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An innovative perspective on the relationship between religion, civil society and development through the prism of faith-based NGOs in West Africa
Although stereotypically homogenized and hostile to immigrants, Japan has experienced an influx of foreigners from Asia and Latin America in recent decades. In Fighting for Foreigners, Apichai W. Shipper details how, in response, Japanese citizens have established a variety of local advocacy groups-some faith based, some secular-to help immigrants secure access to social services, economic equity, and political rights. Drawing on his years of ethnographic fieldwork and a pragmatic account of political motivation he calls associative activism, Shipper asserts that institutions that support illegal foreigners make the most dramatic contributions to democratic multiculturalism. The changing dem...
This book is an examination of the connections between modern economic practices, globalization, and contemporary Christian religious belief, based on an ethnographic study of NGOs in Zimbabwe. It addresses issues crucial for those interested in the strengths and weaknesses of development theory and practice, as well as in Protestant Christianity as a transnational religion.
NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) have emerged in both a development and aid capacity in Bangladesh, providing wide-reaching public services to the country’s population living in extreme poverty. However, resistance to and limitations of NGO-led development - which in conjunction with Bangladesh’s social transformation - led to a new religious-based NGO development practice. Looking at the role of Islamic NGOs in Bangladesh, the book investigates new forms of neoliberal governmentality supported by international donors. It discusses how this form of social regulation produces and reproduces subjectivities, particularly Muslim women subjectivity, and has combined religious and economi...
Self-help organizations across the world, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Croix D'Or, The Links, Moderation Management, Narcotics Anonymous, and SMART Recovery, have attracted tens of millions of individuals seeking to address addiction problems with drugs or alcohol. This book provides an integrative, international review of research on these organizations, focusing in particular on the critical questions of how they affect individual members and whether self-help groups and formal health care systems can work together to combat substance abuse. Keith Humphreys reviews over 500 studies into the efficacy of self-help groups as an alternative and voluntary form of treatment. In addition to offering a critical review of the international body of research in this area, he provides practical strategies for how individual clinicians and treatment systems can interact with self-help organizations in a way that improves outcomes for patients and for communities as a whole.
A study of contemporary slave narratives that reveals the conditions and consequences of slavery and the importance of survivors' stories.
Since 2015, the ‘refugee crisis’ is possibly the most photographed humanitarian crises in history. Photographs taken, for instance, in Lesvos, Greece, and Bodrum, Turkey, were instrumental in generating waves of public support for, and populist opposition to “welcoming refugees” in Europe. But photographs do not circulate in a vacuum; this book explores the visual economy of the ‘refugee crisis,’ showing how the reproduction of images is structured by, and secures hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and ‘race,’ essential to the functioning of bordered nation-states. Taking photography not only as the object of research, but innovating the method of photographìa— the material...
Many facets of social life are now intrinsically linked to the Internet through increasing dependence of user-centric platforms like blogs, social-networking websites, online forums, and open source websites. The Malaysian Church is not exempt from having to negotiate with an increasingly tech-savvy and networked community of believers. Based primarily on Internet ethnography and interviews with Christian bloggers and church pastors, this book looks at how the Internet is a component of “everyday religion” in the lives of Malaysian Christians at individual, institutional, and national levels. It examines the ways in which online Christian expressions are increasingly integrated into the ...
Development practice is full of examples of the importance of religion in the lives of people in developing countries. However, religion has largely remained unexplored in development studies. This timely new book aims to fill that gap. The authors expertly review how religion has been treated in the evolution of development thought, how it has been conceptualised in the social sciences, and highlights the major deficiencies of the assumption of secularism. The book argues that development theory and practice needs to rewrite its dominant script regarding its treatment of religion, a script which has so far been heavily inscribed in the secular tradition. It puts forward an understanding of ...
This book examines how the violence of conflict is transformed in the post-conflict period. Post-conflict studies seek to illuminate, theorise, and narrate the processes by which societies transition from periods of overt and violent conflict to periods of relative stability and peace. Most of the research carried out on post-conflict societies has taken place within disciplinary bounds. In contrast, this volume breaches those boundaries; though each author is grounded in a particular discipline, the chapters have been written in a spirit of interdisciplinarity. The focus of the volume is how the violence of conflict is transformed in the post-conflict period into processes that the editors ...