Elizabeth Olson | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (original) (raw)

Papers by Elizabeth Olson

Within the context of global capitalism and late liberalism, the social and political implication... more Within the context of global capitalism and late liberalism, the social and political implications of waiting have attracted particular attention from geographers. States and other powerful institutions can now maintain control over potentially unruly populations through technocratic management that appears at first glance to be ethically neutral. Wait lists and waiting rooms can mask inequalities and justify the denial of rights, and new spaces of indefinite waiting like detention centers and clandestine prisons have emerged as important state-sanctioned technologies for managing surplus people. As marginalized and abandoned people are made to wait, large-scale future events are treated with the greatest urgency. In this report, I explore the ethical implications and work of waiting in modern moral reasoning, and consider the scalar bias that is revealed in our research on bodily urgency and emergency.

Social Justice and Neoliberalism

Child Development Perspectives

Youth provide significant contributions to their families, ranging from completing household chor... more Youth provide significant contributions to their families, ranging from completing household chores to taking care of members of the family. Researchers have examined correlates, predictors, and consequences of the variation in youth's contributions to their families. One body of work has examined family assistance-youth's help with household chores. Another has looked at youth caregivers who provide significant, ongoing care to family members with health needs. This research has been disaggregated across various theoretical models, methods, and terms, making it difficult to investigate and understand the full spectrum of youth's contributions to the family. In this article, we summarize evidence about youth's help and care for the family across a fuller spectrum of behaviors and intensity, and review the challenges and strengths of myriad methods and conceptual models. We propose a unifying approach for investigating youth's contributions to the family that capitalizes on the strengths of each discipline and prioritizes interdisciplinary sharing of resources.

Social & Cultural Geography

Abstract In this article, I explore the relationship between youth, security, and caregiving thro... more Abstract In this article, I explore the relationship between youth, security, and caregiving through a study of the U.S. Little Mothers’ Leagues, an initiative which began in New York City in 1910 with the aim of reducing infant mortality by training young girls to properly care for their infant siblings. Critical approaches to caregiving view security and insecurity as relational, drawing attention to contemporary power arrangements in the global caregiving industry and the contemporary crisis of care. However, in treating children as perpetual care recipients, it fails to provide a robust framework for understanding youth and children in historical and contemporary concerns related to human security. The history of the Little Mothers, largely children of European ‘non-native white’ immigrant families, illustrates the importance of children in securing population-wide well-being and the nation’s status in the global competition to reduce infant mortality. When set in contrast to the eugenics-inspired Mothercraft movement, the case reveals how children and youth become enlisted into projects of national human security, and how their ambiguity as caregivers – too young according to modern childhood, yet effective lifesavers – intersects with race and gender to further obscure their status as caregiving agents

Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, 2016

Religion and Place, 2012

In 2010, a 14-year-old boy was brutally murdered in a suburb outside of Rio de Janeiro when a gro... more In 2010, a 14-year-old boy was brutally murdered in a suburb outside of Rio de Janeiro when a group of skinheads observed him at a party and suspected that he might be gay (McLoughlin 2011). This scale of horrific homophobia is not uncommon in Brazil, where rates of violence against gays, lesbians, and transgendered people are reported to be amongst the highest in the world. A study conducted with the support of Grupo Gay da Bahia offers the conservative estimate of 260 gays killed in the country in 2010, indicating that rates doubled in only 5 years. The statistic sits uncomfortably with the image of Brazil as a sexually tolerant society, where the legalization of homosexuality was established shortly after the nation’s independence from Portugal. It was therefore with a great sense of achievement for proponents of gay rights that, in May 2011, the Brazil Supreme Court agreed to award same-sex couples the same legal rights as married heterosexuals (BBC 2011). Though the decision stops short of approving marriage for same-sex couples, it has been heralded as an important step against discrimination and toward acknowledging the rights of gays, lesbians, and transgenders to love and live without the condemnation of the state.

Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 2008

Since the 1990s, an increasing number of development agencies have attempted to incorporate faith... more Since the 1990s, an increasing number of development agencies have attempted to incorporate faith-based development organisations into mainstream 'secular' partnerships. Development scholars have responded to these trends by seeking to understand the range of ways that faith might matter in development. Far less emphasis has been placed on how development itself might be influencing faith organisations or their values of development. The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between organisational culture and development within a Catholic prelature in the southern Andes of Peru. By examining changes in development practice and perspective over time and tracing the relationship between development values across scales of organisation, I analyse the various ways that religiously-inspired development values are navigated, integrated and contested in the formulation and funding of development projects.

