Call for papers: Technologies of Bordering: creating, contesting and resisting borders
Technologies of Bordering: creating, contesting and resisting borders conference
3 – 5 July 2019
Sidney Myer Room, University of Melbourne, Australia
Conference convenors: Elise Klein, University of Melbourne and Uma Kothari, University of Manchester
Borders are pervasive spatial, political and social features in contemporary society. Materially and symbolically manifest, borders are shaped by history, politics and power. They take various forms, have multiple functions and are ceaselessly changing. Through a wide array of material, digital and virtual technologies borders divide, exclude, contain, categorise, control, govern and protect people. For example, the presence or absence of documents such as passports, permits and identity cards control the movement of people across borders as do security and surveillance technologies like gamma ray scanners that can reveal undocumented bodies hiding in trucks that are attempting to cross borders. Such technologies are a material manifestation of bureaucratic systems that are mobilised to assign identities to people and ascertain their associated rights as citizens or non-citizens.
PhD studentship on South-South Migration
Project Description
This full time 3 year PhD studentship, starting in September 2019, is fully funded by The University of Manchester and based at Global Development Institute.
As a doctoral candidate, you will be part of the Migration, Refugees and Asylum research group and the Migration Lab. There will also be opportunities to contribute to current teaching programmes by working as a Teaching Assistant on migration-related modules.
You will be supervised by Dr Tanja Bastia and Dr Oliver Bakewell. read more…
In Conversation: Armando Barrientos on social assistance
In this episode Chris Jordan, GDI’s Communications & impact Manager, talks to social assistance expert Professor Armando Barrientos. They discuss why Armando decided to specialise in social assistance and how it has changed over the last 20 years. Professor Barrientos also explains his new social assistance explorer which is the first database to bring together data on low and middle income countries and allow researchers to study and compare programmes at a cross-national, regional and global basis. Finally Armando looks forward to how he thinks social assistance will develop over the next five to ten years.
Digitally removing the middleman for development: Trouble brewing in East African tea?
Chris Foster, Presidential Fellow at the Global Development Institute,
One of the benefits often associated with digital technologies is the potential for disintermediation – or put more simply “cutting out the middleman”. This concept forms the basis for many hopes for development around digital technologies [1].
In the early days of digital technologies, it was found that they often failed to cut out the middleman due to the “digital divide” where digital skills, infrastructure quality and cost limited the use of technologies in smaller firms. But as firms have adopted technologies and with appropriate applications these foundational claims for digital development are important to revisit. read more…
The “global Britain” report: rule-breaking in foreign aid will not strengthen UK soft power
By Heiner Janus, German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) and PhD researcher at the Global Development Institute and Dr. Niels Keijzer, DIE
A new report on the future of “Global Britain” proposes several radical reforms of the UK’s spending on international development. Apart from suggesting major cuts in the aid budget, the report calls for broadening the definition of aid, diverting funds to peacekeeping and integrating the Department for International Development (DfID) into the Foreign Office.
The report, “Global Britain: A Twenty-First Century Vision”, was written by Bob Seely, a Tory MP and James Rogers, a member of the Henry Jackson Society think tank. It informs a Foreign Office review headed by Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt on the UK’s geopolitical role after leaving the European Union. In a foreword, Boris Johnson states that it is time to “turbo charge” Britain’s global reach and influence.
Commonwealth Distance Learning Scholarships
The Global Development Institute (GDI) is pleased to announce the availability of ten scholarships for distance learning, funded by the Commonwealth Scholarships Commission (CSC).
These are for applicants from developing Commonwealth countries, covering all tuition fee costs for the MSc in Management and Information Systems (Distance Learning), commencing in January 2020. read more…
GDI Lecture: development states with Stephan Haggard
Listen or watch Professor Stephan Haggard, UC SanDiego, discusses development states. You can download Stephan’s new book on developmental states for free until 14 Feb.
Listen or watch to the lecture in full below. read more…
GDI Lecture: What social network analysis can tell us about multi-stakeholder partnerships with Moira Faul & Jordan Tchilingirian
Listen or watch Moira V. Faul, Université de Genève, Switzerland and Jordan Tchilingirian, University of Bath, talk about ‘What social network analysis can tell us about multi-stakeholder partnerships’
Listen or watch to the lecture in full below. read more…
Hrishipara daily financial diaries: Tracking transactions, understanding lives part 2
Since May 2015 we have been recording the daily money transactions of up to 70 households living near a small market town in central Bangladesh. These ‘daily financial diaries’ shed light on the money-management behaviour of low-income households, described in papers which can be found on the project’s website. Up to now we have explored matters that face all our ‘diarists’, such as savings and credit, income and expenditure, health, and education.
‘Tracking transactions, understanding lives’ is a new series focusing on individual diarists. We aim to create vivid pictures that give readers a sense of what these lives are like. We hope this will help researchers and activists design better interventions for low-income households. read more…
The roles of the state in global value chains: the growing debate and agenda
By Rory Horner and Matthew Alford, January 2019
In a new paper in the GDI Working Paper Series we argue that the state-GVC nexus is, and will continue to be, especially significant in shaping development outcomes.
Research on global value chains (GVCs) has broken with state-centric approaches to understanding development, providing a more contemporary perspective on trade, industrial organisation and development outcomes. Partly based on a belief that little else was possible in a liberal economic context, the key emphasis in research on GVCs (and related global production networks (GPNs)) has been on how states facilitate GVCs – including both domestic firms and global lead firms. Yet other roles of regulator, producer (state-owned enterprises) and buyer (public procurement) are significant, and are now attracting growing attention.