Now that I have dedicated, reliable internet--and not many other distractions but said interwebs-- I'm able to be following the blogs I have coming in my rss feed more closely. During the school year, I tend to glance, skim at best, the 15 or so sites I have fed there every day. After two days, there would be 600-something items to read; I knew I couldn't get to them, so I just mark them all as read and move back to whatever real work I'm doing. Now that I can actually read them, a few are worthy of passing on:
1. A discussion of web versus regular writing.
The discussion is interesting in and of itself, especially now that I'm blogging again. Although, as more of a consumer than producer of any writing, I'm more piqued to thinking about the practicalities and logistics of reading more and more electronic material, be they websites or .pdf files, than about the writing itself. I'm constantly overwhelmed by the volumes of reading for classes, and in an effort to reduce my own mass of paper clutter (helping the environment is a worthy, but entirely secondary motivation here), I've forced myself to read more and more on the computer. Yet in the 45 minute-1 hour commute (one way) to Cambridge, which was a daily event in the spring, I was stuck either printing some of the articles out after all, or being the nerd/weirdo who pulls out his laptop on the T. (I should say, that's less strange on the Red Line than on the Orange Line). It's made me think of something like Amazon's Kindle as a potential, if expensive, solution to this dillema. But even then, I'm not entirely comfortable reading on the screen: the software isn't advanced enough for my tastes to be able to mark up pages, comment in the margins, and highlight sections; I suppose my generation is a bridge between those who still like holding the book or something tangible and those who are entirely electronic in their reading process.
2. The newest Stuff White People Like, which is on personal anecdotes of poverty.
Most of the time, I have a good laugh at what comes out of this site. They often hit the nail on the head and usually call me, and presumably other readers, out on things that we do so involuntarily in a way that's both funny and a little uncomfortable at times. This edition, from their recent competition for new entries, made me wonder if it weren't possible to take it one step further from just college-age experiences of poverty to experiences of seeing poverty close up and claiming some ownership over it. Like part of what I'm doing now. I catch myself back home from time to time talking with a bit too much omniscience about the experience, or even just the expression, of poverty in the places I've worked. I'm not trying to devalue my experiences here, but to remind myself that spending a summer or a month somewhere leaves me with context that, while useful in many conversations and for personal grounding, that is mostly anecdotal. I'm reasonably confident in my own self-reflection that I wouldn't go so far as to say "I know what it's like to live as a poor person in Malawi," because under no circumstances have any of my experiences gotten me close to living outside a well kept inn. But just as I revel in how many stamps there are in my passport, I think I buy into something that is particularly emerging among educated Americans, especially at a place like where I'm in school, to have done work abroad. Many of the people with whom I share classrooms can toss around stories like, "When I was in [country], the situation there was [description from one incident they witnessed]" as though they have expert knowledge of the situation. It's like what some of the comments in the link mention about sympathy v. empathy. I feel like there's something, whether it's insecurity or arrogance, that makes people feel comfortable appearing as though they know what poverty is like.
This gets to the point that I've come to before: in almost all of my work, I'm an outsider. And more to the point, in a lot of ways, I, by virtue of my nationality, education, university, skin color, and relative wealth, have a lot of power right from the start. And yet, with all this talk about community-based participatory research (which I'm beginning to think is indeed just rhetoric) in the U.S., I realize how terribly difficult it is to do that well. I'm not a member of "the community" (whatever that means). Even in the instances when I have been working within segments of what are, on paper, "my community", I didn't really feel apart of "the community" and felt able to represent that "community's" voice to a very small extent. More to the point here, I've had a rather privileged life such that I don't know what it's like to be poor, nor to live in a rural area; I certainly don't know what it's like to be a Malawian. And while I'm going in the fall to be studying for a degree that will likely make me an "expert" in a certain field, I struggle with exactly how much I may know empirically and how little I know experientially. I also think that part of why I'm drawn to doctoral studies is that it may remove me from having to deal with that paradox: I can analyze the data and contextualize the results with the experience that I do have, but I may not have to go much further. I'm not quite sure how good or bad of a thing that is. I think realizing it is important--it checks the ego that comes with the altruism--but I'm not sure whether that's quite enough, nor exactly what else to do about it.
