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- Convenor:
-
Vibhor Mathur
(University of Bath)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Gender, work and wellbeing
Short Abstract:
Dignity is central to legal, moral and development discourse. However the concept is rarely explicitly questioned or operationalised and often divorced from people's voices/realities. We seek contributions exploring research, programmes and theory exploring relational and grounded ideas of dignity.
Description:
The global polycrisis and calls for urgent responses to assuage the conditions regularly features calls to provide dignity to all. It features as a key virtue across constitutions, international conventions, development goals and political discourse. Yet, rarely is the idea of dignity explicitly questioned or rooted in the voices, experiences and relationships of those whose dignity is sought to be enhanced. This runs a dual risk. Either dignity remains an ephemeral principle with limited outcomes or accountability. Or it continues to be defined top-down by academics, bureaucrats, practitioners, perpetuating the power and coloniality endemic to a lot of development practice and research.
This panel welcomes theoretical, empirical and policy research that questions and explores the ideas around dignity in development. Contributions that bring in new conceptualisations, whether from literature or through consultations with practitioners and participants, are particularly welcome. The goal of this panel is to foster a conversation that brings dignity to the forefront, not just as an abstract idea but a core framework that can inform better research and practice.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Care for the loss, Stakeholder Engagement without fear and Cooperation without adversarial nature are essential for human economy. It is time to deconstruct the violence of “calculation”, and justification of Loan/Debts through emphasizing the danger of “polycrisis” by Public Financial Institutions.
Paper long abstract:
The dignity of emotion is marginalized in development projects. Economists have reduced human relationships to mathematical models, disregarding anthropological data, then, debt can be seen as a corrupted promise shaped by "calculation" and "violence" (D. Graeber, 2011). As Matsumoto (2014) says, anthropologists are underrepresented, while economists dominate the Inspection Panel of the World Bank (WB), leading to a "hierarchy of knowledge" and investigative failures.
Structural violence can be found in the accountability mechanisms such as the WB’s Inspection Panel, ADB’s Accountability Mechanisms and JICA’s Objection Mechanism.
This research presents three distinct analyses.
1)How dignity of individuals has been degraded under the “eligibility” judgement as Project Affected Peoples by comparing the accountability mechanisms.
2) How often the voice against the fear, loss and social corruption are rejected by showing the objection case of JICA and the inspection panel cases of WB.
3) How the ADB's Accountability Mechanism generates adversarial effects among its staff during the review process.
After highlighting the limitations of the accountability mechanisms of PFIs, two proposals are presented to conceptualize ideas for deconstructing the violence of "calculation" and the justification of loans/debts, while emphasizing the "polycrisis" by PFIs.
a) Solidarity beyond the "polycrisis": Building long-term relationships that do not adhere to the schedules dictated by policies.
b) Morality of Acceptance and Response: Recognizing and practicing respect for the dignity of phenomena that cannot be fully evaluated or assessed—not only through legal and economic lenses but also through methods aimed at the "adjustment and reconstruction of human relationships."
Paper short abstract:
This study examines "border dignity" through subjectification practices in Mae Sot, showing how dignity formation can lead to othering. It highlights how reshaping identity and dignity often involves self-other distinctions, influencing borderland relations.
Paper long abstract:
Borders are conceptualized as complex and porous "mosaic" spaces where diverse actors converge and interact. In recent years, geopolitical discourses surrounding the "Dark Zomia" have heightened scholarly attention on the Thai-Myanmar border region (Pinkaew, 2024). Drawing on Foucault’s theoretical framework of dignity and subjectification—which views dignity as a social construct shaped by power discourses and continuously reconstituted through subjectification practices.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2022 to 2024 in the border town of Mae Sot, this study examines the subjectification practices of Thai-Chinese merchants and their profound impact on border dignity and community development. The Teochew community, which constitutes the majority of the Chinese population in Mae Sot, upholds the worship of Song Dafeng Reverend and associated charitable hall culture as a key mechanism for fostering social cohesion and a sense of belonging through religious relief activities. Symbolic charitable rituals have facilitated interactions with local government institutions and established multidimensional personal and commercial networks. This integrated network of charitable activities, religious practices, cultural education, and economic relations forms a unique framework of "social capital," reinforcing the community's central position within the borderland space.
