Milk, meaning, and morality

Donated human milk’s status comes into question as it leaves the mother-child relationship and is reconfigured through practices and discursive structures that seek to stabilise it as a specific kind of object. Based on research conducted in Cape Town, South Africa, we examine the crucial role of technologies in aiding the milk’s transformation as milk moves from donors’ homes into the clinical setting where it is received by preterm, low-birth weight newborns. We show that the milk shifts back and forth between being a bodily fluid, food, and medicine in the course of this trajectory. Different techniques foreground milk’s diverse properties as a set of moral decisions converges around saving, securing, and sustaining life, and materialising relationships

Translating complex realities through technologies: lessons about participatory accountability from South Africa

Accountability is a complex issue in South Africa. The country has high levels of inequality, and marginalised groups struggle to make themselves heard by those in power. Yet the issue is further complicated by an interacting set of factors, including the legacy of apartheid, gender and religious issues, and the lack of access to those in power. Through a six-year research project, the Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation (SLF) used a range of technology-enabled participatory processes to unpack this lack of government accountability. This report focuses on four case studies, which examined the lived realities of marginalised groups and the activists that campaign on their behalf: activists against gender-based violence and for community safety; community care workers and health committee members working for public health; informal traders and the informal economy; and traditional medicine, Rastafarian bossie doktors and indigenous rights. SLF supported these groups to work together and identify the accountability issues that they felt were important, and then consider how they could raise their voice collectively to those that shape and implement policy. The process strengthened the capacity of these groups to speak out – not least through the use of different participatory technologies including digital storytelling, film making, PhotoVoice, geospatial mapping and infographics. This report reflects on the different tools used, considering the effectiveness of the outputs generated and how these tools can empower citizens and bring marginalised groups together. Lastly, the report reflects on SLF’s role as an intermediary organisation, and how this role can influence the path that marginalised groups take in their efforts to make government more responsive to their needs.DFIDUSAIDSidaOmidyar Networ

Milk, meaning and morality : tracing donated breast milk from donor to baby

This thesis follows the trajectory of donated breast milk as it leaves the dyadic mother-child relationship and is reconfigured through a series of transformations as bodily fluid, food, or medicine, depending on its context and the practices and discursive structures that seek to stabilise it as a particular object. Research was conducted between November 2014 and May 2015 in Cape Town, South Africa, including interviews with eleven donating women and eight weeks of participant observation at a level two maternity hospital. Donors use a rhetoric of 'saving babies', the effect of which is to deny the social tie between donor and recipient, or the potential for consubstantiation. Technologies play a crucial role in aiding the milk's transformation as it follows its trajectory through four nodal points (expressing and storage, pasteurisation and testing, packaging, and prescription) from donors' homes into the clinical setting, where it is framed in terms of safety and risk. Care enters into the constellation of relations that the milk ensures in unexpected ways and figures into the ways the milk is distributed in the hospital. Thus, donated breast milk shifts back and forth between being a bodily fluid, food, and medicine as its trajectory takes it through different constellations of saving, motherhood, technologies, care, safety, risk and medical authority. Different techniques foreground particular properties of the milk, as ultimately a set of moral decisions converges around saving, securing and sustaining life, materialising relationships and forming the milk form one entity into another and back again

Democratic leaders and the democratic peace: The operational codes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton

Do the beliefs of leaders make a significant difference in determining if democracies are peaceful and explaining why democracies (almost) never fight one another? Our comparisons of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bill Clinton reveal that both leaders view democracies as more friendly than nondemocracies, and they have significantly less cooperative beliefs toward the latter than toward the former, a difference that extends to the behavior of their respective governments during the Kosovo conflict. We also find that individual differences in the operational codes of the two leaders matter in the management of conflict with nondemocracies; the leaders exhibit opposite leadership styles and behavior associated with the domestic political culture of the two states. Overall, these results support the dyadic version of the democratic peace and suggest that the conflict behavior of democratic states depends upon the beliefs and calculations of their leaders in dealing with nondemocracies. © 2006 International Studies Association