When it comes to turning that altruism into action, I think things get even fuzzier. This country has so much foreign aid coming in--the big debate in Parliament right now is about the budget, and the party in power's criticism of the opposition holding up the process was that doing so was "preventing development from happening"--and I really doubt how much of the aid is really addressing the problems that people face. There is also the question of whether the money actually gets close enough to the intended recipient once funneled through expansive bureaucracies and big US salaries (a job I might have some day). But in terms of the content and mechanisms of the "interventions" that are happening, I really wonder how much of them are driven by "the community." Rather, I think so many of these ideas are dreamt up in New York, London and Washington and are either totally irrelevant or useless to the people who get the intervention. A brilliant thing about the cash transfers was that it cut all that out; the program gave money to the people. There are clearly sustainability concerns there--what happens when the money runs out?--but it strikes me that the average person wouldn't say that a lot of the larger projects running in these areas (a flop of a farming project funded in part by the US comes to mind) are really all that useful. Or that there are some many strange and idiosyncratic ties to the money that it makes it more difficult to manage than it can help (a certain funder in India that would only fund STD testing and not HIV testing and had weird reporting requirements that made the total number of people served look larger than it actually was). Moreover, there's this interesting disconnect from people in the West who take jobs at NGOs because they want to do good work, help people, or a variety of other good reasons; here, people want jobs at NGOs because they're by far the highest paying jobs around. Which isn't to say that people here don't also want the jobs of the same reasons as the people in the West, just that with money there's power (the people who get those jobs are educated Malawians, frankly often over-qualified to be doing some of them), and another level removed from "the community".
I guess where I'm going is how can one work with particularly disenfranchised, or hard-to-reach populations in a helpful and not-condescending way? The people in Washington (or me in Boston) have plenty of data to make a good story of what's necessary (and enough of it, frankly, to cook into telling any story they want). But how much does that really get at the right solutions?
I think that's part of why I'm interested in evaluation. It's naturally reactive and can analyze how and why something didn't work so that you can improve on it. Everyone's a critic, right? But because I'm averse to thinking that I have the answers, evaluation is, in some ways, an easy place to be.
Possibly the thing I like most about being here is having the space and time to ramble on about all this stuff. The irony of being in school where we're taught to think critically is that I rarely feel like I have the time to do so about anything bigger than the task at hand. At some point, there needs to be a way to let it all come together into a sum greater than all the annoying classes that comprise the parts. I found that here last year, and selfishly, that's a big reason of why I wanted to come back. Although maybe the security guard at the airport was right--he said, "ah, so all you do is take, but what do you have to give?" after telling him that I was here to do research. In his case, I think he was asking for money, but the question is relevant otherwise. I'm still working on a good reply.
1. A discussion of web versus regular writing.
The discussion is interesting in and of itself, especially now that I'm blogging again. Although, as more of a consumer than producer of any writing, I'm more piqued to thinking about the practicalities and logistics of reading more and more electronic material, be they websites or .pdf files, than about the writing itself. I'm constantly overwhelmed by the volumes of reading for classes, and in an effort to reduce my own mass of paper clutter (helping the environment is a worthy, but entirely secondary motivation here), I've forced myself to read more and more on the computer. Yet in the 45 minute-1 hour commute (one way) to Cambridge, which was a daily event in the spring, I was stuck either printing some of the articles out after all, or being the nerd/weirdo who pulls out his laptop on the T. (I should say, that's less strange on the Red Line than on the Orange Line). It's made me think of something like Amazon's Kindle as a potential, if expensive, solution to this dillema. But even then, I'm not entirely comfortable reading on the screen: the software isn't advanced enough for my tastes to be able to mark up pages, comment in the margins, and highlight sections; I suppose my generation is a bridge between those who still like holding the book or something tangible and those who are entirely electronic in their reading process.
