Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how crowdfunding platforms harness the intimacy capabilities of modern technology to help NGOs fundraise online. By leveraging existing emotional bonds among individuals, platforms promote peer-to-peer models to financialize interpersonal relationships into donor transactions.

Paper long abstract:

While development practice has often been a story of emotions and power, few cases demonstrate this more prominently than that of crowdfunding platforms. Recently emerged onto the international development space as transformative fundraising tools for individuals and NGOs, crowdfunding platforms leverage the 'feelingful ties' (Moodie, 2013) that connect individuals in pursuit of NGO fundraising. This paper focuses on field research conducted with crowdfunding platforms GlobalGiving (US) and LetzChange (India). I explore how platforms train NGO staff to market their projects in digitally impactful ways using various 'currencies' (Schwittay, 2014) such as compelling imagery and language on their websites, social media, and messaging applications like WhatsApp.

Through the cases of GlobalGiving and LetzChange, I demonstrate the power of what I call 'intimate technologies'— the modern technological tools that recreate affective social bonds and social capital in digital spaces. By encouraging local Indian NGO staff to capitalize on their relationships with existing networks by asking for donations, crowdfunding platforms are creating a new level of financialized power dynamics between individual actors. While one can argue that altruistic endeavors such as non-profit fundraising result in positive emotional associations, NGO staff also grapple with their complicity in creating enduring social and financial inequalities within their own personal spheres. In this paper, I analyse the successes of various affective fundraising strategies platforms suggest to their NGO partners, while simultaneously critiquing how these innovative new practices are in fact quite emotionally and socially exploitative of both the NGO staff and their networks.

Paper short abstract:

Using mixed-methods research with women with young children in rural Busoga, Uganda, we examine whether the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index reflects women's own descriptions of empowerment, and explore whose emotions, values, and motivations this tool includes or excludes.

Paper long abstract:

The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (Alkire et al. 2013) is quickly becoming the standard tool for evaluating whether an agricultural development project has empowered the women it targets. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative research with women (n=207) with young children in rural Busoga, Uganda, we examine whether this Index effectively measures empowerment according it its own definition, and whether it reflects Basoga women's own descriptions of empowerment. In in-depth interviews with a subset of these women (n=30), they expressed strong emotions toward their agricultural livelihoods, their reproductive rights and care work, and intrahousehold power dynamics. These interviews also illustrated the wide spectrum of emotions associated with women's ideas and experiences of empowerment in this context. We consider how this Index includes or excludes these emotions, and how the tool's design reflects the motivations, values, and emotions of researchers and development practitioners. We further explore the distinctions and connections between the intrapersonal emotions associated with individual empowerment (Lentz et al. 2018), and the interpersonal emotions associated with collective empowerment (Gram et al. 2018). This research builds upon a rich literature of feminist science and objectivity (Harding 1992), feminist critiques of technocratic models of international development (Cornwall & Rivas 2013; O'Hara & Clement 2018), and psychological studies of women's care work (Bondi 2008). At the same time, we seek to expand discourses to envision future forms of development that more fully grapples with the emotions underlying women's experiences with empowerment, agriculture, and care work.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss the two functions taking effects on the natural resource extraction and the climate change adaptation in the Monpa villages in Tawang (Eastern Himalayas), analysing what works and what does not work for the mountain development works and the role of emotions.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will discuss two functions of emotions based on a case study with the Monpa people in Arunachal Pradesh. The two functions take effects on natural resource extraction and climate change adaptation. The Monpa people are going through a rapid economic and societal change in the recent 30 years since the first hydropower plant was built to supply electricity of the small mountainous area, and the various cultural and societal reasons that reduced the self-sustainable agricultural production. The state-sponsored border road construction organization along with the local government posts, have become the major and sometimes the only employer. The feelings towards the dominant power that affect the self-control of their lives, including safety, prosperity, aspirations, and related to wellbeing, continuity of the community, have been shifted from mainly prefigurated natural forces to the Indian state. In the case of Arunachal, it is particularly interesting because of its border character and it was occupied by the People's Republic of China during the Indo-China War; thus the way of Monpa imagining a state is plural. In this context, this paper will analyse what works and what does not work for the mountain development works which include the safety protection, transportation governance, conservation and public health, with a specific discussion on the role of emotions.