However, these identity-based subjectification practices in constructing dignity are accompanied by power asymmetries and tensions, particularly visible in their interactions with the marginalized Myanmar migrant community at the border. This study elucidates how border dignity is articulated, negotiated, and reconstituted through faith-based practices, offering new perspectives and insights for broader research on subjectification theory, community development, and border space dynamics.
Paper short abstract:
This paper approaches the water crisis in the rural Himalayan region by linking human and water sociality to examine the undignified development narrative of mountains and rivers.
Paper long abstract:
For mountain dwellers living in remote places, most of them used to own a cycle of food and waste before being connected to capitalist market-driven food imports. After the dependence on food imports was established, either through markets or government rations, the packages, containers, and mostly plastics became the major source of water and soil contamination. Addressing waste issues in rural areas, especially mountainous regions, is a hard task for governance and local society. Himalayan mountains, which have been popular tourist destinations, are facing environmental stress due to the rapidly increasing waste issues. The problems within the food-environment-waste nexus in the East Himalayan borderland face exacerbation due to the proximity of waste and farms, as well as the strategic settlement increase caused by China-India border tension.
In the small village cluster near Jang in Arunachal Pradesh, India, the animation of, function from, and sociality with water has transitioned from a deity-control micro-climate system, the expected source for substance agriculture, the flowing common that brings together the villagers daily, to the drive for micro-scale electricity source, leisure scenery location and fear of widening contamination pointing to global climate change. The local Indigenous group believes that water has a source of its being, which supports the local mountain dwellers’ pro-environment behaviours regardless of the knowledge paradigm shift. This short paper aims to tell the story of the water sociality of the people in Jang to build a dialogue with the conceptualisation of modern crisis – who is altering nature?
Paper short abstract:
The discourse of development has repercussions beyond a narrowly constructed field relating to entrepreneurial life and behaviour. Drawing on the facts from the lives of two older women, this paper explores its effects on the dignity of middle-class women in post-globalization India.
Paper long abstract:
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoliberal philosophical mores have had little challenge in the field of development, including, in international development. With the power and dissemination-reach of the Washington- and Post Washington Consensus (PWC) behind them, they impact norms and discourses beyond a narrowly constructed field of economic enterprise and innovation-related matters.
The inclusion of a humane rhetoric in the PWC discourse often serves to confuse the normative environment around questions of human rights and dignity, rather than add to their promotion. This confusion is especially onerous for the most vulnerable, like older women in the global South, who live with little or no welfare provisions.
This paper defines human dignity, in agreement with Tom G. Palmer and Matt Warner, as the right of the individual to make decisions about the course of one’s life, and relates it to broader notions of work and development. Using facts and data from the lives of two women known to the author personally until their recent demise, the paper argues that neoliberal ideas of development contain notions about the worth of individuals that debilitate rather than empower those with meagre economic resources. Its sublation of the social in the economic further deepens this effect.
Drawing on ideas from economics, psychology and philosophy, I argue for a more holistic paradigm of development, needed to offset the destruction of the dignity of the most vulnerable, which is endemic in the current development climate negatively impacting the substantive nature of development.
Paper short abstract:
I will argue for attention to dignity in the workplace by considering Indian garment workers’ perspectives on respect. The paper will show how a concern for worker dignity informs key framings of labour (un)freedom yet also moves beyond them, with implications for both policy and academic debates.
Paper long abstract:
Whilst concerns about worker freedom and unfreedom feature in debates across a range of disciplines (Barrientos, Kothari and Phillips 2013; Le Baron 2015; Crane et al 2022) and find expression, albeit imperfectly, in policy (ILO Forced Labour Convention 1930 [No. 29], UK Modern Slavery Act 2015), worker dignity is less frequently emphasised. This paper will situate an exploration of worker dignity in the context of articulations of (un)free labour in order to identify scope both for enriching these framings and for moving beyond them. In doing so, it will engage with perspectives of men and women garment and textile workers in factory and home-based settings in India’s National Capital Region.
The paper will make three principal moves. Firstly, it will take up the concept of respect as a relational aspect of dignity. Drawing on worker experiences of disrespectful labour relations in factories, the paper will bring this interpersonal conception of dignity into conversation with a view of dignity as inherent to human beings (Rao 2011 ).
Secondly, it will consider whether framings of freedom and unfreedom articulated by workers, and expressed in policy and academic discourse, presuppose a moral commitment to the intrinsic dignity of workers.
