research

My research focuses on how the understandings that development professionals have of their knowledge and rituals shapes what they are able to see, what they recognize as legimate and how they are able to be engaged by their counterparts. I am particularly interested in this question in the context of those who are doing development and humantiarian work for bureaucratic institions in complex emergencies and other disasters.

This basic focus has led me to look at the religion of development, the training of developent professionals, the status and rituals of development knowledge, and, most recently, the role of military actors deployed in complex emergencies and peace operations in shaping the terrain for later development interventions.

I am now in the early stages of a substantial research project which looks at the learning of military personnel as it pertains to their activities in contexts where they must do and support development work.

This year I have submitted two papers and I am currently copy-editing a third. The first queried the received notion that soldiers are deeply constrained by their doctrine while NGO types act with a large degree of autonomy. The assumption that soldiers do what they are told appears to be constraining discussion of civil-military relations in the contex of complex emergencies. The second explored a method for conducting narrative based research when the unit of analysis is taken to be a subject rather than an individual. The theoretical framework in which I posed this question admits the possibility that one individual may concurrently be a subject in multiple discourses and that their expression in an interview may be the product of the varying composite influence of these formative discourses shaped by their performance of legitimate subjectivity in the interview setting.

Finally, this year I was able to reoffer a course that had a substnatial focus on the role of religion and development. This allowed me to update my bibliography on the performance of secular develoment in theologivally rich environments and religious nature of secular development.