Aidnography

David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers & Michael Woolcock recently contributed a piece to the Guardian on Why dry academic journals are not the only source on development. Their reflections are part of a larger project that has now been published in a great new book Popular Representations of Development-Insights from novels, films, television and social media . Together with my colleague Daniel E. Esser we contributed a chapter to the book on social media, Twitter and global policy summits, based on earlier work on the topic . Even without the self-promotion the book is a very timely and interesting contribution to the debate on how 'development' is presented, represented & discussed outside the narrow confines of academia and the odd mainstream news article: Although the academic study of development is well established, as is also its policy implementation, less considered are the broader, more popular understandings of development that often shape agendas and priorities,

Hello all, My own reflections on 'posh white blokes' in development kick off this week's review. But there is more, of course: On inequality & the World Bank, the new modern slavery index, slow peacebuilding & high housing prices in Nepal, Female Engagement Teams in Afghanistan (sigh...), talking to/with armed groups, gold smuggling in DRC, young girls & ICT, poor multinationals that need to kick out smallholder farmers & development-relevant reflections from Teaching for America; plus something on MOOCs along the lines of 'you have to spend money, to maybe save money later'... Enjoy! New on aidnography You (They) wanted an aid industry – you (they) got posh white blokes So academia, journalism and the start-up sector - all under different pressures to perform well in the capitalist market place - are having similar problems that the current state of continuous transformations favors posh white professors, bloggers and IT gurus. And then there are t

In a detailed and well written piece for opendemocracy, Guppi Bola reflects ‘ On posh white blokes ’ and her discussion she had with Ben Phillips, the original writer on ‘ Posh white blokes-holding back the struggle for a fairer world? ’ in development and NGOs. But what is very interesting in Guppi ’ s list of key enabling factors of PWBs (Internships, pay inequality, rights of short-term contract workers, decision making & hierarchy, all male panels, training for solidarity and equal opportunities) is that many of these areas of the aid industry are discussed along very similar argumentative lines elsewhere: Sarah Kendzior just asked in an excellent piece ‘ Should academics write for free? ’ , the launch of the German edition of Huffington Post started a widespread debate about the future of journalism ( ‘ Huffington Post's German edition launches to mixed reception ’ ) and Mother Jones recently presented ‘ Silicon Valley ’ s Awful Race and Gender Problem in 3 Mind-Blow

Hello all, Welcome to another weekly link review! This week's development section is focusing on a really broad range of topics-from news reporting in Philadelphia to why the ICRC does not like computer games, UNICEF's image archive, a new book on media & the 1984 famine, Sri Lanka's fragile post-conflict boom, unpaid care work plus Bill Easterly declaring the big aid debate over. And do not miss a great new organizational ethnography on UN's Human Rights periodic review process and why 'creative writing' is really just GYAOTC.   Enjoy! New on aidnography Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age (book review) C.W. Anderson’s Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age, a media ethnography about news reporting in Philadelphia raises some interesting questions not just about news in the digital age, but also about organizations, adaptation and how to engage with different audiences. (...) “My old medium is dying, a

When I started reviewing books for my blog, the first titles were not directly related to ‘development’, but I approached the reviews from a development perspective. By reviewing C.W. Anderson’s Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age , a media ethnography about news reporting in Philadelphia, I am reviving this tradition. This has partly to do with my professional shift towards media and communication studies and partly with the fact that the book raises some interesting questions not just about news in the digital age, but also about organizations, adaptation and how to engage with different audiences. Rebuilding the News argues that, in the face of the chaos pressing in on them from all sides, local news organizations made particular choices about how best to adapt to emerging economic, social, and technological realities. The book analyzes the economic, organizational, and cultural factors that helped shape and direct these choices. I

Hello all, I just finished my Warrior Princess review so this week's link review is a tad bit late, but it was worth the extra time! New resources and literature (the end of PLA notes?!); conflict & Canadian mining; how much EU money disappeared in DRC? How to avoid poverty p@rn? Can Ladakhis save the world? TOMS shoes and spiritual neoliberalism; and more on being a good development blogger, planning your career, be a respectful male academic & the limitations of MOOCs. Enjoy! New on aidnography Warrior Princess: My Quest to Become the First Female Maasai Warrior (book review) Despite all this criticism it would be too easy to simply dismiss Mindy and her adventure as a selfish self-marketing ploy; whether ‘we’ like it or not, Warrior Princess is somewhat of a mirror of popular representations of development and the complexities of empowerment between changing tribal cultures and ‘Oprahfying’ the experiences in the fast food culture of books, speaking engagements and

One of the great features of being in charge of your own blog is that you can amend your unwritten rules: Writing primarily negative book reviews and/or giving a platform, no matter how small, to material I largely disagree with are two of them. It may have been the hype surrounding the release of Mindy Budgor’s book Warrior Princess: My Quest to Become the First Female Maasai Warrior ( Tom Murphy's American seeks to become warrior and help Maasai stop being sexist provides a good overview over the debates) and partly it may have been the absence of ‘regular’ book reviews that encouraged me to read her book and write a more traditional book review. When modernization theory meets Blackberries More or less right from the beginning the book surprised disappointed me with its lack of development-related reflections, self-criticism and a strange Out of Africa exoticism that was transferred into the age of Blackberries and business school applications. At its best worst, moderniz