Download or read book Spaces of Aid written by Lisa Smirl and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-03-12 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aid workers commonly bemoan that the experience of working in the field sits uneasily with the goals they've signed up to: visiting project sites in air-conditioned Land Cruisers while the intended beneficiaries walk barefoot through the heat, or checking emails from within gated compounds while surrounding communities have no running water. Spaces of Aid provides the first book-length analysis of what has colloquially been referred to as Aid Land. It explores in depth two high-profile case studies, the Aceh tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, in order to uncover a fascinating history of the objects and spaces that have become an endemic yet unexamined part of the delivery of humanitarian assistance.
Download or read book Spaces of Aid written by Lisa Smirl and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-03-12 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aid workers commonly bemoan that the experience of working in the field sits uneasily with the goals they’ve signed up to: visiting project sites in air-conditioned Land Cruisers while the intended beneficiaries walk barefoot through the heat, or checking emails from within gated compounds while surrounding communities have no running water. Spaces of Aid provides the first book-length analysis of what has colloquially been referred to as Aid Land. It explores in depth two high-profile case studies, the Aceh tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, in order to uncover a fascinating history of the objects and spaces that have become an endemic yet unexamined part of the delivery of humanitarian assistance.
Download or read book Forms of Aid written by Benedict Clouette and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2017-09-11 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For some time now, the subject of cooperation in the context of development aid has featured in the education of architects. However, up to now there have hardly been any attempts to critically place the work of architects and urban designers in this context. The book highlights the architectural consequences of humanitarian actions on the basis of three case studies – in Port-au-Prince, the West Bank, and Nairobi. The authors analyze twelve projects in terms of typology and construction and establish a differentiated position in the discourse on short-term housing for emergency situations. They investigate the far-reaching effects of such architectural aid and supply architects, town planners, and NGOs with useful advice for future planning and design.
Download or read book Spaces of Aid written by Lisa Smirl and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Negotiating Relief written by Michele Acuto and published by Hurst & Company. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While humanitarianism is unquestionably a fast-growing subject of practitioner and scholarly engagement, much discussion about it is predicated on a dangerous dichotomy between 'aid givers' and 'relief takers' that largely misrepresents the negotiated nature of the humanitarian enterprise. To highlight the tension between these relationships, this book focuses on the 'humanitarian spaces' and the dynamics of 'humanitarian diplomacy' (both 'local' and 'global') that sustain them. It gathers key voices to provide a critical analysis of international theory, geopolitics and dilemmas underpinning the negotiation of relief. Offering up-to-date examples from cases such as Kosovo and the Tsunami, or ongoing crises like Haiti, Libya, Darfur and Somalia, the contributors analyse the complexity of humanitarian diplomacy and the multiplicity of geographies and actors involved in it. By investigating the transformations that both diplomacy and humanitarianism are undergoing, the authors prompt us towards a critical and eclectic understanding of the dialectics of humanitarian space. Negotiating Relief aims to present humanitarianism not only as a relief delivery mechanism but also as a phenomenon in dialogue with both localised crises and global politics.--
Download or read book Necessary Risks written by Abby Stoddard and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-02 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Attacks on humanitarian aid operations are both a symptom and a weapon of modern warfare, and as armed groups increasingly target aid workers for violence, relief operations are curtailed in places where civilians are most in need. This book provides an in-depth analysis of the challenges to humanitarian action in warzones, the risk management and negotiation strategies that hold the most promise for aid organizations, and an ethical framework from which to tackle the problem. By combining rigorous research findings with structural historical analysis and first-person accounts of armed attacks on aid workers, the author proposes a reframed ethos of humanitarian professionalism, decoupled from organizational or political interests, and centered on optimizing outcomes for the people it serves.