Thirdly, the paper will analyse implications of attention to worker dignity for debates on unfree labour and related policy work. In putting forward an enriched conception of unacceptable forms of work (ILO 2015) that integrates concerns for both freedom and dignity, it will address current policy advocacy around mandatory human rights due diligence.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is exploring dignity and everyday justice in the cases mediated by Kenyan sex worker paralegals working in Nairobi and surrounding areas.
Paper long abstract:
Community paralegal programs emerged in the contexts where access to justice is difficult for poor, geographically isolated, often vulnerable and marginalised communities. In Kenya, community paralegals are employed in the national HIV response programs targeting Key Populations, such as sex workers who are at the centre of this paper. Community paralegals are not lawyers, but they are familiar with legal structures as well as with the everyday challenges experienced by the communities they work with and belong to. Their role is that of facilitator in their clients’ access justice journeys through formal justice structures or through mediation after experiences of violence or other injustices (Maru and Gauri 2018, Hinman et al 2023).
This paper explores the concept of dignity as central feature of the everyday justice as it unfolds in everyday work of sex worker community paralegals in Nairobi and surrounding peri-urban areas. It is based on three years of work with a group of sex worker community paralegals, and centres the cases mediated by these paralegals. The analysis of cases reveals centrality of dignity in clients’ needs when accessing justice in the poor communities that these paralegals live and work in.
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents a ground-up conceptualisation of 'dignity' that is rooted in the voices, experiences and relationships of those whose dignity development programs often seek to enhance. It presents a framework based on relationality, and the negotiation for recognition and autonomy within that.
Paper long abstract:
Dignity is a key political value and goal, central to various constitutions, international agreements, laws, projects and professional standards. However, rarely have there been efforts to define and understand dignity, especially in the voices of vulnerable and marginalised populations. As a result, dignity either remains as an ephemeral principle, or a paternalistic top-down form of social work, policy and practice. Based on over two years of ethnographic and qualitative research with urban slum dwellers in India, I aim to create an operational framework to understand and analyse dignity as a combination of recognition, relationality and autonomy. This framework, based in the voices, experiences and relationships of those whose dignity policy seeks to ‘enhance’, aims to inform more robust and relational social work and policy practice.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the concept of dignity drawing on primary data into extreme poverty in Bangladesh. We argue that relationality is constitutive of dignity, and that dignity frames the terms on which extreme poor people navigate security and wellbeing.
Paper long abstract:
Over the years, poverty analysis has attempted to ‘move beyond the statistics’ to focus on and better capture the experience of poverty. In this paper, we argue that the concept of dignity offers an important lens to better understand not only poverty experiences but the dynamics that reproduce poverty intergenerationally. Drawing on primary qualitative longitudinal data from Bangladesh, we build on a local understanding of dignity to highlight how being denied dignity constrains options to resist poverty and legitimises social processes of ostracisation. Our intersectional analysis strengthens the argument that relationality is constitutive of dignity, and adds further weight to arguments that call for a shift away from individualistic explanations of poverty to more political explanations
Paper short abstract:
This study intends to critically examine the Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN). The research reveals how technocratic frameworks and donor priorities can marginalize beneficiaries and perpetuate inequalities despite claims of empowerment and dignity.
Paper long abstract:
Established as the world’s largest humanitarian cash assistance program in 2016, the ESSN was initially designed to address the emergency needs of Syrian refugees in Turkey. However, the EU-funded program evolved into a central pillar of the humanitarian-development nexus (HDN) where emergency relief increasingly overlaps with development-oriented interventions. The ESSN’s transformation signifies how cash assistance programs, while promoted as "dignified" aid that empowers recipients and gives them the freedom of choice, might systematically reproduce undignified practices and policies.
Employing a qualitative methodology complemented by budget analysis, textual analysis and 13 semi-structured interviews, the research comprehensively evaluates the ESSN's effectiveness as a poverty reduction tool and its impact on refugees’ treatment, particularly in relation to food security. A particular focus is placed on the role of the World Food Programme (WFP), the program’s main implementing agency between 2016 and 2020. The WFP’s influence in defining poverty metrics, setting arbitrary eligibility criteria and developing the Minimum Expenditure Basket (MEB) with the “2100 calories per day” principle reveals a contested framework.