Fieldwork in Religion, 2010

This paper explores the intersections between feminist conceptions of reflexivity and activism in... more This paper explores the intersections between feminist conceptions of reflexivity and activism in the context of social research on religion in the southern Andes of Peru. Emerging geographies of religion have been strongly influenced by feminist theory and methodology, yet few geographers working on themes of religion have openly analysed the role of reflexivity in research or activism. I draw upon the research that I conducted with the Catholic Iglesia Surandina and the Protestant Iglesia Evangélica Peruana in one of the high provinces of Cusco, and consider two different approaches toward reflexivity—a focus on my own religious identity and considerations of access, and a broader engagement with the politics of knowledge construction in the region. I conclude by suggesting the need for a more thoughtful consideration of the complex and contradictory politics and ethics of social religious research.

Environment and Planning A, 2006

I examine the enmeshment of transnationally networked religious organizations in predominantly Qu... more I examine the enmeshment of transnationally networked religious organizations in predominantly Quechua communities in the southern Andes of Peru. I aim specifically to understand the multiple ways in which transnational religious organizations contribute to the construction of development epistemologies, or the socioeconomics of development truths. Peru has been undergoing a religious transformation similar to the rest of Latin America, with Evangelical and other non-Catholic faiths now well established in the rural highlands. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the Provincias Altas of Cusco, Peru, I examine the histories and organizational expressions of development truths promoted by the Iglesia Surandina (the Catholic Church of the Southern Andes), and the Iglesia Evangélica Peruana (the Peruvian Evangelical Church). The ways that these epistemologies become negotiated and translated in two rural districts reinforces the importance of historical context in the formation of developm...

Area, 2013

ABSTRACT This unique collection highlights the importance of landscape, politics and piety to our... more ABSTRACT This unique collection highlights the importance of landscape, politics and piety to our understandings of religion and place. The geographies of religion have developed rapidly in the last couple of decades and this book provides both a conceptual framing of the key issues and debates involved, and rich illustrations through empirical case studies. The chapters span the discipline of human geography and cover contexts as diverse as veiling in Turkey, religious landscapes in rural Peru, and refugees and faith in South Africa. A number of prominent scholars and emerging researchers examine topical themes in each engaging chapter with significant foci being: religious transnationalism and religious landscapes; gendering of religious identities and contexts; fashion, faith and the body; identity, resistance and belief; immigrant identities, citizenship and spaces of belief; alternative spiritualities and places of retreat and enchantment. Together they make a series of important contributions that illuminate the central role of geography to the meaning and implications of lived religion, public piety and religious embodiment. As such, this collection will be of much interest to researchers and students working on topics relating to religion and place, including human geographers, sociologists, religious studies and religious education scholars.

Area, 2013

This article argues that gender must be central to our theorisations of emergent religious geopol... more This article argues that gender must be central to our theorisations of emergent religious geopolitics. It does so through an engagement with Butler's reflections upon secular time (Butler J 2008 Secular politics, torture, and secular time The British Journal of Sociology 59 1–23), and the ‘cultural reanimation’ of Roman Catholic cultural underpinnings of French culture in the defence of the torture and maltreatment of Islamic bodies. Drawing from both the broader, tactical gender geopolitics of the Catholic Church and the embodied experiences of Catholic faithful in Latin America, the paper argues that the concept of cultural reanimation fails to capture the skilful way in which the Holy See asserts a gender theology that transcends the individual faithful body, through to the body of humanity. The ambiguous position of religious institutions in contemporary geopolitics as both cultural and political facilitates the construction of boundaries and territories that transcend and cut through the politics of the state.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2013

This article explores and extends the geographies of postsecular theory. Despite growing claims o... more This article explores and extends the geographies of postsecular theory. Despite growing claims of secularization, religion continues to be a highly public and rapidly diversifying issue, and of growing interest to geographers. We identify the spatial elements of postsecular theory, and consider how spatial approaches, particularly feminist work, that emphasize lived religion and embodiment might provide an alternative to existing

