progressive pro-poor international development. Michael Edwards (1987) , for example, in his celebrated piece, The Irrelevance of Development Studies , rehearses the late-modern antagonism towards professional knowledge using the post-humanist premise that the ‘real world’ is defined by its empirical diversity and complexity. And hence, echoing Hayekian neoliberalism, largely beyond human comprehension. Development problems are specific to a given time and place. Indigenous livelihood and coping systems have evolved over centuries through discrete
how much diversity can be tolerated? Could a humanitarian practice that argued it would help only ‘people like us’ and leave to suffer and die ‘people like them’ be judged genuinely humanitarian? If your answer is no, surely you are arguing for limits to the malleability of humanitarian social practice that aren’t hardwired into the idea? But discriminatory humanitarianism is surely conceivable? You might not offer ‘them’ the same care as you offer your own, but you might keep them barely alive (by openly offering them out
All in the mix: class, race and school choice considers how parents choose secondary schools for their children and makes an important intervention into debates on school choice and education. The book examines how parents talk about race, religion and class – in the process of choosing. It also explores how parents’ own racialised and classed positions, as well as their experience of education, can shape the way they approach choosing schools. Based on in-depth interviews with parents from different classed and racialised backgrounds in three areas in and around Manchester, the book shows how discussions about school choice are shaped by the places in which the choices are made. It argues that careful consideration of choosing schools opens up a moment to explore the ways in which people imagine themselves, their children and others in social, relational space.
and through dress and appearance. The classed other is seen as posing a potential threat to both the respondents’ children’s happiness and educational achievement. As we also saw in Chapter 3, the assumed source of the problem with unruly children is bad parenting. In this chapter, the focus is placed more specifically on the parents’ discussion of ethnic diversity, arguing that parents were more likely to consider diversity in general as something related to race or ethnicity rather than class, and this kind of diversity is often welcomed. However, what ethnic
151 9 THE INVULNERABLE BODY OF COLOUR The failure and success of a Swedish film diversity initiative Ma r a Le e Ge r dén I n 2016, the Swedish Film Institute launched the Fusion Programme, the aim of which was to promote diversity in Swedish film production. The announcement of the Fusion Programme emphasised innovation, intersectional analysis, and feminist and anti-racist perspectives on artistic practices. The question of representation is also central, which is reflected in the guidelines for the applicants: ‘Applicants must identify himself [sic] as
within a geographical area. This idea of the nation as depending on some sort of cultural homogeneity is a strongly propagated one, not least by governments in time of war. Yet in fact, nations are intrinsically heterogeneous, and such diversity, far from being a threat to a national identity is a necessary characteristic of it. Cultural diversity is one of the things that defines a nation. Nations are identifiable as meaningful cultural units as a result of their internal cultural diversity, not as a result of an internal homogeneity. Perhaps my view here is coloured
A collection of essays about the Colonial Medical Service of Africa in which a group of distinguished colonial historians illustrate the diversity and active collaborations to be found in the untidy reality of government medical provision. The authors present important case studies in a series of essays covering former British colonial dependencies in Africa, including Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zanzibar. These studies reveal many new insights into the enactments of colonial policy and the ways in which colonial doctors negotiated the day-to-day reality during the height of Imperial rule in Africa. The book provides essential reading for scholars and students of colonial history, medical history and colonial administration.
the extent to which our findings may have brought to the fore features of SfD that have previously been underexplored in the wider literature on ‘global’ SfD. This discussion is arranged around three overarching themes that emerged across the empirical chapters. Firstly, focusing on multifaceted SfD practices and experiences , we explore the diversity and complexity of SfD as practised and experienced in Zambia; secondly, we consider associations
The power of vulnerability interrogates the new language of vulnerability that has emerged in feminist, queer and anti-racist debates about the production, use and meanings of media. The book investigates the historical legacies and contemporary forms and effects of this language. In today’s media culture, traumatic first-person or group narratives have popular currency, mobilising affect from compassion to rage to gain cultural visibility and political advantage. In this context, vulnerability becomes a kind of capital, a resource or an asset that can and has been appropriated for various groups and purposes in public discourses, activism as well as cultural institutions. Thus, politics of representation translates into politics of affect, and the question about whose vulnerability counts as socially and culturally legible and acknowledged. The contributors of the book examine how vulnerability has become a battleground; how affect and vulnerability have turned into a politicised language for not only addressing but also obscuring asymmetries of power; and how media activism and state policies address so-called vulnerable groups. While the contributors investigate the political potential as well as the constraints of vulnerability for feminist, queer and antiracist criticism, they also focus on the forms of agency and participation vulnerability can offer.
Migrating borders and moving times explores how crossing borders entails shifting time as well as changing geographical location. Space has long dominated the field of border studies, a prominence which the recent ‘spatial turn’ in social science has reinforced. This book challenges the classic analytical pre-eminence of ‘space’ by focusing on how ‘border time’ is shaped by, shapes and constitutes the borders themselves.
Using original field data from Israel, northern Europe and Europe's south-eastern borders (Kosovo, Albania, Montenegro, Sarajevo, Lesbos), our contributors explore ‘everyday forms of border temporality’ – the ways in which people through their temporal practices manage, shape, represent and constitute the borders across which they move or at which they are made to halt. In these accounts, which are based on fine-tuned ethnographic research sensitive to historical depth and wider political-economic context and transformation, ‘moving’ is understood not only as mobility but as affect, where borders become not just something to be ‘crossed’ but something that is emotionally experienced and ‘felt’.