Aidnography

Hi all, Wow...this has turned into one of the longest #globaldev reviews in a while-so I hope you have some extra time to explore great food for thought from India, Liberia, Ethiopia, Nepal, New Zealand, Hawaii, Afghanistan, Lesotho, Burundi, Iraq, Sudan &  Tonga! Enjoy! My quotes of the week Elders are the collective wealth of our community. They are also majority women, and majority impoverished. Women of older generations were systematically denied the opportunity to build a nest egg because they were forced into low-paid work, homemaking and dependency on their husbands. Older women cannot take care of themselves even if they wanted to. In a decade, one-third of Hawaii will be elderly people. There is no plan to care for them, other than to dump the work on their daughters. We need an eldercare infrastructure to care for every senior, not just the wealthy. (This state says it has a ‘feminist economic recovery plan.’ Here’s what that looks like). This is the task for j

In the scope of the contemporary planetary crisis this post probably qualifies as less urgent and a little bit rant-y, but today I ’ d like to talk about reports, as in: Digital publications, usually pdf documents, that many large #globaldev organizations publish as a staple product for communication, engagement and reminding people that they still exist... tl;dr I read a lot of stuff on the Internet. I also skim-read a lot. I open a lot of pdf files, too. Please re-consider your organizational practice to have a report starting between page 10 to 15. Tell me as early as possible why I should engage with your report, why I should invest precious time to read it, perhaps even share it in my weekly #globaldev link review… I have mentioned it more than once in my curated #globaldev links that most organizational landing pages/repositories/libraries particularly of international organizations have room for improvement. I don’t really want to shame a particular organization, but many look s

Hi all, Happy Friday & a joyful weekend! We have COVID-19 & #globaldev insights from Canada, Yemen, Australia, the military-industrial complex and Western anthropologists 'stuck' in Africa...and there's much more from Lebanon, Greece, Romania, Afghanistan, Tibet & Libya. Plus, how white people took over philanthropy & a great new Nyerere biography! Enjoy! My quotes of the week Our detached and benevolent claim to ethnographic participant observation, always from a position of privilege and relative security, is put into question at precisely the moment when true participation finally becomes inevitable. Now it is us who “are participated” (as the old aid-worker joke went) by the pervasive virus that is in every touch—maybe in our body, maybe in that of the other. It challenges differentiation, threatening pathogenic communion. And the escape route that we had been able to count on for six decades of post-colonial anthropology is finally being

Hi all, It has been a while since I published my last book review -so I'm glad that a new one for Keenie Meenie is up now! The Covid-19 section features some interesting pieces on how the virus is affecting platform workers in the South & there are plenty of other interesting readings on Dutch reparations, fundraising communication, safeguarding in #globaldev research & more! Enjoy! My quotes of the week “We are now down to zero income, zero savings, and have zero insurance. We’ve managed to get through the last two weeks using donations from friends.” (How are platform workers in Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria responding to the Covid-19 crisis?) As the research shows, contributors want their voices heard and to have a greater say in the stories that are told about them. So to continue showing need without changing the process by which we gather stories, or without investing in other, broader depictions, would be to undermine the research findings entirely. (You’ve been refr