Environment and Planning A, 2006

Transnational geographies: rescaling development, migration, and religion The ideas for this them... more Transnational geographies: rescaling development, migration, and religion The ideas for this themed issue emerged from a series of paper sessions on the politics and geographies of transnationalism presented at the 2004 meetings of the Association of American Geographers. (1) Papers in the sessions provided critical examinations of the concept of transnationalism through research substantively focused on the grounded practices that connect uneven development to migration and religion across national borders. The paper sessions were followed by a lively roundtable in which participants debated the value of particular definitions of transnationalism, the methodological challenges associated with studying transnational processes, and whether and to what extent these processes can still be understood through the lenses of classical spatial metaphors. The papers built upon the well-established insight that transnational subjects, wherever they may be located geographically, are powerfully and distinctively constrained in their capacity to navigate borders creatively and engage hybrid identities (Mitchell, 1997). The`transnational', while not evacuated of agency, was understood to be subject to a range of violences, including the geographic imaginaries of powerful religious organizations, state policies and nationalist agendas, the deprivations of poverty, dislocations of war, and the historical^structural constraints of colonial administrations and neoimperial regimes (Harvey, 2003; Sparke, 2004; Yeoh, 2003). Rather than analytically subsuming`culture' under the structures of global neoliberal capitalism, the study of transnationalism has emphasized the cultural, social, and economic linkages that exist across the boundaries of nations, and the ways in which national spaces are sustained and reworked through the everyday activities of people and communities (Lowe and Lloyd, 1997). Networks have been a central thematic for understanding the quotidian processes that make up transnationalism from below' (Portes, 1997; Smith and Guarnizo, 1998). Anthropologists Aihwa Ong (1999) and Arjun Appadurai (1996), among many others, have developed transnational approaches that move beyond vulgar nationalist frameworks to examine the dynamism and processual nature of subjectification and place making. Transnational frameworks have provided a broad, flexible conceptual apparatus that has been adopted across disciplines to examine the interconnections between global economic restructuring, the politics and cultures of diasporas, ethnicity and race, class, community, gender, and the nation (Mitchell, 2003; Pratt and Yeoh, 2003). The focus of much research on`transnationality', according to Katharyne Mitchell (2003, page 74), is``on relations between things and on movements across things.'' Such an emphasis on border crossings, and specifically movements and connections that occur across national borders,``forces a reconceptualization of core beliefs in migration and geopolitical literatures ..., a rethinking of economic categories ... , [and] a rethinking in broader areas of epistemological inquiry.'' Following her lead, the papers seek to push forward various aspects of these reconceptualizations, and thereby expand Guest editorial

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019

In this article, I reflect upon Nixon’s (2011) charge to better represent slow violence through t... more In this article, I reflect upon Nixon’s (2011) charge to better represent slow violence through the context of youth caregivers in the United States. These youth are invisible in recent efforts to acknowledge the looming national ‘care crisis’. Youth caregivers face a range of barriers to receiving supports, and professionals who interact with youth are largely unaware of the possibility that children and adolescents can be caregivers. I apply an authoethnographic lens to my role as a researcher and advocate, explaining my attempts to raise awareness about youth caregiving amongst multiple audiences and through various media. I also discuss how this process of representing and authoring is underpinned with an ambivalence, much of which emerges from creating and stabilizing categories of youth caregivers as a research object. I therefore conclude with a reflection on how ambivalence became a productive partner in representing slow violence through theories of multiplicity, coordinati...

Journal of International Development, Jul 1, 2003

Culture has received increasing attention in critical development studies, though the notion that... more Culture has received increasing attention in critical development studies, though the notion that there are important cultural differences within and between development organizations has received less consideration. This paper elaborates elements of a framework for studying organizational culture in multi-agency development projects. It draws on selected writings in anthropology and in organizational theory and suggests that these two bodies of literature can be usefully brought together, as well as on insights from ongoing fieldwork in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso and Peru. At the centre of this framework is the analysis of context, practice and power. Where development projects involve multiple organizations (such as donors, government agencies, non-governmental organizations and grassroots groups) an analysis of cultures both within and between organizational actors can help explain important aspects of project performance. The paper argues that organizational culture is constantly being produced within projects, sometimes tending towards integration, often towards fragmentation. This fragmentation, indicative of the range of cultures within development organizations, is an important reason why some projects fail, and why ideas stated in project documents are often not realized, especially in the case of the newer and more contentious objectives such as 'empowerment'.

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 0022038042000218134, Jan 24, 2007

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view i... more If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. Information about this may be contained in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. ...

