africa editor and has reported on Africa and its conflict zones for 25 years and her biggest achievement with this book is her nuanced, careful, critical and ultimately empathetic engagement with Somalia and her citizens. Her book is not about a ‘failed state’ that has been captured by a terrorist group, but about the fact that Many people have multiple identities, one of which is some kind of association with Al Shabaab, sometimes voluntary, sometimes pragmatic, sometimes forced (p.5). This may not be an entirely surprising insight for academic researchers engaging in qualitative or ethnographic field work or journalists with in-depth knowledge of the area. At the same time it is a reminder of h...

Hi all, Preparations for the new semester starting Monday are underway, but there's always time for some Friday afternoon & weekend #globaldev reads! My quotes of the week Now, imagine this scenario. A couple of newly minted MPH graduates from an African university, say in Rwanda, land in Washington DC for a 2-week visit. They visit a few hospitals, speak to a few health care workers and policymakers, read a few reports, and write up a nice assessment of the US health system with several recommendations on how to fix the issues they saw. They submit their manuscript to the American Journal of Public Health. Can you imagine AJPH even sending it out for review? Even if the paper got published somewhere, would US health researchers take it seriously? (10 Fixes for Global Health Consulting Malpractice) The new Indonesian law is probably too heavy handed, but it is in the right direction. There is little doubt that there is a problem with #trickledownscience, and governments in the...

Hi all, Welcome to another #globaldev link review...let's start at the end: I added a new section ( What we were reading 5 years ago ) to the blog and will dig up interesting stuff from 2014 link reviews...let's see how themes change, remain, disappear, reappear...but there is also plenty of interesting new stuff this week-with a particular focus on #globaldev & fintech... My quotes of the week They’re turning to a screen that’s producing some results, that says, “You are high risk,” or “You are low risk,” you know, and then they’re acting on that. And so I really want us to become attuned to this intermediary that is not, in fact, objective in the way that we are being socialized to believe it is (Black Communities Are Already Living in a Tech Dystopia) These movements lent their charisma, their ideology, to give these horrible policies — financialization, the precarization of work, and the driving down of wages — the veneer of being pro-gay, pro-women, and so on. That def...