A meeting at SOAS, UK.
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
----- 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
<<EIDOSOrder and Disjuncture-DM.doc>>
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.
----- End forwarded message -----
--
Dr Simon Batterbury
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Geography and Regional Development
The University of Arizona
409 Harvill Building, Box #2
Tucson, AZ 85721-0076, USA
Phone: (520) 626-8054
Fax: (520) 621-2889
http://geog.arizona.edu/~web/faculty.htm
|