2. The newest Stuff White People Like, which is on personal anecdotes of poverty.
Most of the time, I have a good laugh at what comes out of this site. They often hit the nail on the head and usually call me, and presumably other readers, out on things that we do so involuntarily in a way that's both funny and a little uncomfortable at times. This edition, from their recent competition for new entries, made me wonder if it weren't possible to take it one step further from just college-age experiences of poverty to experiences of seeing poverty close up and claiming some ownership over it. Like part of what I'm doing now. I catch myself back home from time to time talking with a bit too much omniscience about the experience, or even just the expression, of poverty in the places I've worked. I'm not trying to devalue my experiences here, but to remind myself that spending a summer or a month somewhere leaves me with context that, while useful in many conversations and for personal grounding, that is mostly anecdotal. I'm reasonably confident in my own self-reflection that I wouldn't go so far as to say "I know what it's like to live as a poor person in Malawi," because under no circumstances have any of my experiences gotten me close to living outside a well kept inn. But just as I revel in how many stamps there are in my passport, I think I buy into something that is particularly emerging among educated Americans, especially at a place like where I'm in school, to have done work abroad. Many of the people with whom I share classrooms can toss around stories like, "When I was in [country], the situation there was [description from one incident they witnessed]" as though they have expert knowledge of the situation. It's like what some of the comments in the link mention about sympathy v. empathy. I feel like there's something, whether it's insecurity or arrogance, that makes people feel comfortable appearing as though they know what poverty is like.
This gets to the point that I've come to before: in almost all of my work, I'm an outsider. And more to the point, in a lot of ways, I, by virtue of my nationality, education, university, skin color, and relative wealth, have a lot of power right from the start. And yet, with all this talk about community-based participatory research (which I'm beginning to think is indeed just rhetoric) in the U.S., I realize how terribly difficult it is to do that well. I'm not a member of "the community" (whatever that means). Even in the instances when I have been working within segments of what are, on paper, "my community", I didn't really feel apart of "the community" and felt able to represent that "community's" voice to a very small extent. More to the point here, I've had a rather privileged life such that I don't know what it's like to be poor, nor to live in a rural area; I certainly don't know what it's like to be a Malawian. And while I'm going in the fall to be studying for a degree that will likely make me an "expert" in a certain field, I struggle with exactly how much I may know empirically and how little I know experientially. I also think that part of why I'm drawn to doctoral studies is that it may remove me from having to deal with that paradox: I can analyze the data and contextualize the results with the experience that I do have, but I may not have to go much further. I'm not quite sure how good or bad of a thing that is. I think realizing it is important--it checks the ego that comes with the altruism--but I'm not sure whether that's quite enough, nor exactly what else to do about it.
When it comes to turning that altruism into action, I think things get even fuzzier. This country has so much foreign aid coming in--the big debate in Parliament right now is about the budget, and the party in power's criticism of the opposition holding up the process was that doing so was "preventing development from happening"--and I really doubt how much of the aid is really addressing the problems that people face. There is also the question of whether the money actually gets close enough to the intended recipient once funneled through expansive bureaucracies and big US salaries (a job I might have some day). But in terms of the content and mechanisms of the "interventions" that are happening, I really wonder how much of them are driven by "the community." Rather, I think so many of these ideas are dreamt up in New York, London and Washington and are either totally irrelevant or useless to the people who get the intervention. A brilliant thing about the cash transfers was that it cut all that out; the program gave money to the people. There are clearly sustainability concerns there--what happens when the money runs out?--but it strikes me that the average person wouldn't say that a lot of the larger projects running in these areas (a flop of a farming project funded in part by the US comes to mind) are really all that useful. Or that there are some many strange and idiosyncratic ties to the money that it makes it more difficult to manage than it can help (a certain funder in India that would only fund STD testing and not HIV testing and had weird reporting requirements that made the total number of people served look larger than it actually was). Moreover, there's this interesting disconnect from people in the West who take jobs at NGOs because they want to do good work, help people, or a variety of other good reasons; here, people want jobs at NGOs because they're by far the highest paying jobs around. Which isn't to say that people here don't also want the jobs of the same reasons as the people in the West, just that with money there's power (the people who get those jobs are educated Malawians, frankly often over-qualified to be doing some of them), and another level removed from "the community".
