| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
106633
|
|
|
|
|
| Publication |
2011.
|
| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the increasing use of 'positive', active images of 'poor women in developing countries' by development institutions, in relation to several interlinked factors: critiques of earlier representations of 'Third World women' as an essentialised category of 'passive victims'; the appropriation-and transformation-within neoliberal discourses of development from the 1990s onwards of concepts of agency and empowerment; and changes in the role of development NGOs in the same period. Through a discussion of recent publicity campaigns by Oxfam Unwrapped, the Nike Foundation and Divine chocolate, the article examines the specific and gendered ways in which these more recent visual productions are racialised, exploring, in particular, parallels and continuities between colonial representations of women workers and today's images of micro-entrepreneurship within the framework of neoliberal globalisation. The article concludes that, like their colonial predecessors, contemporary representations obscure relations of oppression and exploitation, and work to render collective challenges to the neoliberal model invisible.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 2 |
ID:
156652
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
This article considers some ways in which one strand of post-development thinking has influenced non-governmental organisation (NGO)-led activist discourses and practices of transnational solidarity. It argues that there has been a tendency for these discourses and practices to rearticulate racialised constructions of unspoiled and authentic ‘natives’ requiring protection which are historically embedded in colonial practices of governance. In turn, this has meant the failure to acknowledge indigenous histories of political organisation and resistance. Further, the characterisation of development in binary terms as both homogeneous and always undesirable has meant the delegitimisation of demands for equality as well as the neglect of the implications of the decisive shift from developmentalism to neoliberal globalisation as the dominant paradigm. Drawing upon a discussion of aspects of the local, national and transnational campaign to prevent proposed bauxite mining in the Niyamgiri hills in Odisha (India), I argue that given that international NGOs are themselves embedded in the architecture of neoliberal development and aid, their campaigning activities can be understood as facilitating the displacement and marginalisation of local activists and silencing their complex engagements with ideas of development. This potentially defuses and depoliticises opposition to neoliberal forms of development, while transposing collective agency onto undifferentiated publics in the Global North, processes which, however, continue to be actively resisted.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|