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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social work > Charities & voluntary services
Critically examines the role of humanitarian aid and disaster
reconstruction Building Back Better in India: Development, NGOs,
and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami addresses the ways in
which natural disasters impact the strategies and priorities of
neoliberalizing states in the contemporary era. In the light of
growing scholarly and public concern over 'disaster capitalism' and
the tendency of states and powerful international financial
institutions to view disasters as 'opportunities' to 'build back
better,' Raja Swamy offers an ethnographically rich account of
post-disaster reconstruction, its contested aims, and the mixed
outcomes of state policy, humanitarian aid, and local resistance.
Using the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as a case study, Swamy
investigates the planning and implementation of a reconstruction
process that sought to radically transform the geography of a
coastal district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Drawing on an
ethnographic study conducted in Tamil Nadu's Nagapattinam District,
Swamy shows how and why the state-led, multilaterally financed, and
NGO-mediated reconstruction prioritized the displacement of coastal
fisher populations. Exploring the substantive differences shaping
NGO action, specifically in response to core political questions
affecting the well-being of their ostensible beneficiaries, this
account also centers the political agency of disaster survivors and
their allies among NGOs in contesting the meanings of recovery
while navigating the process of reconstruction. If humanitarian aid
brought together NGOs and fishers as givers and recipients of aid,
it also revealed in its workings competing and sometimes
contradictory assumptions, goals, interests, and strategies driving
the fraught historical relationship between artisanal fishers and
the state. Importantly, this research foregrounds the ambiguous
role of NGOs involved in the distribution of aid, as well as the
agency and strategic actions of the primary recipients of aid-the
fishers of Nagapattinam-as they struggled with a reconstruction
process that made receipt of the humanitarian gift of housing
conditional on the formal abandonment of all claims to the coast.
Building Back Better in India thus bridges scholarly concerns with
disasters, humanitarianism, and economic development with those
focused on power, agency, and resistance.
'Here we drink three cups of tea to do business; the first you are
a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third, you join
our family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything -
even die.' Haji Ali, Korphe Village Chief, Karakoram mountains,
Pakistan In 1993, after a terrifying and disastrous attempt to
climb K2, a mountaineer called Greg Mortenson drifted, cold and
dehydrated, into an impoverished Pakistan village in the Karakoram
Mountains. Moved by the inhabitants' kindness, he promised to
return and build a school. Three Cups of Tea is the story of that
promise and its extraordinary outcome. Over the next decade
Mortenson built not just one but fifty-five schools - especially
for girls - in remote villages across the forbidding and
breathtaking landscape of Pakistan and Afghanistan, just as the
Taliban rose to power. His story is at once a riveting adventure
and a testament to the power of the humanitarian spirit.
Funding Philanthropy investigates Dr Barnardo's work and
philanthropic 'empire' as early manifestations of promotional and
branding mechanisms in the mid- to late-Victorian period, processes
that would seem commonplace by the mid- to late-twentieth century.
Barnardo possessed a strategic sense of what would excite people's
interest and pity, as well as a seemingly unfailing capacity to
package and promote evangelical philanthropy on behalf of children,
the nation and the Empire. Thus, the book explores Barnardo as
creative promoter and 'showman,' a savvy entrepreneur in an
evangelical context that overtly mandated against privileging
business principles generally, and the practice of direct appeal
specifically. To manage the business of philanthropy, Barnardo
operated as narrator, orchestrator, and showman, depending upon
artfully constructed bodies, images and stories as imperatives for
emotional engagement and collective participation. Funding
Philanthropy offers new knowledge to anyone interested in Victorian
history, conceptualising children, literary modes, and marketing
practices. The book also considers how Barnardo's conception of
charity is closely aligned with principles of unconditional
hospitality, precisely at a moment in time when the English were
intent on centralising philanthropy and on meting out support
according to measures Barnardo regarded as punitive and
unchristian. Part One explicates how institutional branding evolved
according to the properties associated with the metaphor of the
'open door'; Part Two elucidates how narrative devices associated
with fiction raise both affect and funds; Part Three concentrates
on how Barnardo exploited strategies associated with dramatic
performance in public spectacles, despite his adamant strictures
against the theatre itself. Discussion burrows down to elucidate
such events as highly ritualised Annual General Meetings, child
picnics, as well as ubiquitous 'bazaars' and self-denial drives.
Extensive research in Barnardo's vast archive of periodical
publication for children, youth and adults and the wider public
press underpin the discursive analysis.
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