book cover: Stewart Allen: An ethnography of NGO practice in India. Utopia of development (2018)
Publication
An Ethnography of NGO Practice in India: Utopias of Development

Through an ethnographic study of the ‘Barefoot College’, an internationally renowned non- governmental development organisation (NGO) situated in Rajasthan, India, this book investigates the methods and practices by which a development organisation materialises and manages a construction of success. Paying particular attention to the material processes by which success is achieved and the different meanings and discourses that they act to perform, this book offers a timely and novel approach to how the world of development NGOs and development ideologies work. The author argues that the College, as a prolific producer of various forms of development media, achieves its success through materially mediated heterotopic spectacles: enacted and imperfect utopias that constitute the desires, imaginings and Otherness of its society. The chapters that follow consider the different scenarios through which success was realised at the College.

Publisher
Manchester University Press
ISBN
978-1-7849-9299-6
Year
2018
Pages
175
Language
English
Series
New Ethnographies