Paper short abstract:

Capabilities theory can be expanded to allow for collective strategic agency, which plans for influence and managing empathy. The theory contrasts with the productivity narrative. We carried out field research in rural north central India and rural Bangladesh. Case-study narratives are presented.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how capabilities theory can be expanded to allow for collective strategic agency (taking into account simpler, medium and complex forms of agency). The expanded theory improved upon the standard use of concepts from the productivity narrative, such as Gross Domestic Product and growth. Gender and development theory also helps shape analyses of women and their work, but it is also expanded by adding self-respect, dignity, shame slippage and pride as elements in the dynamics of achieving a good life.

We carried out field research in rural north central India and rural Bangladesh with a mixture of 86 interviews and 3400 personal questionnaire surveys. The informal sector is where women mainly work, yet in that work their loss of dignity arose from sexist expectations about task allocation. Some roles are seen locally as suited only to men. Women felt tensions between shame, shame slippage, and pride. Again, an expansion of 'Gender and Development' (GAD) theory is needed. Empathy, planning horizon, and the logic of planned influence are all part of collective and personal strategic action. By taking such action, improved personal mental health may arise.

I present case-studies of the suffering and achievement of dignity of a few women. Women's capacity for third-order strategic thinking became explicit. Self-respect is within their grasp. A new discourse around work is emerging. This discourse of respect has echoes in the village case-studies and in Uttar Pradesh policy initiatives. Patriarchal norms - and beliefs or sexist stereotypes - are less common now and we know why.

Paper short abstract:

Reflecting on the different emotions expressed by attendants at the inauguration of a mural done by refugees and residents of Perintis Sub-district in Medan, Indonesia, I will illustrate how refugees' presence have complex affects on the lives of local residents and their access to certain spaces.

Paper long abstract:

Indonesia has long been perceived as a transit state for refugees on their way to Australia. In more recent years, the decline in resettlement opportunities has forced about 14,000 refugees in Indonesia to live in a state of indefinite transit. Approaching encounters between refugees and residents ethnographically, I aim to explore how responses and reactions to refugees' presence in Indonesia are deeply emotive and speak to broader discourses of identity.

One event that stood out during fourteen months of multi-sited ethnographic research, was the inauguration of a mural organised by the International Organisation of Migration (IOM) and local officials in Medan, Indonesia. The mural was meant to represent a positive collaboration between residents and refugees. However, it was also a contested space between government and IOM officials that were presenting the mural as a positive achievement for refugees and the sub-district and disgruntled vendors who had been working on the road since 1994 and were forced to relocate their stalls for the mural. Taking the expressed emotions of those present seriously, the inauguration of the mural is a moment that captures an intersection of multiple lives; where the ideal of promoting awareness to protect refugees affects the lives of residents and their access to certain spaces. The mural epitomizes political projects that reflect and influence how refugees are treated by their host society. Examining emotion/ affect highlights the complex ways that refugees, whose identities are defined by international conventions and their global movements, are given meaning within specific localities.

Paper short abstract:

Using in-depth interviews with female online entrepreneurs this paper reflects on the interplay of emotion & power in a context of familial patriarchy.Challenging popular romantic assumptions re: family, the paper critically addresses power structures that impede women's contribution to development.

Paper long abstract:

Feminists have cut through a longstanding romantic assumption about family being a site of altruism and love; arguing that there exists instead conflict of interests, intra-household bargains and power dynamics (Hartmann, 1981). Bangladesh is one of the South Asian countries with clearest instance of "classical patriarchy" in its extended households (Kandiyoti, 1988). However, rapid commercialisation of agriculture sector and a growth in urban industrial employment opportunities led to an urban migration of many rural households resulting in a rise of nuclear families. In this situation, although the material basis of classical patriarchy is eroding (Kandiyoti, 1996; Moghdam, 2004), there is a new form of patriarchal domination, which Sarıog˘ lu (2012: 1-12) rightfully conceptualizes as "familial patriarchy". In these nuclear families, "familial patriarchy" maintains a strong gender division of labour where household tasks and childcare responsibilities are women's prime duties. As a result, women either end up staying at home or engage in online entrepreneurship due to its flexible nature of working hour. Drawing from 25 in-depth interviews from an on-going research project with female online entrepreneurs, this paper therefore highlights the contrasting contexts of emotion, power and patriarchy and how they interplay. Affected by the motherly emotion, and a constant fear of familial patriarchy, while many of these entrepreneurs actually started after quitting their high profile jobs, however they did not sit helpless. Rather, they traverse various patriarchal institutional norms and constraints and adopt nuanced styles and strategies to keep their entrepreneurship running and make their voices heard.