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The personal and the professional: aid workers' relationships and values in the development process
This introduction, and the special issue as a whole, consider how the personal and the professional are interrelated, and how they matter for aid work. Taking up Chambers' call for the ‘primacy of the personal', this paper explores why the personal often remains un-acknowledged in development studies, even though its salience for aid workers is well-documented, for example, in the growing popularity of their blogs and memoirs. One possible reason for this is an implicit narrative of aid work as altruistic and sometimes self-sacrificing, which renders it inappropriate to devote much attention to the experiences and challenges of aid workers themselves. As the contributions in this volume demonstrate, however, their personal relationships and values significantly shape perspectives and practices of aid work. They therefore need to be taken into account in order to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of development processes.
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Publication status
- Published
Journal
Third World QuarterlyISSN
0143-6597Publisher
Taylor & FrancisExternal DOI
Issue
8Volume
33Page range
1387-1404Department affiliated with
- Anthropology Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2012-08-17Usage metrics
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