Aidnography

Hi all, From the closure of Nairobi's iconic Hilton Hotel to palliative care in Uganda, a dodgy app by US immigration & how universities can prepare students better for work in #globaldev this week's review is as eclectic as it should be...especially after the annual content surge around International Women's Day... P.S.: I'll be off to Innsbruck/Austria tomorrow to attend the thesis defense of my first co-supervised PhD student & then to Bonn/Germany for a board retreat so no weekly post next Friday! My quotes of the week As long as people in the West continue to understand local mining in the Congo as Kara’s “grim wasteland of utter ruin” as opposed to Wainaina’s landscape in which people laugh, struggle and make do in usually mundane circumstances, history will repeat. (Who wants to hear about White Saviourism gone wrong?) Local aid workers feel disempowered too. They are on the front line of this emergency, yet feel like decisions are made by faraway bosses

Hi all, This week's link review is almost a double-feature: New #globaldev readings, but also a longer section on gender & feminism right in time for next week's International Women's Day! ' Women at leisure lie at the heart of feminist liberation' really spoke to me as credo for approaching 8 March! Enjoy! My quotes of the week As much as a third of the heavily cut UK overseas aid budget is being spent on housing refugees in the UK (Up to a third of overseas aid budget used for housing refugees in UK, MPs report) We attempt to show that feminists from the Global North try to be inclusive, inviting feminists from the Global South to collaborate, but that the CEE region is somewhere in between (...). Although there have been long-term efforts of some scholars calling for going beyond such concepts, they keep recurring, and there has been a lot of debate on post-socialism and the “in-betweenness” of our “non-region”. With voices missing from Central and Eastern E

Hi all, Honduras, Kenya, Indonesia, China-and four very different environmental challenges, all linked to consumerist lifestyles & vague promises of 'development' contribute to a broader theme in this week's review; but there's more, from bad academic writing to humanitarians using AI, an economic history of cocoa & unconscious bias trainings. My quotes of the week “The main reason why there's a donor fatigue is because, as you can imagine, Somalia has been receiving humanitarian assistance for over three decades now and the situation has not been changing,” said Mohamed Abdi, country director for the Norwegian Refugee Council. “Many of the donors who have been paying money, a lot of money for that matter, to support Somalia will definitely get tired when they see their effort not bearing any fruits,” he said. (Donor Fatigue, Somalia Aid Cuts Worry Aid Workers) Labor exploitation, economic injustices, and environmental degradation are undermining the socio-

It is only February and we already have another case of “how did this get through peer review??!!” in social science #highered. The piece in question is an article in Perspectives on Psychological Science , entitled Positionality and Its Problems: Questioning the Value of Reflexivity Statements in Research .  It is worth checking in on Twitter as the quote-Tweets on one of the authors’ posts (who disabled direct comments on his Tweet), more than 200 at the time of writing, provide an excellent peer review of the article from a wide range of academics. But is not simply a case of academic debate where authors publish an article and then look forward to engaging in meaningful debates and discussions. Positionality is critical in naming privilege and avoiding perpetuating racist/w. supremacists assumptions. Do the opposite of this👇🏽. https://t.co/1PJSZWT5IP — Awanui Te Huia (@AwanuiTH) February 20, 2023 As a newly minted Dr of the social sciences, any claim of the ‘universalism’ of

Hi all, Sometimes a picture says more than those proverbial 1000 words and before we delve into the not-so-great news from around the #globaldev & #highered worlds let's think about the beauty of the 'soil of solidarity' for a moment... My quotes of the week If humanitarian agencies really want to help as many people as possible in Ukraine, they would make it easier for Ukrainian organisations to access their funding, and trust they know what to do with it, says Tetiana Stawnychy, president of the NGO Caritas Ukraine. “Order and transparency are important,” she says. “But building up the agency of local NGOs is also part of building up resilience in society.” (One year on, Ukraine exposes the limits of well-funded international aid) Humanitarian organization do have to address their own colonial legacy. But we should not forget that other colonial legacy that Hannah Arendt called apathy. Consumed by an individualistic way of life and the competition of all against all,