Descrizione del progetto
Ripensare alle conseguenze a lungo termine degli interventi di sviluppo
Gli interventi di sviluppo nel Sud del mondo sono incentrati sul progresso e sull’innovazione. Ciononostante, troppo spesso tali azioni trascurano le più ampie conseguenze a lungo termine esercitate dal loro lavoro sulle comunità locali. Concentrando l’attenzione sul Kenya, sulla Tanzania e sul Mozambico, il progetto AfDevLives, finanziato dall’UE, esplorerà le eredità tangibili e intangibili dello sviluppo. Attraverso l’adozione di un approccio interdisciplinare con un fondamento di tipo socio-antropologico e mediante l’impiego di attente tecniche etnografiche che prevedono metodi creativi, il progetto svilupperà un kit di strumenti metodologici e una serie di risultati rivolti ad accademici, specialisti nel campo dello sviluppo, comunità partecipanti e il grande pubblico.
Obiettivo
International development involves ideologies and activities ostensibly directed towards the improvement of well-being of populations in the Global South. Mainstream development interventions emphasize forward-looking ideas of progress and advocate for novelty. In so doing, however, the sector is often myopic, as evidenced by countless unintended consequences that stretch beyond interventions' official life cycle. Whether deemed success or failure, such interventions leave behind a long trail of tangible and intangible traces.
Project AfDevLives explores how development interventions' representational and material remains are experienced, employed, and re-appropriated by local actors over time, and how such active immanence of the past affects people's life-worlds. It weaves together three temporal gazes: prospective (development's blueprints); retrospective (sediments of the past, shorthanded as interventions' 'afterlives'); and present-time lived experience. Consciously de-centering formal development discourse and temporalities, the project develops and applies a phenomenological framework oriented around embodiment and intertwinement of people, objects, and space.
Using an interdisciplinary approach centered on social anthropology, research will be conducted in Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique, neighbouring Eastern African countries that are among the highest recipients of development aid and whose past and present balance continuities and ruptures. The project will unfold via an iterative process involving four complementary work packages: Movement, Image, Storytelling, and Synthesis. Working across work packages, countries, and case studies, the project will pursue three categories of objectives: conceptual (methodological toolkit), empirical (based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork), and practical (aimed at the development sector, local heirs of interventions, and the public at large). The project will result in a robust set of outputs.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedIstituzione ospitante
1649 026 Lisboa
Portogallo