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2015

ABSTRACT

Within the context of global capitalism and late liberalism, the social and political implication... more Within the context of global capitalism and late liberalism, the social and political implications of waiting have attracted particular attention from geographers. States and other powerful institutions can now maintain control over potentially unruly populations through technocratic management that appears at first glance to be ethically neutral. Wait lists and waiting rooms can mask inequalities and justify the denial of rights, and new spaces of indefinite waiting like detention centers and clandestine prisons have emerged as important state-sanctioned technologies for managing surplus people. As marginalized and abandoned people are made to wait, large-scale future events are treated with the greatest urgency. In this report, I explore the ethical implications and work of waiting in modern moral reasoning, and consider the scalar bias that is revealed in our research on bodily urgency and emergency.

Social Justice and Neoliberalism

Child Development Perspectives

Youth provide significant contributions to their families, ranging from completing household chor... more Youth provide significant contributions to their families, ranging from completing household chores to taking care of members of the family. Researchers have examined correlates, predictors, and consequences of the variation in youth's contributions to their families. One body of work has examined family assistance-youth's help with household chores. Another has looked at youth caregivers who provide significant, ongoing care to family members with health needs. This research has been disaggregated across various theoretical models, methods, and terms, making it difficult to investigate and understand the full spectrum of youth's contributions to the family. In this article, we summarize evidence about youth's help and care for the family across a fuller spectrum of behaviors and intensity, and review the challenges and strengths of myriad methods and conceptual models. We propose a unifying approach for investigating youth's contributions to the family that capitalizes on the strengths of each discipline and prioritizes interdisciplinary sharing of resources.

Social & Cultural Geography

Abstract In this article, I explore the relationship between youth, security, and caregiving thro... more Abstract In this article, I explore the relationship between youth, security, and caregiving through a study of the U.S. Little Mothers’ Leagues, an initiative which began in New York City in 1910 with the aim of reducing infant mortality by training young girls to properly care for their infant siblings. Critical approaches to caregiving view security and insecurity as relational, drawing attention to contemporary power arrangements in the global caregiving industry and the contemporary crisis of care. However, in treating children as perpetual care recipients, it fails to provide a robust framework for understanding youth and children in historical and contemporary concerns related to human security. The history of the Little Mothers, largely children of European ‘non-native white’ immigrant families, illustrates the importance of children in securing population-wide well-being and the nation’s status in the global competition to reduce infant mortality. When set in contrast to the eugenics-inspired Mothercraft movement, the case reveals how children and youth become enlisted into projects of national human security, and how their ambiguity as caregivers – too young according to modern childhood, yet effective lifesavers – intersects with race and gender to further obscure their status as caregiving agents

Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, 2016

Religion and Place, 2012

In 2010, a 14-year-old boy was brutally murdered in a suburb outside of Rio de Janeiro when a gro... more In 2010, a 14-year-old boy was brutally murdered in a suburb outside of Rio de Janeiro when a group of skinheads observed him at a party and suspected that he might be gay (McLoughlin 2011). This scale of horrific homophobia is not uncommon in Brazil, where rates of violence against gays, lesbians, and transgendered people are reported to be amongst the highest in the world. A study conducted with the support of Grupo Gay da Bahia offers the conservative estimate of 260 gays killed in the country in 2010, indicating that rates doubled in only 5 years. The statistic sits uncomfortably with the image of Brazil as a sexually tolerant society, where the legalization of homosexuality was established shortly after the nation’s independence from Portugal. It was therefore with a great sense of achievement for proponents of gay rights that, in May 2011, the Brazil Supreme Court agreed to award same-sex couples the same legal rights as married heterosexuals (BBC 2011). Though the decision stops short of approving marriage for same-sex couples, it has been heralded as an important step against discrimination and toward acknowledging the rights of gays, lesbians, and transgenders to love and live without the condemnation of the state.

Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 2008

Since the 1990s, an increasing number of development agencies have attempted to incorporate faith... more Since the 1990s, an increasing number of development agencies have attempted to incorporate faith-based development organisations into mainstream 'secular' partnerships. Development scholars have responded to these trends by seeking to understand the range of ways that faith might matter in development. Far less emphasis has been placed on how development itself might be influencing faith organisations or their values of development. The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between organisational culture and development within a Catholic prelature in the southern Andes of Peru. By examining changes in development practice and perspective over time and tracing the relationship between development values across scales of organisation, I analyse the various ways that religiously-inspired development values are navigated, integrated and contested in the formulation and funding of development projects.

