‘Order and Disjuncture: The Organisation of Aid and
Development’ Conference at SOAS – call for papers
----- Forwarded message from [log in to unmask] -----
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2003 11:39:24 +0100
From: "Lewis,D" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: "Lewis,D" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Following up on Order & Disjuncture
We've now had many encouraging responses and several
interesting paper proposals for the planned workshop
on 26/27th September at SOAS. It seems that there is
definitely some interest in these issues!
We are now sending the Call for Papers round one more
time. Some may not have had it earlier: we keep adding
people to the mailing list! And please do continue to
forward it on to any other people - particularly PhD
students, but anyone else too - whom you think might
be interested.
We would also like you to let us know (by the end of
the first week of July) whether:
(a) you plan to attend the meeting
(b) you wish to present a paper (please let us have a
title and brief abstract - but you don't need to
re-send if you've already send one)
This will then help us to get an idea of likely
numbers, identify themes and think about a suitable
format for the meeting.
Many thanks for all the interest shown in this so far.
David Mosse and David Lewis
‘Order and Disjuncture: The Organisation of Aid and
Development’
An informal workshop
26th-27th September 2003, SOAS, London
The focus
The 1990s saw the burgeoning of a wide-ranging
anthropological critique of development policy and
practice (cf Ferguson, Escobar, Hobart etc) which
explored understandings of power and discourse, but
which told us little about the ways development is
socially produced or organised at different levels.
We propose to explore this subject further by
considering the theme of ‘order and disjuncture’ in
development. Development is a system for ordering,
representing and giving meaning – a system for the
organisation of thought and action. Yet order implies
disjuncture - between contradictory interests, power
and powerlessness, politics and management, policy
texts and practices etc. Policy and its projects and
programmes are attempts to create a ‘forced coherence’
among disparate individuals and collectives each
pursuing their own agendas. Processes of translation
(cf. Latour, or Long’s interfaces) are crucial to the
production and maintenance of these systems of order
and disjuncture.
This meeting therefore seeks to move debates forward
in a number of key areas:
1. The need for more ethnography of organizations and
practices: there has been relatively little
ethnographic engagement with the ways in which
development is organised as concept, relationship and
practice. How does the ‘extreme order’ of
managerialism and market fundamentalism play out in
development activities? How can anthropologists
analyse organisational cultures, or social
relationships within the peculiar cross-cultural,
multi-level and inter-institutional settings that
international development involves? How are policy
ideas and practices negotiated, interpreted and
translated within and between different arenas of
development agencies, their projects and those they
seek to enrol or affect?
2. Shifting understandings of positionality: earlier
distinctions between an anthropology in development
and an anthropology of development are useful, but
potentially misleading. All anthropologists write from
a position within ‘development’, since it operates –
as colonialism once did - as a dominant interpretative
grid through which international and local power
relations are understood. Both development ‘experts’
and ‘farmers’ – and anthropologists – are objects of
global development discourses.
3. Responding to changes in development policy and
practice: agencies such as the UK Department for
International Development (DFID) no longer focus on
development ‘projects’ to the same degree, but
increasingly see development action in terms of
meeting international development targets, influencing
policy reform at national levels to this end, and
broader notions of ‘global governance’. Staff in these
agencies are increasingly playing the role of
knowledge workers, detached from local communities and
colleagues ‘in the field’. Criteria for ‘success’ are
constantly labelled and re-labelled in the search for
order and coherence.
Background
This workshop is being organised under the auspices of
EIDOS, the European Inter-University Development
Opportunities Study Group.
At present, we regret that we do not have resources to
cover the travel costs of participants, so
participation will have to be on a voluntary,
self-funded basis.
However, we hope that the workshop may provide a
launch pad for a revival of interest in work by
anthropologists on development themes – and we will
discuss possible sources of funding for future events
and an idea for a new journal on Anthropology, Aid and
Development.
Call for papers
Please contact David Mosse at SOAS ([log in to unmask])
and David Lewis at LSE ([log in to unmask]) if you
would be interested in attending or if you have an
idea for a possible paper, attaching a title and short
abstract.
We are particularly keen to have papers from PhD
students working on these themes, who are in the final
stages of writing up, or have recently completed.
We hope to move swiftly to the publication of a set of
papers in an edited volume, perhaps with Pluto Press.
See also our first paper on this topic: David Lewis,
Anthony J. Bebbington, Simon P.J. Batterbury, Alpa
Shah, Elizabeth Olson, M. Shameem Siddiqi and Sandra
Duvall 2003. Practice, power and meaning: frameworks
for studying organisational culture in
multi-agency rural development projects. International
Working Paper 12, CCS, LSE.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/CCS/publications/iwp/IWP12.htm
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