Download or read book Aid in Danger written by Larissa Fast and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanitarian aid workers increasingly remain present in contexts of violence and are injured, kidnapped, and killed as a result. Since 9/11 and in response to these dangers, aid organizations have fortified themselves to shield their staff and programs from outside threats. In Aid in Danger, Larissa Fast critically examines the causes of violence against aid workers and the consequences of the approaches aid agencies use to protect themselves from attack. Based on more than a decade of research, Aid in Danger explores the assumptions underpinning existing explanations of and responses to violence against aid workers. According to Fast, most explanations of attacks locate the causes externally and maintain an image of aid workers as an exceptional category of civilians. The resulting approaches to security rely on separation and fortification and alienate aid workers from those in need, representing both a symptom and a cause of crisis in the humanitarian system. Missing from most analyses are the internal vulnerabilities, exemplified in the everyday decisions and ordinary human frailties and organizational mistakes that sometimes contribute to the conditions leading to violence. This oversight contributes to the normalization of danger in aid work and undermines the humanitarian ethos. As an alternative, Fast proposes a relational framework that captures both external threats and internal vulnerabilities. By uncovering overlooked causes of violence, Aid in Danger offers a unique perspective on the challenges of providing aid in perilous settings and on the prospects of reforming the system in service of core humanitarian values.
Download or read book The Paradoxes of Aid Work written by Silke Roth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores what attracts people to aidwork and to what extent the promises of aidwork are fulfilled. 'Aidland' is a highly complex and heterogeneous context which includes many different occupations, forms of employment and organizations. Analysing the processes that lead to the involvement in development cooperation, emergency relief and human rights work and tracing the pathways into and through Aidland, the book addresses working and living conditions in Aidland, gender relations and inequality among aid personnel and what impact aidwork has on the life-courses of aidworkers. In order to capture the trajectories that lead to Aidland a biographical perspective is employed which reveals that boundary crossing between development cooperation, emergency relief and human rights is not unusual and that considering these fields as separate spheres might overlook important connections. Rich reflexive data is used to theorize about the often contradictory experiences of people working in aid whose careers are shaped by geo-politics, changing priorities of donors and a changing composition of the aid sector. Exploring the life worlds of people working in aid, this book contributes to the emerging sociology and anthropology of aidwork and will be of interest to professionals and researchers in humanitarian and development studies, sociology, anthropology, political science and international relations, international social work and social psychology.
Download or read book Does Foreign Aid Really Work written by Roger C. Riddell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-07 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provided for over 60 years, and expanding more rapidly today than it has for a generation, foreign aid is now a $100bn business. But does it work? Indeed, is it needed at all? In this first-ever, overall assessment of aid, Roger Riddell provides a rigorous but highly readable account of aid, warts and all.
Download or read book On an Empty Stomach written by Tom Scott-Smith and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On an Empty Stomach examines the practical techniques humanitarians have used to manage and measure starvation, from Victorian "scientific" soup kitchens to space-age, high-protein foods. Tracing the evolution of these techniques since the start of the nineteenth century, Tom Scott-Smith argues that humanitarianism is not a simple story of progress and improvement, but rather is profoundly shaped by sociopolitical conditions. Aid is often presented as an apolitical and technical project, but the way humanitarians conceive and tackle human needs has always been deeply influenced by culture, politics, and society. Txhese influences extend down to the most detailed mechanisms for measuring malnutrition and providing sustenance. As Scott-Smith shows, over the past century, the humanitarian approach to hunger has redefined food as nutrients and hunger as a medical condition. Aid has become more individualized, medicalized, and rationalized, shaped by modernism in bureaucracy, commerce, and food technology. On an Empty Stomach focuses on the gains and losses that result, examining the complex compromises that arise between efficiency of distribution and quality of care. Scott-Smith concludes that humanitarian groups have developed an approach to the empty stomach that is dependent on compact, commercially produced devices and is often paternalistic and culturally insensitive.
Download or read book Mutual Aid written by Dean Spade and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world. Around the globe, people are faced with a spiralling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable. Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid. This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout. Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.