Fieldwork in Religion, 2010

This paper explores the intersections between feminist conceptions of reflexivity and activism in... more This paper explores the intersections between feminist conceptions of reflexivity and activism in the context of social research on religion in the southern Andes of Peru. Emerging geographies of religion have been strongly influenced by feminist theory and methodology, yet few geographers working on themes of religion have openly analysed the role of reflexivity in research or activism. I draw upon the research that I conducted with the Catholic Iglesia Surandina and the Protestant Iglesia Evangélica Peruana in one of the high provinces of Cusco, and consider two different approaches toward reflexivity—a focus on my own religious identity and considerations of access, and a broader engagement with the politics of knowledge construction in the region. I conclude by suggesting the need for a more thoughtful consideration of the complex and contradictory politics and ethics of social religious research.

Environment and Planning A, 2006

I examine the enmeshment of transnationally networked religious organizations in predominantly Qu... more I examine the enmeshment of transnationally networked religious organizations in predominantly Quechua communities in the southern Andes of Peru. I aim specifically to understand the multiple ways in which transnational religious organizations contribute to the construction of development epistemologies, or the socioeconomics of development truths. Peru has been undergoing a religious transformation similar to the rest of Latin America, with Evangelical and other non-Catholic faiths now well established in the rural highlands. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the Provincias Altas of Cusco, Peru, I examine the histories and organizational expressions of development truths promoted by the Iglesia Surandina (the Catholic Church of the Southern Andes), and the Iglesia Evangélica Peruana (the Peruvian Evangelical Church). The ways that these epistemologies become negotiated and translated in two rural districts reinforces the importance of historical context in the formation of developm...

Area, 2013

ABSTRACT This unique collection highlights the importance of landscape, politics and piety to our... more ABSTRACT This unique collection highlights the importance of landscape, politics and piety to our understandings of religion and place. The geographies of religion have developed rapidly in the last couple of decades and this book provides both a conceptual framing of the key issues and debates involved, and rich illustrations through empirical case studies. The chapters span the discipline of human geography and cover contexts as diverse as veiling in Turkey, religious landscapes in rural Peru, and refugees and faith in South Africa. A number of prominent scholars and emerging researchers examine topical themes in each engaging chapter with significant foci being: religious transnationalism and religious landscapes; gendering of religious identities and contexts; fashion, faith and the body; identity, resistance and belief; immigrant identities, citizenship and spaces of belief; alternative spiritualities and places of retreat and enchantment. Together they make a series of important contributions that illuminate the central role of geography to the meaning and implications of lived religion, public piety and religious embodiment. As such, this collection will be of much interest to researchers and students working on topics relating to religion and place, including human geographers, sociologists, religious studies and religious education scholars.

Area, 2013

This article argues that gender must be central to our theorisations of emergent religious geopol... more This article argues that gender must be central to our theorisations of emergent religious geopolitics. It does so through an engagement with Butler's reflections upon secular time (Butler J 2008 Secular politics, torture, and secular time The British Journal of Sociology 59 1–23), and the ‘cultural reanimation’ of Roman Catholic cultural underpinnings of French culture in the defence of the torture and maltreatment of Islamic bodies. Drawing from both the broader, tactical gender geopolitics of the Catholic Church and the embodied experiences of Catholic faithful in Latin America, the paper argues that the concept of cultural reanimation fails to capture the skilful way in which the Holy See asserts a gender theology that transcends the individual faithful body, through to the body of humanity. The ambiguous position of religious institutions in contemporary geopolitics as both cultural and political facilitates the construction of boundaries and territories that transcend and cut through the politics of the state.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2013

This article explores and extends the geographies of postsecular theory. Despite growing claims o... more This article explores and extends the geographies of postsecular theory. Despite growing claims of secularization, religion continues to be a highly public and rapidly diversifying issue, and of growing interest to geographers. We identify the spatial elements of postsecular theory, and consider how spatial approaches, particularly feminist work, that emphasize lived religion and embodiment might provide an alternative to existing

