Wageningen University, The Netherlands
Le site de l’annonce
Date: Tuesday 28-30 June 2017
Place: Wageningen, the Netherlands
Organisers: Bram Büscher (Wageningen University) and Philip Fountain (Victoria University of Wellington)« From just a dollar a day… »: Life, Death and Development
NGO development fundraising campaigns have long drawn direct links between giving donations and matters of life and death. Such appeals have an undeniable affective power, in no small part because of the logics of responsibility that are implied for potential donors by granting them the obligation to adjudicate over the fate of distant others. The immediacy implied in such campaigns is clearly mythical in that it occludes attention to the plethora of intermediary dynamics that shape gift trajectories and, relatedly, because it erases broader political and economic contexts impinging on the desired outcome. But such advertising remains potent for analysis precisely because they invite critical investigations into the ways in which development and humanitarianism impinges on questions of life and death, and the ethics that underlie these disparate interventionary projects. This panel takes up the task of assessing the intersections of life, death and development in diverse sites, and how this might change our ideas about (bio)power, politics and political economy.
