Event overview
'The Help Economy in India in Three Frames' with Arjun Shankar
This talk is about how development feels. It is about the values associated with development and the feelings these values produce. It is about the moral urgency to rectify social inequality in places that have doubled down on free market fundamentalism, and the many solutions which continue to focus on saving the poor – women and children in particular. It is about the redeployment of financial resources to poverty alleviation and human development – a growing circuit of capital that Roy (2010) terms “poverty capital” and what I refer to as the “help economy”.
To explore the paradoxes of these emerging economies, I draw on fieldwork with Adhyaapaka, an education NGO that worked in Karnataka, India, and “intervened” in thousands of rural government schools all over the state, driven by a compulsion to fix an Indian government school system which it believed was in crisis. Over my seven years conducting research with Adhyaapaka, I became transfixed by the interactions between Adhyaapaka’s leadership, the Adhyaapaka fieldworkers, and the youth who lived in Karnataka’s villages who were purportedly in most need of “help”. Adhyaapaka was led by a group of transnational Indian technocrats – a group I refer to as “brown saviors”. The values they espoused were shaped by their cosmopolitan travels and the caste, class, and racial privileges which gave them an authority to do the work of “saving” those in rural India. By contrast, Adhyaapaka’s fieldworkers had grown up in rural areas of Karnataka and were responsible for forging relationships with children in rural schools. If on the one hand, they too believed in the rhetoric of uplift, their position did not allow for the facile acceptance of the leadership’s moral valuations when they were themselves struggling to find economic and social mobility.
It was in their tense negotiations that I began to see just how much feeling was attached to development; how all of these negotiations as to what one ought to want, how one ought to help, produced particular affects in the guise of hopes, dreams, aspirations, inadequacies, or anxieties for the future.
Discussant: Gabriel Dattatreyan
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 26 Mar 2019 | 3:00pm - 5:00pm |
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