The research scrutinizes how the ESSN cloaks dehumanizing practices in depoliticized and technocratic discourses. These critical discussions illustrate that modern development programs risk breaching the principles of “Do No Harm”, “Leave No One Behind” and “Zero Hunger”. By fostering a critical conversation around the policies of global donors and implementing agencies, the study thereby seeks to debunk the myth of cash assistance as inherently dignified while probing its overall implications for humanitarian and development paradigms as well as the aid industry.
Paper short abstract:
Examining welfare delivery in the Philippines through governmentality and administrative burden frameworks reveals how street-level bureaucrats mediate between state power and citizen dignity, shaping how marginalized populations access and experience social protection programs.
Paper long abstract:
This research examines how street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) mediate between state power and citizen dignity in welfare delivery through the dual lens of Foucauldian governmentality and administrative burden theory. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed how governmental practices and administrative requirements can either enable or constrain citizens' access to vital social protection, particularly affecting their sense of dignity.
The study examines how power dynamics manifest in citizen-state interactions through administrative burdens—such as learning, compliance, and the psychological costs that citizens face when accessing social welfare. Drawing from Foucault's concept of governmentality, it investigates how these burdens function as governmental techniques that shape citizen behavior and legitimize state control. Of particular interest is how citizens internalize norms and adjust their conduct based on administrative requirements, reflecting Foucault's concept of subjectification.
The initial findings of qualitative research conducted in local governments in Laguna, Philippines, reveal how governmental practices create visible and invisible barriers to access, disproportionately affecting marginalized populations. It shows how administrative burdens serve not just as procedural requirements but as instruments of power that shape citizen identities and their relationship with the state.
The research has significant implications for creating fairer and more respectful methods of delivering social protection, especially in Global South settings where the dynamics of state-citizen power relations are often more evident.
Paper short abstract:
Stigma may be relieved and dignity may be enhanced by anti-poverty policies but could also be harmful. This study underscores the importance of contextual factors modifying poverty-induced stigma and dignity, and calls for a nuanced approach to reduce stigma and centre dignity.
Paper long abstract:
The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated poverty in Bangladesh, reversing the country's previously declining poverty rates and pushing millions into poverty, especially in low-income urban areas. Poverty is strongly linked with stigma, which manifests in economic, mental, and social inequalities, and undermines dignity. Stigma may be relieved, and dignity may be enhanced by policies seeking to reduce poverty, but could also be harmful by the ways in which interventions are designed and implemented.
This study uniquely explores the intersection between poverty, stigma and dignity in Dhaka, Bangladesh, using mixed-methods research. It introduces the Poverty Stigma and Dignity framework, highlighting the layers of stigma at intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural levels, and their effects on dignity and well-being. It offers insights from primary qualitative data about experiences of poverty and social protection efforts to tackle it, with specific learnings from a low-income urban context. The study underscores the importance of understanding the contextual factors modifying poverty-induced stigma and dignity, and calls for a nuanced approach in designing interventions to alleviate poverty, reduce stigma and centre dignity.
Paper long abstract:
Every human inherently possesses dignity which cannot be taken away (Kant 2002, as cited in Hill, 2015). The word “dignity” is translated as harkat dan martabat in Indonesian language, which implies honor and self-worth (Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia, n.d.). Acknowledgement of dignity appears in government policies and mission objectives of several development agencies operating in Indonesia, especially after development initiatives globally transitioned from charity-based to capacity building models (Merino and Carmenado, 2012). The latter model ostensibly upholds program participants' dignity by not treating them as aid-dependent “objects” but “subjects” of their own development.
However upon further examination, it is questionable if both government and development programs truly respect dignity or not. For example, the definition of capacity building by the United Nations says that capacity building is a process to enhance skills to adapt in the world (United Nations, 2016), implying the participants do not possess the ability to survive by themselves without the development program. A clearer example is a clause in Indonesian Law on Poverty Alleviation Management where it states that the program aims to “make participants acquire dignity through education” (Undang - Undang Penanganan Fakir Maskin, 2011).
This paper inquires how dignity is conceptualized in Indonesia’s development policies and programs. Using content analysis, this paper explores common themes, contradictions, and dynamics in the representation of dignity in development. Ultimately, this paper explores the implications in the plurality and paradoxes of dignity conceptualization and how they affect the participants of development policies and programs.