Radical Listening, Action, and Reflection at the Boundaries of Youth Violence Prevention

The purpose of this article is to make visible collaborative pedagogical and research practices that opened space for community members to be co-educators and researchers with students and a professor on a youth violence assessment. We use Third Generation Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as a conceptual framework to examine the learning that occurred in the boundary zone of our eight differently situated organizations. As we demonstrate through the inclusion of boundary dialogue excerpts, this process generated more authentic understandings of why racial inequity has persisted in youth violence outcomes. The assessment questions we asked, the key informants we engaged, the data analysis process we undertook, and the substantially different types of findings that emerged were a function of relationship building and radical listening in the boundary zone of our collaboration. We conclude that practices that foster radical listening in boundary work can reframe experiential learning for racial justice

The revised OECD Guidelines: a strengthened forum for resolving ESG disputes?

The 2023 OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct contain various revisions to their self-contained dispute resolution mechanism, before National Contact Points established by adhering States. This Perspective explores the revisions and the potential of the revised mechanism to “bite” multinational enterprises

NGOs and feminisms in development: Interrogating the 'southern women's NGO'

The inclusion by Northern stakeholders of a discursively constructed category of 'Southern women's NGO' - increasingly heralded as the ultimate organisational form of grounded, subaltern, collective action - has come to represent a signifier of commitments to gender equality, poverty reduction and/or social justice. Southern women's NGOs are frequently credited with the capacity to facilitate the inclusion of marginalised groups conventionally excluded from development's frame. This critical review argues that this essentialism derives firstly from the belief in the Southern NGO as a grounded, democratic and accessible organisational form well suited to reach and represent the diverse and disparate needs of the grassroots. Secondly, it reflects the tendency, despite an abundance of critical black, Third World and postcolonial feminist theory warning to the contrary, to cast 'Southern women' as a category of politicised agents who share trajectories of historical and contemporary oppression that allow them to transcend other axes of difference to achieve improved development outcomes. The discussion examines this tendency, and whether it has led to a wholesale belief in the capacity of both 'Southern women' and 'Southern NGOs' to reach as well as represent anti-hegemonic, subaltern and thus alternative development paradigms. The analysis concludes with some brief reflections on both the discursive and practical implications of privileging the 'Southern women's NGO', expressed as a homogenous category, as a key interlocutor between the powerful and the marginalised in development