Bernal

24.1. Victoria Bernal (University of California, Irvine): NGO Fever and Feminism: Gender, States, and Donor Regimes

During our next lecture, we will learn how struggles for gender equality are being transformed by the proliferation of NGOs in Africa. It examines how NGOs have opened new spaces for women’s activism and created new local and transnational linkages while at the same time presenting new configurations of power and terrains of struggle. Women and gender issues have emerged as key foci of NGO activity, and women activists have come increasingly to pursue their struggles through starting or joining NGOs. Neoliberal agendas and discourses of state inefficiency and corruption have contributed to the growth of this vast and diverse sector. Yet NGOs are deeply entwined in state politics and in the process of professionalization often come to mimic state bureaucratic forms in many respects. Furthermore, NGOs seeking to address gender issues must often rely on donor funding. Donors constitute another regime with which women activists must contend due to the on-going necessity of appealing to donor priorities and complying with donors’ requirements in order to retain funding to sustain their efforts. These and other conditions create a landscape of contradictions that in part explains the ambiguous results achieved by so much NGO activity and millions of funds. Some case studies of Tanzanian activism in NGOs illustrate these arguments and make visible the complex and contradictory power relations at work.

Victoria Bernal's research has addressed a range of issues relating to gender, migration, nationalism, transnationalism, development, cyberspace, and Islam. She has carried out ethnographic research in Eritrea, Tanzania, and the Sudan. Bernal has been the recipient of a number of prestigious grants and fellowships from Wenner-Gren, Fulbright, and Rockefeller Foundations among others. Her book analyzing rural transformations and the complex interplay of development policies, labor migration and peasant households, Cultivating Workers: Peasants and Capitalism in a Sudanese Village was published by Columbia University Press. Her articles and chapters have appeared in numerous collections as well as in anthropological, African Studies, and interdisciplinary journals, including Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, African Studies Review, and Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

Victoria Bernal is currently working on three major research projects. "Eritrea Online: Diaspora, Cyberspace, and Social Imagination" analyzes the Eritrean diaspora and its use of cyberspace to theorize the ways transnationalism and new media are associated with the rise of new forms of community, public spheres, and sites of cultural production

Letzte Aktualisierung 22.02.2012 von afrikaprakti

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Bernal