Environment and Planning A, 2006

Transnational geographies: rescaling development, migration, and religion The ideas for this them... more Transnational geographies: rescaling development, migration, and religion The ideas for this themed issue emerged from a series of paper sessions on the politics and geographies of transnationalism presented at the 2004 meetings of the Association of American Geographers. (1) Papers in the sessions provided critical examinations of the concept of transnationalism through research substantively focused on the grounded practices that connect uneven development to migration and religion across national borders. The paper sessions were followed by a lively roundtable in which participants debated the value of particular definitions of transnationalism, the methodological challenges associated with studying transnational processes, and whether and to what extent these processes can still be understood through the lenses of classical spatial metaphors. The papers built upon the well-established insight that transnational subjects, wherever they may be located geographically, are powerfully and distinctively constrained in their capacity to navigate borders creatively and engage hybrid identities (Mitchell, 1997). The`transnational', while not evacuated of agency, was understood to be subject to a range of violences, including the geographic imaginaries of powerful religious organizations, state policies and nationalist agendas, the deprivations of poverty, dislocations of war, and the historical^structural constraints of colonial administrations and neoimperial regimes (Harvey, 2003; Sparke, 2004; Yeoh, 2003). Rather than analytically subsuming`culture' under the structures of global neoliberal capitalism, the study of transnationalism has emphasized the cultural, social, and economic linkages that exist across the boundaries of nations, and the ways in which national spaces are sustained and reworked through the everyday activities of people and communities (Lowe and Lloyd, 1997). Networks have been a central thematic for understanding the quotidian processes that make up transnationalism from below' (Portes, 1997; Smith and Guarnizo, 1998). Anthropologists Aihwa Ong (1999) and Arjun Appadurai (1996), among many others, have developed transnational approaches that move beyond vulgar nationalist frameworks to examine the dynamism and processual nature of subjectification and place making. Transnational frameworks have provided a broad, flexible conceptual apparatus that has been adopted across disciplines to examine the interconnections between global economic restructuring, the politics and cultures of diasporas, ethnicity and race, class, community, gender, and the nation (Mitchell, 2003; Pratt and Yeoh, 2003). The focus of much research on`transnationality', according to Katharyne Mitchell (2003, page 74), is``on relations between things and on movements across things.'' Such an emphasis on border crossings, and specifically movements and connections that occur across national borders,``forces a reconceptualization of core beliefs in migration and geopolitical literatures ..., a rethinking of economic categories ... , [and] a rethinking in broader areas of epistemological inquiry.'' Following her lead, the papers seek to push forward various aspects of these reconceptualizations, and thereby expand Guest editorial

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019

In this article, I reflect upon Nixon’s (2011) charge to better represent slow violence through t... more In this article, I reflect upon Nixon’s (2011) charge to better represent slow violence through the context of youth caregivers in the United States. These youth are invisible in recent efforts to acknowledge the looming national ‘care crisis’. Youth caregivers face a range of barriers to receiving supports, and professionals who interact with youth are largely unaware of the possibility that children and adolescents can be caregivers. I apply an authoethnographic lens to my role as a researcher and advocate, explaining my attempts to raise awareness about youth caregiving amongst multiple audiences and through various media. I also discuss how this process of representing and authoring is underpinned with an ambivalence, much of which emerges from creating and stabilizing categories of youth caregivers as a research object. I therefore conclude with a reflection on how ambivalence became a productive partner in representing slow violence through theories of multiplicity, coordinati...

Journal of International Development, Jul 1, 2003

Culture has received increasing attention in critical development studies, though the notion that... more Culture has received increasing attention in critical development studies, though the notion that there are important cultural differences within and between development organizations has received less consideration. This paper elaborates elements of a framework for studying organizational culture in multi-agency development projects. It draws on selected writings in anthropology and in organizational theory and suggests that these two bodies of literature can be usefully brought together, as well as on insights from ongoing fieldwork in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso and Peru. At the centre of this framework is the analysis of context, practice and power. Where development projects involve multiple organizations (such as donors, government agencies, non-governmental organizations and grassroots groups) an analysis of cultures both within and between organizational actors can help explain important aspects of project performance. The paper argues that organizational culture is constantly being produced within projects, sometimes tending towards integration, often towards fragmentation. This fragmentation, indicative of the range of cultures within development organizations, is an important reason why some projects fail, and why ideas stated in project documents are often not realized, especially in the case of the newer and more contentious objectives such as 'empowerment'.

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 0022038042000218134, Jan 24, 2007

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view i... more If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. Information about this may be contained in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. ...

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2015

ABSTRACT