Empowering NGOs: The Microcredit Movement Through Foucault's Notion of Dispositif

This article develops a critical response to initiatives such as microcredit. The critical tools for understanding the shifts in the development project need to be extended beyond those approaches that center on economic relations. To begin to address this need, I develop one aspect of postdevelopment literature by drawing on Michel Foucault's notion of dispositif - a task that requires some adjustments to the ways in which this concept has been used so far. The dispositif is particularly useful for engaging with the fluidity and heterogeneity of the development project and for consideration of relations of knowledge, power, and subjectivity alongside the economic. To address the question of the rise of NGOs and associated notions of autonomy and empowerment specifically, I make use of Foucault's concept of governmentality. Considering recent shifts in the development project through this lens highlights ways in which phenomena such as the rise of NGOs are not necessarily emancipatory. To the contrary, it suggests a basis for the emergence of initiatives and practices that increase the penetration of power into the social body of the Third World through the development dispositif. To demonstrate these issues and my approach I examine the Grameen Bank and microcredit movement, arguing that it is through 'empowerment' that the developmentalist subjective modality is promoted in an operation of developmentalist discipline

“I didn’t fink dat was funny”

This paper examines the effect of middle and older age on Michael Caine’s realisation of the English dental fricatives. The results show convergence to prestige forms during middle age. Caine only exhibits TH- fronting during his older years within a familiar social setting (audience and speech styles), while TH- stopping is present in both age groups with a significant increase in his older years. It is proposed that the discrepancy between stopping and fronting exists because the two variants carry different levels of stigma in Caine’s linguistic community

Culture, 'Relationality', and Global Cooperation

What is the relationship between cultural difference and global cooperation, and what challenges and opportunities does this relationship pose for cooperation research? This paper examines how culture is a potential resource for global cooperation while grappling with its enigmas and ambiguities. It explores the paradoxes of culture to argue that the partly unknowable character of the concept ‘culture’ may be an advantage for cooperation research rather than a problem to be solved. The paper casts culture and cultures as examples of a wider class of ‘relational’ phenomena that arise through interaction and that rely upon this interaction for their standing. This proposition foregrounds relations over entities, becoming over being, and dynamism over fixity in line with a range of contemporary philosophical developments and the burgeoning of interest in relationality. Thinking of culture in relational terms offers a way of modulating culture; of simultaneously respecting cultural difference and allowing that difference is a shared human resource. Relationality can be deployed to help facilitate cooperation by re-opening interaction within political, social, economic, and institutional arrangements, including through processes for generating relational and cooperative effects have been developed in the field of conflict resolution. However, doing so requires that the fields most obviously related to global cooperation (political science, international relations, and global governance) engage relational approaches at the limits of the precise sciences and through philosophy, religion, and non-western cultural traditions

The Sad Predictability of Indigenous Affairs

The recycling of debates around welfare, violence and history in Settler-Indigenous Australian affairs involves the circulation of some well-worn perspectives. The authors assert that the entire relationship of black and white Australia needs to be reconsidered, and claim that this should include a critical examination of Australia's political and administrative rationality and (the history of) its intersection with Aboriginal culture. They call for a dialogue between European and Aboriginal political values and systems

Theatre for audiences labelled as having profound, multiple and complex learning disabilities: assessing and addressing access to performance

The research described in this thesis is the result of a collaborative project between The University of Nottingham and Roundabout Education at Nottingham Playhouse, funded through an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, which aimed to explore and begin to overcome the barriers to access to theatre for audiences labelled as having profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD). Positioned primarily from the perspective of the unique worlds of five profoundly disabled young people, the thesis begins with an assessment of their access to theatre in the light of disability discrimination legislation particularly Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1991 - and highlights their disenfranchisement from past and current consultation processes, which perpetuates the lack of theatre appropriate to their needs. An initial examination of current audience reception theory - and current theatrical practice for PMLD audiences - suggests that this 'invisibility' is caused by a complex range of historico-cultural factors. The thesis describes the two practical research phases which I undertook as a key part of this collaborative project in order to address this shortfall. In the first phase, Thumbs Up, a team of specialists from a range of art forms worked alongside young people at a Nottingham School to experiment with the engagement potential of three theatre spectra (silence-sound, darkness-light and stillness-action) to foreground emotional narrative moments. This led to the second phase, White Peacock, in which I created a play using the three spectra to construct emotional narrative and utilised the concepts of inner and outer frames to ensure that those narratives could be experienced by PMLD audiences within a safe ethical framework that kept the distinction between reality and performance distinct at all times. The thesis concludes with a number of foundational principles emerging from the research that will assist theatre-makers wishing to create narrative theatre for PMLD audiences in the future

Estimation of Peak Design Discharges within the Mackay Region

Flooding is known to be one of the worst natural disasters and can lead to significant economic damage. The design of flood mitigation measures makes up a significant sector of the civil engineering industry, as well as the assessment of flood risk imposed on existing landscape by new development. There is currently a variety of methods that are prescribed to the industry as to how to best estimate design floods and their associated peak design discharge. The release of the 2016 revision of the Australian Rainfall and Runoff (ARR) guidelines in late 2016 has introduced new methodologies which may impact infrastructure that has been designed to set flood immunities set out by historical guidelines. This research project aims to explore methods of calculating design discharge estimates for ungauged catchments, particularly within the Mackay Regional Council boundary. These methods include the Rational Method, at site Flood Frequency Analysis (FFA), the Regional Flood Frequency Estimation (RFFE) Model, rainfall runoff-routing modelling software (WBNM) and hydrodynamic software modelling (TUFLOW). The project also investigates the application of different design rainfall event approaches including the simple and ensemble events as outlined in the ARR 2016 guidelines. Through investigating these various methods and approaches, a comparison of results to existing studies and recorded data was made, with commentary provided on the strengths and shortfalls of each method. The hydrodynamic (TUFLOW) modelling method was found to deliver what was perceived as the most realistic peak design discharge estimate for sites within the Mackay Region, with other methods having their own limitations for application. The application of the ARR 2016 design rainfall and hydrologic parameters was found to cause a decrease in peak discharges when compared to that of the ARR 1987 counterparts