Susceptibility in Development
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€100.99
Regular price
€101.99
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Sale price
€100.99
Susceptibility in Development offers a novel approach to understanding power in development through theories of affect and emotion. Development agents - people tasked with designing or delivering development - are susceptible to being affected in ways that may derail or threaten their 'sense of self'. This susceptibility is in direct relation to the capacity of others to engender feelings in development agents: an overlooked form of power. Susceptibility in Development proposes a new analytical framework to enable new readings of power relations and their consequences for development.
Susceptibility in Development offers a comparative ethnography of two types of local development agents: volunteers in a community development program in Medan, Indonesia, and women municipal councillors in Dehradun, India. Ethnographic accounts that are attentive to the emotions and affects engendered in encounters between individuals provide a fresh reading of the relations shaping local development. Local development agents may be more 'susceptible' than workers and volunteers from the global North, yet the capacity/susceptibility to affect/be affected orders relations and shapes outcomes of development more broadly. In theorising from the local, Susceptibility in Development offers fresh insights into power dynamics in development.
Tanya Jakimow is Associate Professor and ARC Research Fellow at the College of Asia Pacific, The Australian National University. The central focus of her work is the micro-politics of local level development, and understanding how power operates in all its forms. Her research spans the disciplines of development studies, anthropology and Asian studies, on topics such as NGOs and civil society, agrarian livelihoods, community development, women in politics, and personhood. She is author of Decentring Development: Understanding Change in Agrarian Societies (2015, Palgrave MacMillan, Anthropology, Change and Development series) and Peddlers of Information: Indian NGOs in the Information Age (2012, Kumarian Press). Tanya Jakimow currently holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship examining women's political labour in India and Indonesia. She has also been a recipient of an ARC Discovery Early Career Fellowship.