I guess where I'm going is how can one work with particularly disenfranchised, or hard-to-reach populations in a helpful and not-condescending way? The people in Washington (or me in Boston) have plenty of data to make a good story of what's necessary (and enough of it, frankly, to cook into telling any story they want). But how much does that really get at the right solutions?
I think that's part of why I'm interested in evaluation. It's naturally reactive and can analyze how and why something didn't work so that you can improve on it. Everyone's a critic, right? But because I'm averse to thinking that I have the answers, evaluation is, in some ways, an easy place to be.
Possibly the thing I like most about being here is having the space and time to ramble on about all this stuff. The irony of being in school where we're taught to think critically is that I rarely feel like I have the time to do so about anything bigger than the task at hand. At some point, there needs to be a way to let it all come together into a sum greater than all the annoying classes that comprise the parts. I found that here last year, and selfishly, that's a big reason of why I wanted to come back. Although maybe the security guard at the airport was right--he said, "ah, so all you do is take, but what do you have to give?" after telling him that I was here to do research. In his case, I think he was asking for money, but the question is relevant otherwise. I'm still working on a good reply.
Labels: malawi, mchinji, professional ramblings
please stop showing me up with your long thoughtful blog posts. we all know you are smart, the haarrrvaarrrd and all, whatever. im going to cheat and just put a post on my blog with a link to yours. so there.
xoxo, em
Ben, I'm so glad you posted #2. It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately actually ... with preparing myself to make a big change in career lately. The funny thing is that I actually believe that the people who build their careers in the world I plan to leave soon - high-powered/high-strung NY lawyers - are just as motivated by ambition as the people in the world I hope to be joining soon, the world of development and rights advocates. They are just ambitious about something different - making money, or the status that comes with that money and with being able to say you are a NY lawyer, or whatever ... In the world of advocates, I think the ambition is for something different, that often comes from a place of altruism, and often comes from a place of pure ambition as well. I guess what I like to remind myself is that everyone has something different that gets them excited, so there's no judgment there for me really. For me, I know what gets me excited and so I want to be doing it. ... but I want to be doing it whilst having an impact. When I was in grad school, doing endless problem sets and way more calculus than I ever imagined I'd even be able to do, I remember getting extremely frustrated ... the truth is that what would probably make me happiest in a given moment would be to go to Bangladesh and help a group of women to start a business or to open up a school for displaced Sudanese children. But would that be the best way to achieve impact? I'm not sure. Somehow I believe, and I hope that I am right, that by having gone to hahvard and columbia or whatever, and by having practiced law in NY and understanding a little bit of how the moneyed world works, that I will have the soft power that will give me access to hard power ... that will achieve maximum impact. Does that make sense? I feel like I am now rambling ... but you raise a really interesting point. The question of impact is connected to your observations about evaluation ... & also begs the question of development for what? There's always that question, do you tear down the village and people's lives and histories for generations to build a dam? It really bothers me when college kids travel to the third world and feel like they are enlightened and wiser because they hugged an unshowered child. I think it's great that those kids are doing that and trying to open their eyes to something new ... but there are so many layers of complexity & I find it really patronizing when they make comments like "it's so amazing how these children are able to laugh." You know, Bangladesh ranked #2 in the BBC's study of happiness. I think America was #18 or something. Certainly, I believe that there are basic human rights that every human being deserves - clean water, access to health care and education, other fundamentals - but to suggest that because someone is living below the poverty level they cannot be happy comes with an entire lens of judgment that I don't think helps the cause of development.