Technologies of truth in the anthropology of conflict: AES/APLA Presidential Address, 2013

Science and technology studies can help to unveil invisible modes of power that are embedded in the ways conflicts are known, debated, and resolved. Legal forms of adjudication, reporting systems used by international commissions, and data gathering on the part of governmental and nongovernmental agencies shape how conflicts are fought out on the ground and in policy arenas. Assumptions about evidence, categorization, adjudication, and measurement privilege certain forms of suffering over others, even as they omit phenomena that defy categorization. Using two examples-a global survey of violence against women and a U.S. government initiative to defer the deportation of certain undocumented immigrants-we bring insights from science and technology studies to bear on sociolegal phenomena. In so doing, we highlight tensions between measurement and invention, visibility and invisibility, and objectivity and discretion that are intrinsic to new forms of governance. We thus examine what measurement initiates and precludes, the reactive and proactive nature of technologies, and how new practices reproduce established techniques. © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association

Youth, gender and livelihoods in West Africa: perspectives from Ghana and The Gambia

In this paper we report on preliminary fieldwork conducted in Ghana and The Gambia on the interrelationships among youth, gender and livelihoods. We examine how policy in developing countries, typically characterised as related to child labour or education, needs to emphasise the linkage across processes that affect young people. We argue that policy will be improved if young people are given voice to express how work, education, social networks, and culturally-bound notions of responsibility are linked and how they perceive the opportunities and constraints on their ‘life chances’

The 'feminisation of poverty' and the 'feminisation' of anti-poverty programmes: room for revision?

The construct of the 'feminisation of poverty' has helped to give gender an increasingly prominent place within international discourses on poverty and poverty reduction. Yet the way in which gender has been incorporated pragmatically�-�predominantly through the 'feminisation' of anti-poverty programmes�-�has rarely relieved women of the onus of coping with poverty in their households, and has sometimes exacerbated their burdens. In order to explore how and why this is the case, as well as to sharpen the methodological and conceptual parameters of the 'feminisation of poverty' thesis, this paper examines four main questions. First, what are the common understandings of the 'feminisation of poverty'? Second, what purposes have been served by the popularisation and adoption of this term? Third, what problems are there with the 'feminisation of poverty' analytically, and in respect of how the construct has been taken up and responded to in policy circles? Fourth, how do we make the 'feminisation of poverty' more relevant to women's lives�-�and empowerment�-�at the grassroots? Foremost among my conclusions is that since the main indications of feminisation relate to women's mounting responsibilities and obligations in household survival we need to re-orient the 'feminisation of poverty' thesis so that it better reflects inputs as well as incomes, and emphasises not only women's level or share of poverty but the burden of dealing with it. Another, related, conclusion is that just as much as women are often recruited into rank-and-file labour in anti-poverty programmes, 'co-responsibility' should not be a one-way process. This requires, inter alia, the more active support of men, employers and public institutions in domestic labour and unpaid care work.