Transnational lived citizenship and local struggles: Ethiopian migrant communities in Nairobi
Tanja Müller, Professor of Political Sociology, Global Development Institute
Reflections from the second emerging findings workshop of the ESRC-funded project: Transnational lived citizenship: practices of citizenship as political belonging among emerging diasporas in the Horn of Africa, held in Nairobi, 22-23 February 2023.
The Transnational Lived Citizenship project examines how migrant populations establish different forms of political belonging. The empirical data highlights the complex dynamics of lived citizenship and belonging and how it interacts with changing political environments, locally, regionally and globally. The second emerging findings workshop in Nairobi included the project team, Prof Tanja Müller and Dr Oliver Bakewell from the University of Manchester, and local project lead Dr Linda Oucho and her team from the African Migration and Development Policy Centre (AMAPDOC), along with key stakeholders: representatives from community organisations and other NGOs, practitioners, and policymakers. read more…
In Conversation: Tom Goodfellow + Pritish Behuria
In this episode of the GDI podcast, Tom Goodfellow and Pritish Behuria discuss Tom’s career and his new book, Politics and the Urban Frontier: Transformation and Divergence in Late Urbanizing East Africa.
Despite the rise of global technocratic ideals of city-making, cities around the world are not merging into indistinguishable duplicates of one another. In fact, as the world urbanizes, urban formations remain diverse in their socioeconomic and spatial characteristics, with varying potential to foster economic development and social justice. In his book, Tom Goodfellow argues that these differences are primarily rooted in politics, and if we continue to view cities as economic and technological projects to be managed rather than terrains of political bargaining and contestation, the quest for better urban futures is doomed to fail. Dominant critical approaches to urban development tend to explain difference with reference to the variegated impacts of neoliberal regulatory institutions. This, however, neglects the multiple ways in which the wider politics of capital accumulation and distribution drive divergent forms of transformation in different urban places. read more…
Finding Home in Europe: Chronicles of Global Migrants
Bringing together the voices of nine individuals from an archive of over two hundred in-depth interviews with transnational migrants and refugees across five European countries, Finding Home in Europe, a new book edited by Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia and Sara Bonfanti, critically engages with how home is experienced by those who move among changing social and cultural constraints.
Highly conscious of the political strength of their voices, migrants and asylum seekers speak out loud to the authors, as this volume seeks to challenge the narrative that these people are ‘out of place’ or cannot claim their right to belong.
Podcast: Building inclusive urban reform coalitions with Diana Mitlin
This episode comes from the African Cities Research Consortium podcast.
Diana Mitlin talks to Ezana Haddis Weldeghebrael about her new paper on how reform coalitions can contribute to inclusive equitable urban change in the global South, her experiences of working with coalitions in Africa and Asia, the future of the urban reform agenda in African cities, and an upcoming conference being organised by ACRC.
Diana Mitlin is CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium and professor of global urbanism at The University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute.
Ezana Haddis Weldeghebrael is a postdoctoral research fellow at the African Cities Research Consortium, supporting research across the crosscutting themes of finance, gender and climate change.
The African Cities Research Consortium is a major six-year investment by FCDO to fund new, operationally-relevant research to address intractable development challenges in African cities.
Managing expectations in a context of protracted displacement
By a Civil Society Worker
The intention of this post is to present challenges and conflicts that arise when managing expectations as part of civil society actors’ work with statusless and marginalised populations. The setting is the civil society landscape in Israel shaped by the protracted nature of this refugee scenario. Balancing our clients’ expectations and ours is an exercise of imagining a narrative together where we can agree on basic premises to discuss together as we try to mitigate our clients’ lack of agency with our own limited agency as civil society workers.
I have been working with African asylum seekers – mostly Eritreans and some Sudanese – living in Israel since 2015 as part of a civil society organisation aiming to support marginalised populations through advocacy and mediation with various local-level state institutions. They have lived in a state of limbo for a decade, under constant pressures and constraints associated with their protracted statuslessness; a decade in such a status quo takes its toll both on asylum seekers and civil society. We’ve built relationships with various stakeholders and work in tandem with other initiatives to fill gaps for each other -for example, where one organisation focuses on legal aid; we will help collect the paperwork they need and ensure clients get to their appointment on time. This is all to say that we are limited in what we can tangibly do beyond advising, assisting, and offering logistical, financial, and emotional support to clients in their individual challenges navigating a liminal life, who themselves often look to us for much more than we can possibly provide. read more…
Five lessons on social determinants of healthy ageing in 28 rich countries: childhood poverty gets in the epigenome
Gindo Tampubolon, Senior Lecturer in Poverty, Global Development Institute
Maintaining health up to the centenary takes more than just genetic inheritance. Social determinants of health including wealth, income, education, social class and social networks throughout life combine to shape who survives and who thrives. In a recent chapter I wrote about a new set of findings that extends empirical evidence on the social determinants of health of people up to 100 years old (Tampubolon 2023). read more…
Is there a silver lining to this Covid-19 pandemic? The impact of government transfer on financial inclusion
The toll of the Covid-19 pandemic is still being counted. Meanwhile, new variants continue to threaten because the reservoir of people infected is still large enough for some random mutations to take hold and spread. Excess deaths, a global measure, were estimated by the WHO to be around 14.9 million in 2020-2021.
With all this immense suffering, is there a ray of hope? After all, governments supported family finances, delivered through digital and other means. With deepening financial inclusion (more families owning bank accounts or formal institutions), there are benefits to share. Account holders can smooth consumption and manage risks, banks can arbitrage between savers and inventors, governments can expect increased investment in the economy and better information on the funds circulating, useful for macroeconomic management. read more…
MSc HRM Enhancement Programme: Ethical Grand Challenge and Visit to Stoke-on-Trent
On-campus session with the University Ethical Grand Challenge Team and Organisational Visits to the World of Wedgwood and Trentham Gardens
The MSc Human Resource Management Enhancement Programme (HRMEP) has been developed over seven years, with support from Heads of School and Faculty, to offer closer student engagement with a wide range of organisational contexts in the field of HR practice, with a focus on the professional, cultural and social dimensions of student’s experience. HRMEP aims to equip learners with a robust theoretical framework in human resource management and at the same time to provide students with an opportunity to gain insights into practice-focused human resource practices across a wide range of management contexts and sectors. read more…
Responses and resilience to future climate extremes in urban areas: ECR vacancy
The project
We are seeking an ECR (working on their PhD or having recently been awarded a PhD) to work on an exciting research pilot. Our project aims at generating a step-change in our understanding of societal responses and resilience to future, unprecedented climate extremes in urban areas. To help achieve this aim, we are developing a new conceptual approach, which combines critical social sciences and climate projections to explore the interplay of future climate extremes and urban inequalities. read more…
DSA Call for papers: Development Studies Association conference 28–30 June 2023
Academics from the Global Development Institute are helping to convene a number of panels at the annual Development Studies Association conference taking place on 28–30 June 2023. The theme of the conference is Crisis in the Anthropocene: Rethinking connection and agency for development.
The annual conference will be hybrid (in-person and online combined) to ensure the highest levels of inclusion, flexibility and engagement.
There is a call for papers for all panels at the DSA Conference, for more information on all the panels visit the DSA website. The deadline for submitting papers is 10 February.
For full details of each session and to propose a paper, click on the title. read more…