Category Archives: Research as advocacy

Doing Development the Right Way: A Conversation with Charles Piot

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Anthropologist Charlie Piot has been conducting research on the political economy and history of rural West Africa for over thirty years. His first book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (1999), has gained wide attention for re-theorizing a classic, out-of-the-way place as existing within the modern and the global.  

Academia, Academic Career, Africa, Africanist scholarship, Anthropology, Author interviews, Books, Community, Community education, Cultural Anthropology, Current Issues, Cyber café, Duke University, Ethnography, Health care, Health insurance, Inequality, Intercultural communication, Internet, Microfinance, Non-governmental organizations, Research as advocacy, Social activism, Social justice, Study abroad, Togo, Undergraduate education Read more

Everything You Thought You Knew about Orphans in Africa Is Probably Wrong

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Policy makers, development workers, orphanage voluntourists, missionaries, prospective adoptive parents: ignore this book at your peril.   “AIDS orphans” are commonly imagined as the most vulnerable of the world’s most vulnerable populations.  In a provocative new study, anthropologist Kristen Cheney  challenges just about everything we thought we knew about the children

Africa, Africanist scholarship, Anthropology, Author interviews, Childhood, Community, Cultural Anthropology, Current Issues, East Africa, Education, Ethnography, HIV/AIDS, Intercultural communication, Labeling theory, Medical anthropology, Orphanages, Orphans, Politics of representation, Research as advocacy, Research methods, Schooling, Social activism, Social justice, Stigma, Voluntourism Read more