How progressive culture resists critique

The impasse of NGO Studies

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2402446
AutoresAmanda Lashaw (University of California, Berkeley, autor de correspondencia)
Año2013
Volumen14
Número4
Páginas501-522
Fecha de publicación2013-12-01
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaEthnography (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1466-1381 • E-ISSN: 1741-2714
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1466138112463803
OpenAlexW2096214557
IdiomaFR
Citas recibidas19
Referencias citadas28

Ethnographies of NGO and nonprofit practices are increasingly focused on the social lives of middle-class liberals who significantly shape how societies recognize social suffering and its redress. At the same time, the boundaries between academic and NGO worlds are blurring ever more as ethnographers prioritize 'engaged' projects and as more doctoral students enter graduate school with NGO experience. This article addresses the distinctive dilemmas that arise from this lack of distance between ethnographers and research subjects and particularly the difficulty of critically examining the moral sentiments of progressive actors. I tell the story of a first fieldwork project in which I struggled to objectify the social power of professional education reformers who already analyzed themselves and whose efforts to combat race and class inequalities seemed to be beyond reproach. The narrative explores how the particularity of their norms and ideals continually threatened to disappear in the contexts of university life, of critical ethnographic literature, and of the fieldwork itself. I argue that a direct focus on the production of morality is crucial to grasping the meaning of 'progress' as a product of struggle

Environmental ethics · Ethnography · Morality · Narrative · Political science · Power (physics · Redress · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Law · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics · Social Science and Policy Research · Tourism, Volunteerism, and Development