Download or read book Aid to Armenia written by Joanne Laycock and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interventions on behalf of Armenia and Armenians have come to be identified by scholars and practitioners alike as defining moments in the history of humanitarianism. This volume reassesses these claims, critically examining a range of interventions by governments, international and diasporic organizations, and individuals that aimed to ‘save Armenians’. Drawing on perspectives from a range of disciplines, the chapters trace the evolution of these interventions from the late-nineteenth to the present day, paying particular attention to the aftermaths of the genocide and the upheavals of the post-Soviet period. Geographically, the contributions connect diverse spaces and places – the Caucasus, Russia, the Middle East, Europe, North America, South America, and Australia – revealing shifting transnational networks of aid and intervention. These chapters are followed by reflections from leading scholars in the fields of refugee history and Armenian history, Peter Gatrell and Ronald Grigor Suny. Aid to Armenia not only offers an innovative exploration into the history of Armenia and Armenians and the history of humanitarianism, but it provides a platform for practitioners to think critically about contemporary humanitarian questions facing Armenia, the South Caucasus region and the wider Armenian diaspora.
Download or read book States Markets and Foreign Aid written by Simone Dietrich and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-11 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the different choices made by donor governments when delivering foreign aid projects around the world.
Download or read book Aid Worker Voices written by Tom Arcaro and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2014, a sociologist from Elon University and professional humanitarian teamed up to study the aid industry. Through a census-style online survey that was among the first of its kind, over 1,000 aid and development professionals shared their views and opinions on a wide range of topics related to their experiences as the core of the aid industry's workforce. This book is the analysis of those 1,000+ responses. As the title suggests, this represents the voices of humanitarian aid and development workers around the globe - a diverse array of individuals with deep, intense and equally diverse feelings on what it means to be part of today's humanitarian workforce. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the global aid and development industry better. All net proceeds from this book will support the Periclean Scholars at Elon University and the Periclean Foundation.
Download or read book Life Lived in Relief written by Ilana Feldman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Palestinian refugees’ experience of protracted displacement is among the lengthiest in history. In her breathtaking new book, Ilana Feldman explores this community’s engagement with humanitarian assistance over a seventy-year period and their persistent efforts to alter their present and future conditions. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic field research, Life Lived in Relief offers a comprehensive account of the Palestinian refugee experience living with humanitarian assistance in many spaces and across multiple generations. By exploring the complex world constituted through humanitarianism, and how that world is experienced by the many people who inhabit it, Feldman asks pressing questions about what it means for a temporary status to become chronic. How do people in these conditions assert the value of their lives? What does the Palestinian situation tell us about the world? Life Lived in Relief is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and practice of humanitarianism today.
Download or read book The Vulnerable Humanitarian written by Gemma Houldey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-27 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Vulnerable Humanitarian challenges the prevalence of stress and burnout culture within the aid sector, laying bare the issues of power, agency, security and wellbeing that continue to trouble organisations and staff. Engaging and insightful, this book illustrates the problematic and unrealistic expectations of aid workers through the archetype of the perfect humanitarian, and considers why burnout is so endemic, yet so rarely acknowledged, within aid organisations. The book provides practical means through which staff and managers can reflect upon and discuss damaging organisational cultures and behaviours, and develop a more inclusive and caring work environment. Drawing on original academic research and interviews with national and international aid workers and development experts, the book proposes a feminist, anti-racist and decolonial agenda in challenging oppressive systems and structures within the sector. With extensive professional experience as an aid worker herself, Gemma Houldey also shares her own struggles with mental health and what she has learned from feminist practices for self- and collective care. Proposing new ways of addressing wellbeing that are sensitive to the multi-faceted personalities and lived experiences of people working on aid and development programmes, The Vulnerable Humanitarian is essential reading both for current aid sector employees and for prospective employees and students.
Download or read book Acts of Aid written by Eleonor Marcussen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This socio-political history on the aftermath of the 1934 Bihar–Nepal earthquake explores disaster aid, relief, and reconstruction and the questions they give rise to about class, communities and inequality. The book traces disaster responses across the twentieth century in order to demonstrate how they were embedded in political processes transcending the event of the earthquake. Aid, relief and reconstruction mirrored political agendas and ideas that articulated both changes and continuities by the colonial state, civil society and international organisations. The impact of the earthquake and aid in its wake varied widely according to social groups, ethnicity and gender in the aftermath. By studying the effects of the earthquake on communities directly affected and society, the author argues that we can come closer to an understanding of the role political, social and cultural factors held in shaping resilience to natural disasters.
