Aidnography

Hi all, What a week, eh?!? This edition is a bit shorter-perhaps because other developments dominated my social media feeds, but perhaps also because I worked on my Aidnography first newsletter in a long time , taught the first week of a new semester, held an important lecture & attended an interesting board meeting with inspiring colleagues! Nonetheless, there's still plenty #globaldev stuff to explore from the poetics of the Arab Spring to language in Australia & non-profit diversity challenges! Enjoy! My quotes of the week International organisations are not reducing their capacity and ambition because they’re confident that local governments or NGOs can already meet needs better than they can, or because the job is done but because they simply don’t have the funding and people they need. (Investing in a localised aid system must not mean stepping back from international assistance) If we don’t have women and people of color in the not-for-profit sector, the dispari

Hi all, Happy New Year! Your favorite weekly #globaldev link review is back with a special 2020 review-2021 preview section & plenty of new interesting readings! Enjoy! My quotes of the week Senior leaders in non-profits need to critically interrogate the following questions as a priority: does your diversity and inclusion focal point have legitimacy among minoritised groups in your organisation? Be honest — in what ways might you be setting them up to fail rather than succeed? To what extent are you asking staff working on diversity to focus more on PR than systemic change? How will you support your diversity officer to act in the face of resistance? What does institutional transformation mean to you — and how far are you willing to go? (So You’ve Hired a Diversity and Inclusion Expert? Here Are Six Ways You Could Be Undermining Them)   As the case of Kenya shows, the introduction of centralized biometric systems increases the risk of function creep. Even if intended fo

Hi all, My blogging year is coming to its end. There is still some grading and reviewing to do and the spring semester courses also deserve a little attention-so I will share some reflections early next year after a moment of rest. I am looking forward to hearing from you in 2021 and you can stay safe & reasonably sane ;)! I included some excellent long-reads and essays in this final review of 2020 which should tie you over the holidays! Happy holidays, thanks for reading & sharing-see you in 2021! My quotes of the week Foreign money also equates the commotion of democracy with risk. “We’ve seen a lot of investors going abroad, looking at places like Morocco or Egypt that are authoritarian countries and present the same cheap, skilled labour force but with less trouble, less social demands,” says Youssef Cherif, the director of Columbia University’s Tunis Centre. ('He ruined us': 10 years on, Tunisians curse man who sparked Arab spring) But are overenthusiastic hashtag

Hi all, One thing I realized this week was how our sector likes to talk about reforms of the #globaldev & humanitarian system...and then you come across an investigation into the UN's Ebola response & all the talk about 'coordination saves lives' seems just that...this week there's even more on language, jargon & visual representations, the strange case of Portuguese returnees from Angola in 1975 & much more! Enjoy! My quotes of the week Australia will spend nearly $1.2bn on offshore processing this financial year, even though fewer than 300 people remain in detention in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. That’s roughly $4m for each person. (Budget blowouts: offshore processing costs $1.2bn for fewer than 300 people) “We need to move away from the world of people sitting behind desks, moving bits of paper around, to making the real heroes of the project the person that is really delivering the school … Strangely we've created a world where too often all the