This blog

I am in the final stages of writing up the research for my dissertation.  My research is focused on a cross-border development program called the Peaceful Communities Initiative.  The program was funded by USAID and implemented by Mercy Corps an U.S. relief and development NGO.

The purpose of this blog at present is simply to act as kind of a place-holder until I finish the dissertation and to occasionally be a repository for hashing out some of the ideas I’ve encountered in the quickly growing OOO/OOP/speculative realism blog community.

As for the name of the blog, one of the criticisms that are leveled at development in general and at the project I studied in particular is that they ‘depoliticize’ development.  Development programs do this by rendering their interventions in terms that are entirely technical.  My research shows that this is not the case with PCI.  The PCI program may have worked to make politics between villages that shared a common resource less contentious, but by virtue of bringing in a variety of actors, –and these were not limited to just village leaders, but included local government representatives, local NGOs, businesses, villagers, etc – the PCI program gathered together not only people but the things about which they disagreed.  This gathering together of both people and things into a common space in order to make plans for dealing with a common/shared resource strikes me as the very definition of politics.   Thus my research has focused on that activity of gathering things.

The picture above was taken while I was doing research in the villages of Ziddi & Mingdona in the Zarafashon Valley of Tajikistan.  I’m always stunned by the way in which villages in Tajikistan are able to move back and forth from technology that is centuries old to more contemporary stuff.  The hoe pictured above is meant to be pulled behind an oxen, the material covering the hoe is copper.   One could travel to the capital of Tajikistan and visit the antiquity museum and see much the same thing in a glass case.   Working between modernity and antiquity makes for some interesting hybrids.